Shield - Creation and influences

Shield - A Fashion film : The creation of the idea. 

In late February a fashion student at UCA Epsom set out a chain email looking for assistance in creating a short fashion film to help promote women self defence and martial arts. Having just finished my dissertation and a week or so to spare before filming my main projects ( Debbie and Anxiety) i thought this project would be an interesting collaboration and great way to bulk up my showreel.

After emailing back and forth for a few days getting to know more about what Christina wanted to do with the project, i went to epsom to talk to her in person about the direction she wanted to go with. Christian had a lot of ideas and concepts that she wanted to try to incorporate with the project  but had never created a film before or knew about the pre production work that was needed for filming. After bouncing around ideas and looking at her inspiration, i took everything she had suggested away to research further into and come up with a plan.  This project was a very quick turn around for me as a i only had a few days to concentrate on it before filming Debbie and dance then shortly afterwards start filming this film so i had to be selective in what was and wasn't possible for both the storyline and my schedule. 

The initial ideas Cristina suggested. 

For this project Christina wanted to create a fashion film that also had a deeper meaning. She wanted it to look stylistic and minimilist like a traditional fashion film but also empower or show how women self defence is important.  For the main bulk of the film she wanted it to be studio based with the model preforming krav maga movements against a white background, swiftly edited to the beat of a song.  This was a great idea as it was simple, showed what she wanted to show whilst keeping the fashion at the front of the idea, as after all it is a fashion film. 

How ever she also suggested several other things like filming busy London train stations with the model preforming the movements in  or the use of feathers.

After going away to research on filming on location i decided that filming in London would be too much hassle than what it is worth for a few reasons : 

1. It would be expensive 
2. getting position from each place would take longer than we had 
3. crowd control and risk assessments would be more complected with the self defence movements in  a public location 

All the though the though and idea was a good concept with time and budget being a problem is suggested we stick to a simple studio based shoot.  I suggested that maybe to get more of the meaning across that instead of filming on location we put statistic and infographics of the top. This would still keep the video very clean and fashion focused like she suggested but also heighten the meaning of the film. 

Influences and research. 

Alongside research into the production of filming on location is have been watching a lot of fashion based films.  Some of the main influences for this project have been. 

These films are very simple to make and produce which i great for the time frame we have, but from the way they are edited and ascetically put together still remain interesting for the viewer. 

As christinas main output for this film was on blogs and social media i also looked at other films for insparation. Buzzfeed has been a large insparation for me during this project as they manage to produce short, intersting videos that explain some kind of meaning in a similar style to what we are planning. Buzzfeed has increased in populartiy of the last year or so and all though mostly making silly internet video showcases how simple online videos can be created to look professional and become viral. 

This video in particular has been used to influence the project as it shows how statistics along side fashion can make a video more interesting than just shooting a model in a plain room. 

and this video on womens fashion shows how simple yet effective a studio based film can be