The past few weeks seemed to have brought me some very bad luck, within this negative time of my life I’ve learnt to appreciate the things that I do already have, things that normally I would have taken for granted like a warm bad to sleep in at night, a loving family, a roof over my head, great friends and more than one meal a day. I believe that the majority of us don’t realise what we have until it’s gone which is understandable yet doesn’t have to be the case, a world where we appreciate the things we have more would be a brighter, happier one.
My video was created to trigger the appreciative and happy mood that people get when they realise that they have got things going good in their life, even if the feeling only lasts the duration of the video itself.
My initial plan was the interview people from different walks of life and compare what made them happy throughout the main ages of it, but after attempting interviews multiple times and didn’t receive mutual co-operation, I changed the interview to handing out small questionnaires for the people to fill in, I found this technique less intimidating for both me and the receiver as well as quicker and more truthful as the member of the public that I was asking felt uncomfortable talking to me about their life and seemed to find it much easier writing it down on a piece of paper!
Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s ‘Inside out debate’ prompted me to get into the lives of these people yet without the intense interview I had planned, I could only but imagine.
I asked two music students to make me some background music, I asked for a ‘happy, uplifting, bouncy’ tune and allowed them to interpret that brief as they wished. I received two brilliant pieces of music from Jacob Puckering and Jack Bowden, in the end though I picked the drum based piece over the guitar based piece. I asked for both because these two people both specialise in different instruments and I wanted a wider range to pick from at the end rather than being stuck with one piece of music that might not have fit in with what I was doing.
I chose to portray the things that make people happy in both stills and video because I wanted to show I could produce both, I think they work well together but only after speeding up my videos so the fast flow from the still carried on through to the videos.
My final video does what it’s meant to, it shows people no matter how sad they are at that particular time, there will always be something that makes them happy. The video makes people happy by getting them to think about ‘What makes them happy’ whilst watching the answers of other people and finally it prompts the appreciative feeling that I aimed to trigger in the viewers.
