Week One.

In week one we all came together to share initial plans and bounce ideas off each other to help develop our projects. My idea in brief is to create a fictional documentary in video following the day in the life of a deaf person. What’s special about my character is that he uses vibrations to interpret sounds in his own head and the viewer will experience what he believes he’s hearing. It will show how my character overcomes dealing with loud, day-to-day activities by creating his own sound for them.

     To do this project I am going to have to do a lot of research into the deaf and see what they find challenging in everyday life, or if they even see it as a problem and how they feel like they interpret sound. I have already emailed Bristol’s centre for deaf and I am awaiting to hear back, I also have a deaf friend who I'll get in contact with soon. I am also going to look into theoretical research on the deaf, sound manipulation and on the making of documentaries.

     The method I am going to use for this film is to create it in a documentary style, using general codes and conventions to make it look as professional as possible.  For the sound, I’m going to record it all through the microphone and capture everything. Then in postproduction I will feed the audio through logic and start removing frequencies and laying sounds on top, adding effects such as phasers, filters, flangers and some chorus. This will then develop his own personal hearing and create a great effect. For camera shots, apart from the interview sections, which I'll film conventionally, I wanted to shoot a lot of the film in point of view, so the viewer can really get involved and feel like their experiencing what he does everyday.

     

     So the aim of my film is to creatively interpret an experience, using professional sound techniques to give it an interesting fictional twist. It will show how some people have to live and the challenges they face, bringing awareness to a serious matter through an original style of documentary.

    Furthermore I also thought to add some substance to the film he could be a DJ, either as a past time or professionally, and show how he creatively puts music together even though it all sounds completely different in his own head. Victoria Gwen Dobie, a deaf French horn player quoted ‘deaf people hear music, they register it in their bodies. The brain is desperate for music; it will hear it through vibration.’ That’s what my character will use to DJ and to develop sounds in his head, the different vibrations everything makes. I could then also research into the DJ Frankie While, a DJ who through his career ends up going completely deaf but carries on and learns how to do it without his hearing, just through the vibrations.

     So lots of research needs to be done for this project, but the initial ideas are down. Now I have to develop my ideas further and using my research, start to draw out how I’m going to put this documentary together.