Brief 1: Shooting Stars

I really struggled to get into this brief for various reasons, the main one being that I was scared and worried because i’ve never worked with film or moving image before. At first I was looking at doing 9/11 and began looking at conspiracy theories but after the first group crit I decided that instead I would do the Amy Winehouse topic.

Contrary to belief, when she died it was reported that no illegal substances were found in her body. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, has said that she may have died from a siezure as these can be very serious and life threatening when you completely cut out alcohol from your system after depending on it for so long. I wanted to somehow show in my video that almost ironically, if she’d had one more drink, then maybe she would still be alive. This was why I had a problem as my inexperience with film meant I had to idea of how to show this, and I feel that the edit I have put on here fails to show that.

The video is currently a bit of a mash up of her best and worst performances showing how great she was when she was sober, and how awful she was when she was drunk, even though it was drink that ended but could have saved her life. The backing sound I used was live footage of her ‘singing’ addicted at Belgrade (her worst ever live performance), I use the term ‘singing’ lightly because she only managed to murmer out a few words she was so intoxicated. The problem with this is that it therefore just sounds like a soundtrack when I wanted it to sound more like a struggle, like she struggled through life. I found the 60second time limit we were given for the brief really limiting as I wanted to build it up dramatically and then end it with the sombre footage of her body being taken from her house but I found that hard to do in 60 seconds.

With me being pretty unhappy with the final outcome I want to continue working on this video until i’m happier that it shows the message I had in mind without having to read the idea behind it first…