In early August 2018 I attended an event called DesignInquiry held in the Devon countryside. The event is setup by university lecturers from around the world who come together to present their current research projects then debate and feedback on them. With the current stage I am at with my project I felt it was the perfect time to take part in this. Maybe it was slightly brave to get 15 - 18 different design lecturers opinions on a project I have been working on for so long but I felt I was still able to make serious changes if possible. The animation was also still very much in its rough stages so I wasn’t expecting anything too damning. Below is a clip of the rough trailer I showed at the presentation.
My idea for presenting the trailer was to not over explain it, in fact I wanted to give basically no prior information about what they were going to see. The thinking was that it might be something they would just come across whilst on the internet. This way I would be able to see how directly the messages translates and if the context of the film trailer works.
First responses were slow, they really wanted to ask more questions. Which told me a lot. In fact one of the most telling things was that they believed it to be autobiographical. This means they didn’t get it was about female struggle, they thought it was a personal, male struggle, so the one most important thing I was trying to get across failed. Meaning that the whole point of the trailer and the stories are lost and the main message had been distorted. The commentators cited a few reasons for this. One, it feels very male, this I explained we were trying to do on purpose to encourage men to feel apart fo the production not excluded. The other point was that there was too much writing not enough artwork. When I was watching it back in the presentation I had the feeling that it maybe had a little too much text, and that the images were not doing enough work. This point is very important, but easily rectified. Initially the trailer had more ‘flashes of abuse’ in one of the earlier drafts, in the most recent above it has just one. Adding more things like this will cement the female side much more and I think I could push them further now I know how much of in impact they will have on the piece and what it translates. If I start by adding in the previous 3 flashes, and maybe have some other images, like a cup being knocked over, or a struggle in the background maybe?
Photo taken of the participants of Di Devon 2018