Thursday, March 28, 2013

Haggin Hall Documentary


     The issue that our documentary will be covering is Haggin Hall, an all male dorm on campus. This dorm is a sort of historic building here at UK and will be torn down soon. We seek reactions from students and staff on campus who care, or don’t, about this landmark. The audience of our proposal is Mr. Owen Horton, but our documentary as a whole seeks the interest of everyone on campus here at the University of Kentucky.
     For this project, the labor will be divided based on each group member’s academic strengths. Anna is in charge of writing the proposal and all other secretarial tasks, as well as helping Carlos with editing. Carlos will be our main editor of both audio and video footage, as well as operating photography and videography equipment. Jackie will be an interviewer recording audio and video footage, as well as helping out with any miscellaneous tasks that may come up.  David will also be an interviewer recording audio and video footage, and helping out with miscellaneous tasks. Emilee will also be an interviewer recording audio/video, and helping out with miscellaneous tasks. Our timeline for this project is:
*March 31 – Anna completes proposal
*April 1 – Emilee, David, Jackie, Carlos acquire photo/video equipment
*April 3 – Emilee, David, Jackie, Carlos begin audio/video recording; Anna collects footage via Dropbox daily and starts writing out organizational ideas
*April 15 – Emilee, David, Jackie, Carlos complete video/audio recording; group meets to go over the rough edit of acquired footage
*April 16 – Carlos & Anna begin editing video/audio; if time allows, Anna will write out the final script after editing
*April 30 – Project complete
     Our aim as far as the tone and style of our documentary will be a sort of “tongue-in-cheek” melancholic nature. We feel that while Haggin Hall is a well-known feature of UK and a lot of memories are made there, most people will not feel the sadness/nostalgia that would be expected in the tearing down of a place where many young men begin a new chapter of their lives – college. We believe that many people do not look at Haggin Hall seriously, and we intend to play on that in this documentary.
     Our aspirations involving camera shots, content and audio include wide-angle footage of the building, personal/close-up angles for interviews (in order to convey emotion or lack thereof); lots of background dialogue – less video footage of people/interviews (to create a sense of discomfort and to allow more room for images/video of Haggin Hall rather than people (as Haggin Hall is the subject of this documentary – not it’s residents)
     As far as transitions go, we will be using a lot of fading, because it connotes thoughtfulness. We will also be using time slates because they bring a sense of organization, and effort in general, to our project. As for our plan of organization, we will tart out sort of poking fun at Haggin Hall and conveying that no one takes it seriously. However, we plan to gradually progress into a more serious tone. We would like to try to find where Haggin Hall actually made an impact on male students (both of today and years past).
     We intend to promote our documentary through social media (Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.) The emotion we are hoping to extract from the audience through our short film is empathy, respect of a historic building on campus, and perhaps nostalgia for the young men, and maybe even women, who made priceless memories at Haggin Hall. The music we involve in our project will aide in conveying these emotions with a sad tone and an acoustic style. We plan to use a gloomy filter/lighting effects, a “rainy” look to our video footage, and dark/shadowy/foggy effects throughout the presentation.

1 comment:

  1. I love your ideas, but I worry about your ability to make the satiric nature of this video readily apparent to your audience. I stressed this to Carlos, as he had a rough run-in with failed satire earlier this semester. If it helps, I always present South Park as the gold standard of satire in contemporary society-- take a look at how South Park presents their satire and allows the audience to quickly and easily grasp the "real" message behind each episode.

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