Southend shoot - Evaluation

Southend shoot - Evaluation

One of the consequences of climate change that we wanted to tackle was the rising sea levels. Initially, we thought we could represent that by shooting people in a living room in a house by the sea and having the water invade their space, reaching their feet. We came to the conclusion that the best way to shoot would be to build a simple living room set on the beach, so the water could easily reach our actors’ feet. This way we would be pushing the frontiers of filming a moving image piece by utilising an unconventional location to build a set in and even more so, by showing the construction, breaking the illusion crated initially. 

We decided on shooting first close-ups of a couple sitting on a sofa in their living room, doing banal things, such as watching TV, filing nails and eating cereal. Then, we would reveal the constructed set and it’s real location, panning to the water reaching their feet. This means of challenging the audience’s expectations was also used in the shoot at Dungeness, which created a link between the two that went beyond just aesthetics.

We decided to go for a vintage look. Not only would that create a link with the environmental destruction made in the decades of 1950/1960 - the time which we visually based our film on -   but it would still make sense in a future setting, considering the retro tendencies in fashion and design at the moment.

In the end, the set was destroyed by the intense wind, waves and the increasingly high tide. However, we decided to keep shooting because we thought that would go perfectly with what we were trying to say. It would also enhance the strangeness of the situation, especially by showing the couple on the sofa with no set in the end.

For the presentation we decided to build a similar set around an old TV that would show the final piece, so we would create a similar environment to the one being portrayed in the video. The poor quality of the screen went really well with our edit, which was made to look like a VHS tape. We also added an old weather forecast narration on top of the visuals so that the audio would also add to the theme of climate change and extreme weather conditions.