Wednesday, 29 September 2010

The Satorialist

When I first saw this image, we were asked to write down key words or phrases that you instinctively think about the character, based on this picture only.
Here are all of the words I came up with: old, scraggy, beard, looks homeless, only one outfit, beggar - possibly sells the big issue?, lives in a homeless hostel, perhaps a squatter, he doesn't look dirty... maybe the hostel has cleaning supplies, doesn't care what people think, he's wearing all the clothes he owns, smokes - money from the streets (smoking also means he doesn't have to eat as much - less money spent on food), he has confidence (in his stance), he's wearing a coat because it's cold (people around him are wearing coats), patched and turned-up trousers, had them for years? no wife or kids.

After being shown this picture of the same man on a day to day basis, and being told he works for Ralph Lauren in New York, I felt like I had stereotyped him to the maximum! He was simply at work on his cigarette break in the previous image, he likes that style of clothing so that's the way he dresses. 
Images from The Satorialist.

Film

Creating a film
As a group we were told to come up with an idea of a film that we could pitch to African-American men, we struggled at first but then thought about the film ‘Freedom Writers’ that some of us had seen, and thought if we made it British then maybe another type of audience would watch as it would be very different to an American film. We decided to set our film in Ruislip College and locations nearbuy the college as people in the UK would recognise it from the Channel 4 show, ‘The Inbetweeners’; we have also chosen to hold the open auditions at the college, so that the students auditioning get a feel for the set.
So this was our brief pitch:

There are 5 stereotype groups in a college, these cause gang violence and because of this, the college gets shut down. One of the teachers of the college takes a member from each gang and brings them together to form a separate group for a youth project, everyone feels equal as the groups all join as one. The college is under inspection and they protest to get it re-opened, but the night before it re-opens, one gang member steps up and shows that he disagrees…

We chose to use the same director (Richard LaGravenese) as ‘Freedom Writers’ had used, the editor and script writer of ‘Remember Me’ as after reading reviews on the film, the script was described as moving, however from my own experience of watching it I feel the film editing was just as moving as the script itself.
As we were given a maximum funding of £5m we had to restrict our cast, so we chose to use open auditions. However our funding has been given to us by a Tax Schemes company meaning we don’t have to pay any excess tax that could risk us lowering our funding budget, so that helped us out.

Director – Richard LaGravenese, £2m overall
Editor – Andrew Mondshein, £10,000 a week [10 weeks]
Location – Ruislip College, £100,000
Cinematographer – Barry Ackroyd, £50,000
Cast – Open Auditions, £50,000 overall
- Venue: Main hall at Ruislip College [place of filming]
Script Writer – Will Fetters, £50,000
Plus the below the line costs, amounting to a maximum of £100,000

Wednesday, 8 September 2010

media interests

Film - Toy Story 1-3, Cars, The Incredibles, Twilight/New Moon/Eclipse
Television - Ugly Betty, Friends, The Inbetweeners, Two and a Half Men, The Simpsons, LA Ink
Radio - Radio One, Leicester Sound
Music - Arctic Monkeys, Katy Perry, Katy B, Travis McCoy, The Drums, Train etc.
Games - Fifa 10, Need for Speed, Mariokart