For the last two years I have worked as a support worker in both a day center for the homeless, and in a women's emergency nightshelter. This has given me a vast insight and knowledge into the day-to-day issues faced by homeless people, both male and female. I have also conducted various research projects into different aspects of homelessness including a geographical exploration of the different spaces available to homeless people, in which I spent several days exploring the different ways homeless people interact, and to a certain degree perform within both public spaces, and spaces set up specifically to cater for their need (i.e day centers and night shelters.) My experience working with the homeless community and conducting these studies has taught me a lot of things, but first and foremost that the only true similarity between all homeless people is simply thier lack of a fixed home. This is the point that I want to get across to the audience through my film.
To get these ideas across in the film, I have come up with a few ideas:
- I am going to focus on one main character - the film has a maximum length of 15 minutes and I feel that I won't have enough time to explore and develop too many different characters, however, my opinion on this may change throughout the pre-production process especially once I have voiced my ideas with other people.
- I don't want to disclose the reason that the main character is homeless. I feel that if I were to disclose the reason why the character is homeless, the audience will begin to judge on that basis, again reverting back to pre-existing stereotypes. I would quite like to give a variety of possible scenarios as to why the character is homeless, but I'm still thinking about how I will be able to fit all of this in.
- I am thinking of asking my old manager at the day center if I can film there on a day that it isn't being used - I know the day center isn't open at all on Friday & Saturday, and is only open in the afternoon on Sunday & Monday. Using an actual day center is much more realistic than trying to recreate one.
- I would quite like to experiment with lighting. In my previous production, a lot of my filming was captured in a completely black space. For this project I would like to experiment filming in a white space, allowing me to work with shadows. I used the matte tool in post-production for my last film in order to super-impose different clips into each other. I would like to experiment in using this technique to have the shadow in the background of the shot behaving independently from the character in the foreground.
- When and if I film the possible scenarios for the main character becomming homeless, I would like to make a clear separation to the present storyline. In order to do this I was thinking of attempting to use an effect in post-production to make the sequences look almost animated and cartoon-like. I know this is something that can be acheived, I'm just not too sure how. It might not be very effective and may be extremely time consuming so for now it is simply an idea, but one I will definately be exploring further.
Since I have started planning this film, I have found out that I have been accepted to take part in the BBC Second Screen ideas lab. This will be quite a time consuming commitment and I'm not sure how I am going to split my time evenly between both projects. I am attending my first lab meeting on Friday 20th January 2012 so until then I am not sure whether or not I am going to have to sacrifice my homeless project. However, I have spent quite a lot of time developing the homeless project and am quite excited about taking it to production. I am meeting with my tutor tomorrow and will discuss things then. Hopefully if I can really get on top of the homeless idea and manage my time effeciently I should be able to do both.
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