Direction Unit: Inital Ideas

When we first found out what we had to do for the Direction unit I imediatly started to think of dramas I watch and how I could adapt them.

My initial thought was to use the American drama FlashForward but I couldn't think of any ways to adapt any of the scenes from the show with the budget, equipment and locations available to me.

I've thought of another drama which I can adapt in a few ways and which I know I can achieve with the facilities I have. That drama is the British BBC drama Mistresses. Mistresses is a drama about 4 female friends who all lead very different lives but who are all linked by their friendship. They often all get together and discuss their problems over wine and this is the kind of scene I want to use from my piece of work as I believe it represents the drama perfectly and I have a few ideas on how I can adapt this.

First idea - 4 men in a pub/beer garden discussing their problems over pints.

Second idea - 4 builders discussing their problems in a cafe over cups of tea.

Thrid idea - 4 teenagers in a park discussing problems over alcopops.

I'm going to think about these ideas more in depth and try and develop one which I can use for my episode.

Back to Uni

Today was our first day back at uni after the very long summer and I was ready to see what this semester had in store for us. We were first introduced to the 3 units we are going to be studying and found out what work is involved.

The 3 units are:
Direction
Commission
Narrative and Genre

We found out that for Narrative and Genre we are going to need to write an essay and for Commission we will get the chance to make our own documentaries. We're going to learn more about these 2 topics next week but for today we focused on Direction.

We will be learning about working with a crew and how to direct them, lighting, single camera direction, performance and mise-en-scene. For the coursework part of the unit we will each have to choose 3 minutes from an existing drama and adapt this into our own style by changing the script slightly and shooting the scene in our own way. We will then put these on Youtube to create a series and as a group we will have to come up with a title sequence to go at the beginning of each episode.