Major Project: Presentation Blog

Gullible

Introduction: What is Gullible?

Gullible is a fifteen webisode series. It is about two young men in their early 20's (names are not specified as of yet), one is a compulsive liar the other is extremely gullible (thus the title of the series). The liar will tell the gullible person a ridiculous lie and the gullible person will believe it. The gullible person will then see the lie unfold in front of their eyes in a very surreal kind of way. All of the episodes will be based around gags from the book Great Lies to Tell Small Kids written by Andy Riley.

Where would it be shown?

I feel that Gullible would be perfect to be put on the internet video sites (youtube.com, vimeo.com, etc). My reasons for this because Gullible will be shown in one minute segments so would find it hard to fit into television however there have been many people who have made a living off of youtube by writing and publishing short videos and comedy sketches and this is where Gullible would fit into. One thing that made me so drawn to youtube is that you can receive feedback of your video from people who have watched it meaning you can learn directly from your "fans" what they liked or didn't like about the video, this way if it became an on-going series and people who watched it shared it to all of their friends the series could snowball and potentially become a big hit.

Why the Web?

As I said before I feel that the Gullible is perfect for the web because of it's short run time. On television small one minute episodes may be missed or overlooked however on the web viewers can choose what they want to watch and when they want to watch it, which is an even bigger plus for Gullible as people can click, watch an episode and choose weather they want to watch another one or do something else. Comedy duo Smosh have been producing short comedy sketches and videos since 2002 and have over 12 million subscribers and are a good example of how I'd like the series to turn out (without sounding too ambitious).

My main audience for Gullible would be young adults and teenagers. The Gullible is a very light hearted comedy and isn't too crude or smutty, not to mention that youtube is watched mostly by the younger generation, so Gullible would be able to appeal to these audiences

The Story

Each episode will start of with the two main characters sitting together on the sofa, the GI (Gullible Idiot) will be watching the TV as it plays in the background and the CL (Compulsive Liar) will be reading a book (the book will change each episode depending on the lie which is about to be told). The CL will then tell his (ridiculous) lie to the GI who will believe it. The GI will then see the lie unfold in real life and will react to it in some way shape or form. Each episode will follow a similar plot line but the difference will be in the lie so it isn't the same thing over and over again with slight differences.

A few gags that I have chosen from the book are as follows:

"When you change channels on the TV the presenter on that channel dies instantly"

"Father Christmas is hiding in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border region never sleeping in the same place for two nights running, he’s MI5’s ten nost wanted list"

"Narnia Is Real"

The Characters

As I said before the series will have two main characters: The Compulsive Liar and The Gullible Idiot. The CL will be a small dark haired individual who enjoys teasing his gullible friend and telling him stupid lies, he is conniving and quick to think on his feet, also enjoys pranks. The GI will be a taller lighter haired individual who usually sits around watching the telly most of the day, he doesn't have much common sense an is pretty much an airhead. He'll believe everything the CL says. Although these characters seem like complete opposites they are the best of friends.

Casting &Location

I am halfway there for casting in the sense that I have cast the GI from a past project that I've done. However I plan to look on Star Now or Casting Call pro for the CL role which will be put up this weekend.

The location for most of my videos will be set in a living room on a couch. It will be a very simple set where not much will be going on in the background. Occasionally I will need to film outside and around Maidstone but it wouldn't be anywhere too crowded for a long period of time so that shouldn't be a problem.

Collaborations

For Gullible I will be collaborating with Sam Wilder. Sam and I have worked well together in the past so I have chosen him to work along side me as co-writer and co-director. I feel that Sam can bring alot to the table and would be a great help in this production. I will be editing the project by myself.  

Professional Practice: Dissertation Proposal

For my dissertation proposal I wanted to focus on animation in Japan and the issues of localising it in the western world. I knew I wanted to focus on animation in Japan but wasn't sure about the topic I wanted to tackle. Although I thought about issues on localisation in the western world I wan't sure on it.

When I had my tutorial with Chris this week it really cleared up some things and gave me a clearer understanding on what I wanted to do. Instead on focusing on localisation I'm going to compare Japanese animation to American animation. There are many differences between the two such as different types of audience and specific types of genre. I plan to observe how history has affected two different types of animation e.g. how Tom and Jerry evolved into the The Simpsons and how Astro Boy evolved into One Piece

Professional Practice: Commission

For my professional practice, myself and a couple of other students were asked to film and make a promo video for "The Social" which is taking part on Saturday 28th of September at Mote Park in Maidstone. "The Social" is musical event with many different acts performing such as Robert Dietz, Carl Craig, Loco Dice and many more. For research I have observed other promo videos for festivals very similar to this one and have made a short list of ideas for shots etc.  

Major Project: Idea

In this blog I will demonstrate the process of how I've come up with my current idea for my major project and why I have chosen to do it.

My original idea was to do a 15 minute long sketch show which would consist of 3 sketches and a few mini ones in between. However when I went back home for the summer I stumbled upon a book that I bought several years ago by Andy Riley called "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids". The book is full of humorous illustrations with captions of (as the book says) lies to tell small kids. I then remembered that I had the option to create fifteen one minute episodes and the one minute episodes would be perfect to adapt these lies into film. So I decided to change my idea from a sketch show to a 15 episode series.

I decided that if I were to create this series I'd rather work with adults than children so I changed the title of the series from Great Lies to Tell Small Kids to Great Lies for Gullible idiots. My second port of call was to come up with a story for each episode, obviously the stories for each episode would be based around each page of the book but I still needed to form a story around these pages. So I decided to have a maximum of two main characters The Compulsive liar and The Gullible Idiot. The compulsive liar character will tell a lie and the gullible character will believe it, the gullible character will see the lie unfold in real life. I then decided to shorten the name of the title to just "Gullible" to keep it simple and to the point.

That's about all I've got so far I keep updating when I have more ideas or any changes are made

Coming back from the Summer

Over the Summer break I kept my self occupied with a number of things one of which was videoing and editing press conferences for a website called Bollywood Eye. I got this job through a friend who interviews for the company.

The first bit I did for the company was film the Satyagraha press conference. Unfortunately the camera which we were using was not high quality so the footage wasn't entirely clear and we had no external mic to record sound, however I felt that I grabbed a good spot to film from considering most of the camera crew from other websites were competitive for places to film. Overall I feel that the positioning was good but because the footage and audio was not high quality I felt that this let it down but I did my best to edit the footage together with parts of the trailer and it seems to be doing pretty well with views by reaching over 3000. Here is the video below.

 
The second piece of work that I did over the summer was an edit for the press conference of Bhagg Milkha Bhagg for the same website. This time it was filmed on a proper hd camera with an external mic so it was much easier to edit compared to the Satyagraha one. I put the official music of the film over the top of the interview to associate it more with the film. I feel that compared with the Satyagraha press conference this video looks and feels much better because of the difference in image and sound quality.