The Waiting Room - Our Development

  We were given the task of creating a single camera production, which explored the ways you can alter time and atmosphere using lighting, camera work and montage editing. We had to
1.) Convey atmosphere
2.) Distort time
3.) Build Tension
4.) Tell a Story
5.) Give the Situation a Story.
   We got into a group of four, Tasha, Rob M, Rob S and myself, and started planning. We took inspiration from a short paragraph provided by Tim, which was very descriptive about how a room was becoming a prison, a ticking time bomb, and how the character's life within it was about to change forever.
  We first thought about having a boy, sat at a desk in front of a phone, waiting for it to ring. He has a piece of evidence from a crime scene and the police and the criminal both want it back. However, after more planning we decided that it would be quite complicated to convey the whole story whilst also playing with the concept of time. So we started thinking up other ideas.
  Our final idea came as we were booking out "The Cove" from the ERC. Being a dark place, it would be perfect to set up a hostage situation, and so after some thought, our idea became: Two girls, waking up in a dark warehouse, tied to chairs with a minute timer in front of them. They are beaten and bruised and are dreaming of a crash or crime (depicted with noise) but soon wake up and realise the situation they are in.
   I am really happy with the way that the video turned out because i think that it allows the audience to make up their own minds about how the girls are involved, are they criminals, or simple bystanders that have seen too much? We wanted to play around with different lighting and atmosphere,so we set up only three dedo lights with multiple black screens and put a 50mm f/1.4 lens on the camera to give a shallow depth field and give better capture in a low light. I was also happy with the way the post production sound recordings fitted in with the whole video, i think that this is an result of good planning and really adds to the intensity of the tension. Overall i was happy with the way that the video was produced as a whole and also with how the video was perceived by an audience.