Task 1: Sweding

The term “sweding” comes from the film “Be Kind, Rewind”, a film by highly acclaimed music video director Michel Gondry, in which Jack Black destroys video cassettes of films whilst working at a video store and attempts to remake them for a low budget. The actual term “sweded” is a reference to the characters charging more for the homemade movies “as they are exports from Sweden”.The films themselves are not edited, and mostly filmed with one take per shot.

The concept of sweding was also used as a method of viral marketing for the film. Michel Gondry himself actually featured in a sweded version of Be Kind Rewinds's trailer. The film's official website and Youtube channel also encouraged viewers to create their own sweded efforts. Viral marketing created much more public awareness than the film would have had otherwise, with fan-made swedes, such as the one we will create, being continually made today.

Some examples of sweded films are:

Godzilla


Monsters Inc.


My original ideas for films to swede were:
*Edward Scissorhands
*Toy Story
*Avatar
*Jurassic Park
*Batman – The Dark Knight



I pitched Toy Story after taking influence from the above Monsters Inc. swede, as they are both Pixar films and thought they could work similarly. Toy Story is a hugely successful film, with a memorable storyline that would be easily recognisable to the audience. It has iconic characters such as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr Potatohead etc, and our own representations of these would be funny for everyone to watch. The majority of the film is set in the character Andy’s room, so we could easily film it at any of our homes.



After much debating, we as a group felt that the costume requirements and amount of characters would be too much to do in the short deadline given, and we did not really want to do simply one scene from a film, so we opted to do a sweded version of “The Shining”. Again, this film had iconic moments and characters as well the line “Here’s Johnny!” which suited my group perfectly. We have all watched and enjoy the film so we felt we could do a good and humorous re-make. We watched trailers of the film and viral videos on YouTube, Google and Yahoo, so we could build up an idea of what our preview would feature.

For the first time in a while using the cameras and editing software, we think we did quite well in the time frame given. We completed all stages of production on the dates we set ourselves and finished our video. When filming we now know we will have to make more use of the tripods and setting up each shots perfectly, but here we did not feel as if we would have completed the film if we had taken that into account this time. We have improved our skills on editing and cuts now, and overall are happy with the final video. If we had perhaps been better prepared, we would have brought in our own pre-downloaded music, so we could have had a quiet backing track playing that would suit the tense theme. Also the audio levels vary throughout, so with more time this would have definitely been altered. Taking all this into account, I think the outcome of this task has been successful, and will be entertaining for all to watch.

Final video and prelim task coming soon…