Skip to main content

Ideas

When we were coming up with ideas for our documentary Jess and I (Lauren was home and sick at that moment, but she also came up with few ideas) brainstormed what our society is obbsessed with. To do that we tried to think of what we are obbsessed with and looked up the common themes in a few online newspapers.

We ended up choosing 3 things to explore more individually, Jess chose to research more about obbsession with reality TV stars, Lauren chose to research obbsession with image and I chose conspiracy theories. 

Honestly, I wanted to research more about conspiracy theories and one of the reasons why this idea didn't work in the end was because I was (still am) kind of obbsessed with it. I just simply find it so fascinating, we live in the world where there's a conspiracy theory about almost everything. From some people believing that the moon landing was faked to the world being a simulation. So why do so many people believe in conspiracy theories? What's the science behind them?

From the start I found the subject to be really difficult to even start the research about, because I didn't really knew where to start because, as I said, there's probably a conspiracy theory about EVERYTHING, so I had to really narrow it down to specific theories. One that really stood out for me (mostly for its stupidity) is that the Earth is flat. I genuinely wanted to find out what makes people believe that the Earth is flat, but at the same time it was so hard not to make fun of others beliefs when it came to it and that was probably another reason why this idea would have been unsuccessful. People who I tried to get to talk to me about this probably thought that I was making fun of them, because of others before me doing so. It was really hard to find people who I could contact, because most of them had disabled others from messanging them and those who hadn't didn't reply to me.

While I was waiting for the reply I looked into the science behind conspiracy theories and why do people believe them. Found a few articles  and videos about it, but I think it's best explained in this video:

The main reason to believing in conspiracies is fear, it jumpstarts others and people end up believing in said conspiracies 
1. Evolved to be a bit paranoid (dismissing a possible threat might cause death)
2. Pattern Recognition (Our brain needs to link various events together)
3. Confirmation Bias (It's hard to admit we're wrong, especially about things that form our view of the world (religion, ideology))
4. Proportionality Bias ( believing that big events have big causes)
5. Projection (atributing our negative qualities to others)
Most of these are evolutionary things that made us survive for centuries, but with an access to loads of (true or false) information makes conspiracy theories wide spread.

Although, I liked the idea to base our documentary on conspiracies, it would have been way too hard to achieve due to the lack of accses to conspiracy theory believers and also it would have been hard not to accidentaly make fun of some of them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DIRECTIONS

The magic 2  every director has to think about is: 1)  what's in front of the camera    2)  where's the camera positioned.  It's important to read the script and break it down to questions: How? - style, mise-en-scene, mood. Who? - cast, crew, collaborators. Where? - locations, set. What? - production, costume, sound design, editing. Key director moments: How you pesent the character. Where you set the story. How you position the light. How you edit the story (rhythm, tone, mood). For our first Directions unit lecture we had to get into groups and have a go at directing a short scene. I found it to be very difficult to direct my DP instead of handling it myself. I ended up with a lot of spare shots I didn't need or couldn't use (mainly because it was hard to get the ball of paper to land into the bin) but the end result didn't disappoint me.
Post a Comment
Read more

Camera workshop (coverage)

In one of our camera workshops we learned about the importance of coverage. It doesn't matter that in the end we won't use all of the footage and maybe even end up using just few shots, it's important to have multiple shots from diferent angles so that we would have options while editing.  During the workshop we had two exercises. One of which was "The Chair": It ended up being pretty short video and I ended up not using half of the footage I got for it. For next exercise we were given scripts and had to interpret it in our own way.  While editing I wished I would have filmed few more close up shots and to have actually filmed the whole scene from fixed camera positions. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Studio Idea

Personally, I found it really difficult to come up with an interesting studio production idea. But because "one idea is not enough" (Brown and Duthie, 2010)  I came up with 3 initial ideas: 1) Guess the song type of game show, but instead of guessing pop songs, the contestants would have to guess classical music. I got this idea from a game my friends and I loved to play and the way my music teacher used to test my class.  2) Travel guide about how to make the most of your trip, places worth visiting and places that are overrated and not worth your time. I got this idea from my sister who travels a lot and from the way she does loads of research about each and every place she visits. 3) Debate/Game show where 2 groups of people debate about nerdy topics ( whats better Marvel or DC, which Doctor was the best etc.). The idea comes from noticing how much rivalry there is between comic book lovers and overall 'nerds'. I feel like this idea is the stronge...
Post a Comment
Read more