OBEDIENCE

Connor Albinson, Nicole Harman-Smith and Rufaro Maumbe

SYNOPSIS

A theatrical short film looking into the idea that people can try to

control your mind, subconsciously, though the use of certain imagery

or sounds. The film will show the character watching a montage of

images that symbolizes each of the main themes associated with

subliminal imaging (sex, violence, fear, food and drugs) and show the

effects the images had on her.

FILMING DAY

We were originally meant to meet on the Sunday to shoot for our film, but due to issues taking out

equipment on the Friday before, we had to reschedule. We decided to film on the following Tuesday

because unfortunately this meant that the equipment would have to be returned the next day so we had

to film everything at once, but I was confident that we could.

We met at 1:00 to get out the equipment and we all met at the equipment hire, here we ran into a

few problems. We had all the forms ready including permission to film but we did not have an equipment

list so we could not get the equipment out straight away. Instead we had to wait until we could get an

equipment list which took quite some time and set us back a few hours. Afterwards we went to lidl to get

some props, we bought: a small chocolate cake, 3 jam doughnuts and whip cream for the food sections

of our film. It came to around £3.07 which me and Nicole split between us.

FILMING DAY

We got back to my house, where we filmed, at around 3.30 pm and started to setup. We arranged the

room to make more space and placed plastic sheets on the floor and a small VHS TV in the corner of

the room. I liked the look with the plastic and TV on the floor as it gave the room an eerie, strange vibe

and would keep the floors clean. We also setup one of the red head lights and Nicole added a blue filter

and two diffusion sheets to give the room a bright but natural glow, which darkness around the edges. We

also setup the camera, tripod (to a mid height), the microphone and covered the window with a black

sheet so the only light we had was from the red head.

It took us around 3 hours to print overall and in my opinion it went really well, considering we had

the pressure of filming all in one day I think everything went quite smoothly. We followed the shot list

that I had made and this really helped with the flow of filming. I think we worked well as a group and

everyone gave their opinions and ideas on the shots which really helped. I also thought Yasmin, as our

actress, worked really well, she got herself into the roll and was really enthusiastic about helping us with

our film.

EDITING

We gathered the clips together that we got from the filming day

and went through a selection process where we collected the clips we

wanted and discarded the ones we didn’t.

Then, we added them onto the timeline on premier pro and put

them into a little sequence and thought about where we wanted

specific clips to be.

EDITING

We left room in the main sequence to insert montages representing

what she was watching based on the 5 main techniques of subliminal

messaging. We decided to use archive footage as it a representation of

what we actually watch everyday.

Over the montages we decided to give it a VHS look to cohere with

the older television, We also decided to keep the sounds of the original

footage to give the effect of clicking through channels.

Lastly we added the words in subliminally, in quick flashes.

SOUND

While filming we focused on recording the sound along with recording

the footage so we would have good sound effects to work with

We also added TV static though out to remind the viewer that she is

affected by what she has seen

We made a conscious decision to not use a soundtrack over the ‘real’

footage as we felt it would have more of an impact if it was silent.

WHAT WENT BAD

We planned to film our own footage for the montages but we

decided against it for reasons we mentioned before.

We planned to use after effects to glitch names and some footage

but it failed after we tried it out. We didn’t think it looked that great

and the film looked better without it so we left it out.

WHAT WENT WELL

Filming day went well because everybody was enthusiastic and we

worked well together with recording footage and sound.

We got good footage and sound.

We became best friends