Imagining Reality - Initial Points

Finally we've been given our task for Imagining reality and its a group filming task to create a documentary around the theme of Community. and we were also given out groups, My group is a 5 person group consisting of myself, Ciara Goldfinch, Suzanne Bellisio, Gareth Loughlin, and Adelaide Sommers. To start our project we got together as a group and brainstormed ideas on what community could mean and what we could make a documentary on.

Notes Suzanne made during our idea development talks

Our first step was to think of different communities that could be in the surrounding area and as well as places that you could group communities in for example: the employees of a workplaces are their own community. The main ones that stuck out to us was the speed dating idea, a university society, and maybe something with a dog shelter.

Another one of our ideas was to set up our own  society within the uni, I personally really liked this idea as it would be a really interesting experience. we threw around a few ideas like maybe an acapella community, but our first problem with this idea is we couldn't all agree on one idea, and because i wanted this to be something we all enjoyed and were interested in so it would be a fun experience i got put off this idea a bit. Additionally, we all agreed that we wouldnt have enough time to set up our society in the time frame we had.

In the end we all decided that dating would be the best one to go for as it is relevant and sort of a hot topic currently.

Initially the dating idea was to set up our own speed dating and at first this seemed like a great idea as it would be really interesting to film and document the actual process of a date. we decided to develop the idea of dating to see what we could come up with and eventually suzanne said it would be funny if we just followed her around with a  camera asking people for dates. I immediately liked the idea as it has more of a fun vibe to it. I personally like to work with lighter subjects as i have fun and enjoy making films so I want this to be reflected in what I make. Everyone else agreed that making a funner film we be a nicer process as this is our first film as it's more of a learning experience, and it's something more to get us use to the process of making a documentary rather than something super serious.

Next we started to plan the documentary. We knew we were going to follow Suzi around and asking people out, as well as interviews with people from the university campus, but we needed to fill out some finer details. We felt the story arc should be simple, start with an introduction defining documentary and introducing Suzi, then have the on campus footage of following Suzi around, and finally end with either, Suzi back in her room alone, or Suzi going off on her first date. all this would be scattered with the interviews to break up to footage of Suzanne and help direct the progression of the story. We also want to include some footage of Suzi using Online dating techniques such as apps and matching websites so we can show a contrast of online and offline. I think dating is a very strong topic and would make an interesting but still light hearted documentary.