Our Very First Client Jobs
Today, our very first clients pitched their prospective projects to us. And while I expected it to be the other way round - the filmmaker pitching his idea to the executive producers or clients - I realised that the client also needs to present his endeavour and that he would naturally present it in a pitch-like situation.
So our first client is a singer and musician who wants a pop promo video for his song called 'Hotel Chelsea' and he already started off with a very detailed idea of what he wanted included in the video. In his song, he basically glorifies the history of the Hotel Chelsea and while the lyrical I is unable to travel to the hotel itself, he imagines a crow that travels over the Atlantic easily, visiting New York, the hotel and its famous inhabitants like Sid Vicious, Jacques Kerouac, and Andy Warhol before it takes wings again and returns to his master.
And while this idea sounds really amazing, it poses a lot of issues, especially for our current level of learning:
For the first, capturing a flying crow on footage is really difficult and demanding. Either you capture one on footage in nature or you need to get an animal trainer and a trained crow to come into the studio to take appropriate footage. Designing one with CGI is nothing anyone of us has done before and would take much more time than we have for the module.
Furthermore, obtaining footage of New York is costly, either by copyright or by taking a flight over there and filming it. The same goes for footage of the actual Hotel Chelsea. Using copyrighted footage of all three elements named above would, if worst comes to worst, mean a lot of expenses and a long search for footage that matches up just right in terms of lighting. He furthermore wanted a strong colour palette as presented in the video down below, which could pose another difficulty, since his song by nature is extremely slow and rather toned down.
To make it short, for this idea I will need to come up with good ideas to work around these issues in the time that we are given.
Our second client on the other hand posed to be a completely different challenge than the first one. While our first client was a musician, extremely vocal and explicit in his ideas, our second client is the director of a transgender organisation and shelter asking for a video to raise awareness of her cause and charity and to attract the approx. 2 % of the population that suffer from their divergent gender identity in order to offer help.
During the presentation of her cause, I learned a lot about the topic of transgenderism and especially about non-binary gender identities. She showed us a video called 'Masked' that she particularly liked and I felt that I connected with the idea.
However, in contrast to our first client, she was not entirely sure about the audience she wanted to attract - she seemed pleased with either a short film addressed to those that are affected and need help or to those who are yet unaware of the issue and are thus redirected to our client's organisation to learn more and, if possible, maybe even help out.
To me it was wildly interesting to have two different types of clients being presented to us. While the first client was ambitious and had extremely concrete ideas of what he wanted to achieve, the second one was entirely open to our input, suggestions and creativity. And that, to my mind, can be both a blessing and a curse in disguise.
While number one basically delivered his idea to us that 'just' needed implementing into a film, the second one demanded more creative - and due to the nature of the project also more sensitive - work from us. However, for the second client's project we are able to pitch ideas we're more comfortable with implementing, whereas the first client's concrete idea is extremely hard to put into practice since it demands not only a lot of preparation and knowledge, it also demands a lot more technical skills than we currently have. Film a flying crow?
Heck, that is going to be interesting. However, I now have two weeks to come up with a good idea for both of them whilst applying for the DAAD-scholarship in Germany.
So, yeah, keep your finger's crossed!
References:
QueensStoneAgeVEVO (2009) Queens of the Stone Age - Go With the Flow [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcHKOC64KnE [Accessed on 15 January 2018]
Trans Aware CIO (2017) Masked #freetobeme [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NliXT67y_8 [Accessed on 15 January 2018]