Character Identity

We had to create a character using only social networking sights, that would look convincing to others who would view it. This would be a challenge as often enough people see a friend request off somebody whom they have never heard of an decline due to not being entirely convincing, so we needed a back story that people would believe. We created Mark Hepburn, a middle aged writer who was new to the social networking world and spent 90% of his time at home with his laptop. This was a tough task in my opinion because as the weeks went on its hard to put yourself entirely in someone else's shoes, i found myself writing a status but before publishing it, re-typing it 5-6 times using a different vocabulary each time.

The highlight of Mark Hepburn's short life was when we actually had one of our friends exchanging messages with him, talking about everyday things. This was a big confidence boost as we were doing what we set out to do, we were convincing every day people that 'WE' were Mark Hepburn.

Factual Short

Our final project for production practice was to create a film about an interesting subject which was based around a character with an interesting story. As a group we began brainstorming thinking about what we could do, and one of the girls proposed we should do it around hairdressers and the relationship between a hairdresser and a customer, which we all agreed would work, but when discussing our idea with Corin we all agreed the idea was a bit bland, and we needed to introduce something dramatic into it, Corin then proposed that we got maybe an Alopecia patient to surround our original idea around her/him, that was it would be a bit more entertaining to the viewer, after discussing in a team we agreed this was the best solution and began looking for a subject.

After a week of looking we had 2 subjects who agreed to be filmed; Jane, who was a current Alopecia sufferer who agreed to be filmed at her home address and Vivienne, a salon owner who would allow us to shoot in her salon, which was perfect as we could get a lot of stock footage to cut in between shots and link interviews together. We had no trouble with the 2 interviewee's and they were very co-operative when filming and spoke confidently on camera, and we were not ready to start editing. Folloeing our rough cut Corin gave us some useful feedback, saying we needed to get a bit more of a background on what Alopecia is.

We then filmed Dr. David Bell, a doctor who had previously dealt with Alopecia patients and had agreed to be filmed and talk about Alopecia more in dept. When we came to our final edit we thought this worked really well and the shots we got of our Doctor sewn really well into existing clips.