48 Hour Project - Trash Man

October 11, 2019

48 Hour Project - Trash Man

Working in a group of 5, only having 48 hours and iPhone we create a project based on the theme of the ‘environment’, through a parody of American Psycho. We wanted to create a dystopian world where being surrounded by trash was the norm. But also approach it with a humorous manner; having an extremely pretentious voice over with very absurd footage to create an uncomfortable yet funny short film.

The process of creating this film was very quick and smooth; we started with a main idea, then bounced off of each other and then distributed the work evenly.
Leah came up with the basis of the film and from there we were able to bounce off each other to develop ideas. From there, Leah created a story board and helped directing along side with Ndumiso.
Ndumiso, Claudia and I worked as a team to do some research. Ellie created the script and focused on music. Ellie, Ndumiso and I shared the camera work between us. Finally, editing was split between Ndumiso and I.
I think we worked well together as we all had different strengths and weaknesses as well as being able to learn from each other. We all shared the same vision and were able to bounce off each other.

Research
We looked heavily at American Psycho's script and shots as this is where the idea originated from. The Patrick Bateman mourning routine was our main inspiration and we used the basic structure of this and adapted this to our own.

In addition, we looked in to tropes of dystopian environments, particularly looking at the novels of
The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Orxy and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

Olafur Eliasson's work was a prominently focused on as he explores the issues of the environment.

We also looked in to PES Animations who uses everyday inanimate objects to create new material. inspired by him, we thought it would be interesting to experiment with a short 5 second animation of a bin bag flowing out of a tap. We achieved this by taking a series of photos (with the camera in the same place) of the tap. However, each time we would ruffle and move the bag in a slightly different position. The only issue we had with this was because it had to be shot on an iPhone, it was difficult not moving the camera between each photo as we had to hold it.