Summer Project Diary - Day One

Today we were given the brief for the Summer Project. As this term we will be working with students from the interactive media course as well as students from the television course, we watched some clips and viewed websites of popular television shows which have cleverly used the world of the web to widen their programme's appeal. They have done this through making the website appear like a slice of life for the programme in hand with blogs, video diaries and countdowns to the next shows which invovles the audience with the programme much more than it would with just words on a page. I found this quite imformative and interesing as it made me think about the influence that websites can have in the media industry. When I am watching a show on television I don't tend to think about shows and their websites, but today was a reminder of just how important and intelligent they can be. For example, I found out that the show Smallville in which there is a daily newspaper article written about the goings on in the town, actually exists in fictional form on a website. This is quite clever, because it gives the program a realistic feel and makes it appear so much more than just a sixty minute show that they tune in to watch for an hour of their lives once every week. Fans like to immerse themselves in programmes, for the shows to become an important part of their everyday live. This quest is fulfilled by websites which allow them to do so.

At the end of the lecture we were taught about the importance of being able to collaborate well and share ideas and thoughts with our random group members. I think this should be a good expereince as it it is very much like the industry, where people work with other people they might not know or even like but manage to work well together in spite of these issues to produce excellent pieces of work. This will be a challenge, and albeit a very important challenge as it will give me a taste of what the life of a scriptwriter can be like.

In the brief we were told simply that our subject matter was to do with the 'End of Empire.' Immediately my thoughts turned to images susch as the crumbling of the Roman empire but as the day has passed I have realised how broad this subject matter can be. I looked up the word empire in an online thesaurus to see how wide the subject of empire could spread.

Here are the results that came back:

authority, command, commonwealth, control, domain, dominion, federation, government, kingdom, people, power, realm, sovereignty, supremacy, sway, union.

Based on these definitons for the word empire, I have come up with numerous plot scenarios that could suit the subject matter having previously believed this to be a very complex task. A man quitting his job, the miner's strike, a town hero losing his touch. They are stories that are all relevant to the brief and all of which could be devleoped into six minute story ideas.
I still have no idea what the film is going to be about and I am still racking my brains thinking of something suitable for the subject brief but tomorrow I am hoping me and my partner will come up with something creative and which also sits well with the rest of the group. The next few weeks could be quite hectic, but fun and challenging all the same.