Idea & Narrative Development: Post-Preliminary Reflections

Andddd we're back! At this point in time we were simultaneously working on our A2 music video, and balancing the film opening and music video was a huge challenge for us, but honestly, we weren't very worried. We got a few months to sit and stew over our Preliminary Task and the reactions to it: now, how do we improve it? By the time we got to show Sir Zia the preliminary, we were extremely happy with how it turned out. Of course, everyone has their reservations about certain shots or narratives, but we were very happy to know Sir liked the idea and the way we executed it. It was dripping with potential. The challenge now, to live up to said potential.

As mentioned earlier, both Zara and I were very happy with how the preliminary turned out, so when we discussed it again, there wasn't much we wanted to change. We just knew we might've wanted to tweak it visually and technically, instead of narratively. On discussing where to go with it now, it was a definite done-deal that we would shoot again - whether that was to completely redo the idea, or add to it, was still in question but we were definitely leading towards just tweaking the preliminary.

What I'm glad we did speak about, were the weaknesses of our preliminary, as well as potential problems that would arise during filming, the biggest one being a creative block: going all the way to our location to shoot, and not having a purpose for every shot. We'd be filming almost a montage sequence, not knowing what to do with it and then realizing we needed more footage once it was too late. So we needed to plan ahead. Where to shoot exactly? Why will you be doing what you're doing? I didn't want Zara to just be walking through and running through ruins or certain architectural structures. Our focus wasn't on other aspects, but on Zara's character. We needed to make sure it wasn't monotonous. So, how do we do that?

The idea in our preliminary was that the character has a dream, and there's essentially a 'glitch in her universe' where she realizes something's wrong, and the very place she had escaped to, had entrapped her. It was open ended, where she is basically surrounded or chased by a negative force or being of some kind - taken figuratively or literally, in any way the audience wants.

THIS time, we needed something clearer to go on. The 'glitch' was only possible if we were experienced editors with proper softwares and effects. We underestimated that with our preliminary task, so we needed something tangible but not. It needed to create a clear purpose for Zara's character to do what she was doing. So we made sure to change our own lens on the narrative a bit. These small changes in outlook were affecting our performance as creators too, with shifting outlooks on how to go about shooting it. Since our idea did entail something similar to a montage sequence there was no complex plot, just an idea that needed to remain consistently highlighted in our work. So it was time to dig for a plot and create meaning.

We realized we needed to focus more on the aspect of her being followed by an evil force in her dream. Said force could be figurative - it could represent real life problems she was worrying about, or be a reality she was trying to escape from. Once she realizes she was being followed, she starts to run before it catches up to her. There was deep symbolic meaning to something so open ended, but could've been interpreted with surface level decoding too (maybe an actual person could've been following her?), so we felt a lot more confident with our train of thought. The idea was to now keep workingon enhancing this aspect of our idea, as well as shooting with it mind too. So that was that!