Narratives Stage 4 Report
I would like to introduce you to my report for Narratives, the first module on this Multimedia course. The main task for this module was to work in a team with four other Multimedia students to produce an idea for a two minute narrative (story), and then present the idea using recorded sound and vision e.g. film, animation.
Throughout this report I will assess what I have learnt and achieved during working on this module over the past two months. During this time I have experimented with many new work processes, forms of multimedia and computer programs, so feel I have gained a fairly versatile range of new skills and knowledge.

When I first met the other members of my group, they had already drafted out a basic idea for a narrative. This idea was based around a music video called “Smack my Bitch Up” produced by the Prodigy. This video shows a presumably male character on a typical night on the town; he shaves, gets dressed, snorts a line of cocaine, goes to a bar, has a few drinks, goes to a club, has a dance, has a fight, goes to a strip club, and takes a girl back to his flat. This is all filmed from a first-person perspective so you only ever see his hands and how he interacts with other people in the video. However right at the end of the video, the audience discovers that the main character is not male, but a tough nailed lesbian instead.

Although the video is fairly impressive, it wasn’t really my ideal primary influence for a narrative and was fairly sceptical about it. However since I had missed the first group meeting (due to lack of internet access at home to be contacted) and everyone else seemed satisfied with the idea; there was no point in changing it, and besides I felt the idea could be fairly flexible.

So we decided we would create our narrative as a kind of surrealist documentary about a female student on a night out in Nottingham, filmed from a first-person perspective. The basic key events involved her getting dressed, consuming alcohol, snorting cocaine, going to a bar, going to a club and the film would conclude with a twist revealing her as a gay man. The film would have a self-produced music soundtrack to provide the audio.

We presented our idea as a PowerPoint presentation to our course group and module leader and received some very helpful criticisms; however the one helped most was to ensure that the film was original and stood apart from the inspiration – “Smack my Bitch Up” video. At this point the film did feel like it would be a blatant rip-off of this, so as a group we decided to research ideas which could make our film fresh and original. We were also warned that this was to be a narrative and not a music video. However we felt that the film did follow a basic film structure with a beginning, middle and end; plus a twist in the tale.

We began to research ideas and gather up inspiration that could be added to make our film different. We aimed to make use of the cocaine consumption in the film to add interesting and surreal effects to the footage. The You Tube website was a very useful source for research as we were able to view numerous video clips from different films. Two major influences in the final version of our film were taken from scenes in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. From here on our film began to really take shape; as we began the actual filming, ideas started to really flow.

I think the best idea that came up was to scrap the whole gay man revelation plan. Instead we decided to work with the concept of girls who go and get too drunk and high and end up being date raped. This idea was fairly original and had a real message behind it.
Another idea which I feel worked fairly well was the use of still photographs in the film (as in Lock Stock); this added an artistic feel to the film and also made it easier to include events which could have been tricky to film.
We also wore Halloween masks for a couple of the scenes which added surrealism to the film and put an emphasis on the fact our character was hallucinating from the substances she’d consumed.

Finally we used iMovie HD on the Apple Mac to edit the film, although I think this program is probably inferior to Premiere, we had a short amount of time left and this was easier to use. We added the drum n bass/hardcore soundtrack over the top of the film using this as well.

Our final problem came an hour before the deadline when we discovered there was no DVD-writer for our Apple Mac so therefore had to go through a long process of converting the film back to video and transfer it onto a PC, luckily we had some help from Justin the technician; the lesson from this was not to leave things until the last minute!

I feel I was pretty lucky with the selection of people in my production team, everyone was fairly active and creative, and all managed to bring something to the team. I feel I’ve learnt a lot from the importance of teamwork to achieve a task. A project like this requires a lot of effort from both a design and a technical perspective, and unless you have some kind of supernatural multi-tasking ability, the quality of your work is unlikely to be great, let alone meet a deadline. As a team each individual can focus on a certain task and have more time to produce better quality work.

Communication was crucial to good teamwork and we did this via mobile phone and MSN Messenger; although we were advised to use the online group forum, I saw this as being fairly pointless since everyone in my team was logged onto MSN pretty much all the time; though looking back I can now see the advantages of using it, will have to get into the habit for next time. I think it would have helped team morale and the project if we had a team social/drink-up earlier on in the term as we only really got to know each other properly during the last couple of weeks of production. However we managed to arrange regular meetings which were all fairly productive.

I am very pleased with the technical skills that I have gained throughout the course so far. I have learnt much about the aspects of film such as different camera angles and lighting, however we didn’t really have the chance to incorporate these skills into our film since it was filmed from a first-person perspective.
I also really enjoyed learning about video editing on Adobe Premiere, and although we didn’t actually use this program for editing our film, the editing skills we had learnt from a design perspective became very useful.

I have also learnt a bit about story telling techniques and we used this to our advantage by adding certain elements and events to the film to make it a much more interesting viewing for the audience.

Since completing this project I have a much greater appreciation for the processes and methods of work that go into the production of a film. There is a lot more involved than I first thought and teamwork is the key to it all.
There are however a few things which I definitely like to improve for next time I work on a project like this, and the most important is preparation and time planning. I think it is extremely important to research a wide range of different materials before you make any definitive plans for the film; we completely changed the main events in the last week and the execution of these scenes could have been much crisper if they had been planned out and researched further in advance. If we had researched other ideas more thoroughly before hand we would have had more time for filming and editing, and overall a better produced film.
I think we would have also got a better result if we had used Adobe Premiere for editing as iMovie HD seemed to have limited capabilities in some respects, although again this comes down to lack of time planning.

Overall I have really enjoyed learning about and implementing all the different aesthetics and elements of multimedia required for film production, and also the importance teamwork. I have also enjoyed creating this film and the Narrative module as a whole and shall definitely be selecting audiovisual production as an area for specialisation for next year.