Creating the pond..

Thinking about how we would create the pond in the studio. If we did it in the studio the pond would have to be quite small which is a limitation we wouldn't have if we did it on location. If we are creating a pond in the studio we have to make it abstract otherwise it could look really badly unrealisitc but trying to look realistic. The problem we have is how do we do this? Here is a video (below) of an abstract video that has the feel of it being real yet we see that clearly they are not trying to represent the real world. This is something we want - but we still want there to be a magical element to it.

In this video it is at night and they are seen to be in the clouds - obviously we see that this isn't actually real but thats the almost beauty of the video that it is not trying to look really real. This even looks quite magical as its an artificial way of making them look like they are in the clouds. We liked the fact that this was at night and the background is something we want in our video - starry night. This would be our back drop to the shots of the girl by the pond. The stars give a mygetstic feel to the shots, this is shown in this video even when its not trying to look magical. Below is a picture of a starry night and this is the kind of thing we want the background of this part of the video to be. It has a dreamlike feel to it, and there is something beautiful about it. We wouldn't have this done by green screen we don't think, but actually get material that represents a starry night - it wouldn't look this realisitc.

Thinking about the water and grass we had the idea of using material. We could use green felt for the grass. It could even be something as basic as cutting them up into the shape of grass like a zig zag line - this would be quite stylised. Or we could just have the green felt over bags of things so that this creates a sort of river bank. Its weather we want to go overboard with the 'arty not real' feel or more in the middle. This is just an idea of how we could get over the fact that going to a real location has many problems. For the water we thought about the idea of having dark blue cloth around a big rectangular tray which is filled with water. We could also just use a mirror at the bottom of a tray full of water and if the water doesnt show up we could dye it blue. Another way that we could create water would be by using blue shimmerin material that is crumpled up (like quality street rappers) over a mirror. This would create a riplling effect of water which won't look real at all, but it would look stylistic and people would understand the concept. We also discussed the idea of having a tree next to the pond - this could be a fake tree which we thought maybe fairylights could be hanging in the tree as this would be dreamlike. Another way to do it would be like in Cheryl Coles video for 'Parachute'. Below is a print screen of what she did. This would be quite easy to do, all we would need would be a blue material and fans to blow it up.