RED 2
Production
I Had the idea of shooting footage around the city at night time. the reputation that the Plymouth nightlife had acquired
meant that I could find some interesting behaviour to display on screen. I spent some time thinking about how I would
want this film to look. I thought about the city lights and the atmosphere that
various areas of the city could generate. I knew it was going to be very dark
when I would get around to filming it, so I knew that I would have to use a
camera which could generate some interesting and atmospheric scenery, some good
lighting yet have the details of the
buildings roads stand out and look dense.
I wanted the "blacks" , the negative space, to have some aesthetic presence,
so I picked the z1 Camera as I had some good experiences shooting with it before
for similar conditions. I knew that when it came to the editing, I considered
that it may give me more opportunities
to play with effects and
hopefully learn a few things than if I had used a DSLR which I feel tends to
make the image look flat in "low-light" .
I actually shot the R.E.D. 2 footage the same day as the
R.E.D. 1 footage, it was simply a case of wrapping one film and starting the
next. My initial idea for the film was always to use lots of audio excerpts
from different sources but the idea with
the footage was to find certain things
around Plymouth that people would find to be negative, I travelled round the
poorest areas, I went round through the areas of the city centre where people
would be drunk, I searched for any signs of police cars, ambulances, fire
engines etc. I tried to pick out any derelict areas, any evidence of homeless
people, anything that I could add to my film. The reason why was because I
wanted to present my own feelings when
confronted with these things, all of which made me feel uneasy, resentful and
fearful, I have always had a " love/hate " relationship with my home,
I have experienced some of the best times in my life here but at the same time
I have seen many things that I would wish to forget and some characters that I
would go so far as to say that I would
ever socialise with them if I could help it. Unfortunately, or fortunately in a
sense, there wasn't much to see, it seemed as though everybody was on their
best behaviour. It was when I got home and I started to think about what I
could put into the film to communicate my ideas that I struck on the notion of
taking material from other sources and to use the footage from that night as
point of reference from which the clips jump off from, in the context of the
story, I wanted to portray a journey
around the city , where the clips would almost come from the driver is
if he/she was reflecting on their feelings and anxieties.
I wanted the clips to
have some sort of synergy, some relation to each other and to the dialogue the
other footage being used that could follow it, for example I put together shots of brightly lit gambling
establishments together that tempt people with the acquisition of monetary
wealth and underneath the dialogue
talked about " how Jesus asks you to love him more than your parents
" followed by the image of a dying child in Africa, limp in an adults arms,
the idea was to show how we are so far removed from the reality of what is
important in our lives and I was maybe presenting the notion that the worship
and "need" for money and fame
has become almost a religious cult in it' s own perverse form. I could say that
with the footage of the dying child I could be saying that this child is going
through more suffering than most of us will ever endure, does the idea of god
or money really mean anything to this individual at this time in their life?.
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