Influences

Some of my influences came from a short film called ‘The Seafront’ – a documentary piece based around different peoples experiences at the beach. It used very picturesque establishing shots, which was something I tried to achieve, and believe I did.

My original idea was influenced by this to have a short documentary focusing on a key issue in an area. I was then influenced by one of my teachers who happened to mention the issue of ‘townies against students.’ This was a topic reported on in the news known as “Student Bashing” where residents of the University town would violently attack students on nights out. This was to become the focus of my documentary.

I was influenced by a number of stories I read in the newspapers and carried this up. However, when I couldn’t get permission to film in certain locations and could not get hold of anybody to talk about the subject, I had to abort the idea and then focused on the ‘promotional tourist’ approach. I then researched videos of this genre, which was quite difficult, but finally found the style of video on the Thompson Holiday Channel on Sky. This was exactly the type of thing that I needed to look at to get an idea on how tourist videos look and sound.

Another one of my influences was looking back at ‘The Handler’ – the single camera drama I created. I wanted to achieve more establishing shots that portrayed the location and told the ‘story’ without necessarily having to have any dialogue or narration.