Fiction Adaptation: Montage (Group Project)

What is Montage? 

-To use oppositional images presented in juxtaposition to create new meanings.

-The technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, text or music.

For this unit, we have been asked to adapt a piece of fiction, in the form of a poem into a visual film. The brief expects us to illustrate the text in the most inventive and creative way possible to allow the audience to visualise the poem and bring the words to life. The use of Montage is likely to be apparent in every film, where the images are unrelated but edited in a sequence so that they relate to the written text. This technique is often used in film and television. For example there are a few montages throughout the film 'Hot Fuzz'. The clip below shows Simon Pegg's character Nicholas illustrating events in his life that enabled him to get to where he is at present, as a Police Officer. As he explains each event after another, this is shown on screen in a couple of sequences, almost in list form. This tells us and shows us a little about the character in a very obvious way so we are left feeling like we understand the character.

In order to learn more about montage and how to address it for our own projects, Helen has asked us to get into groups of four and create a short montage (3.00m). I will be working with Ellen, Saskia and Cheyenne. We were given four emotions, of which we must choose one and represent in our montage. The options are Joy, Hope, Despair and Fear. We decided to choose Despair as we felt we could be creative with it, we also felt like negative emotions are generally easier to convey. We had a meeting this afternoon to discuss ideas and have come up with a few possibilities for the story. Cheyenne suggested we show the character having a terrible day, highlighting all of the things that go wrong in montage form, resulting in them being in complete despair by the end after their life has fallen apart. I think we could be quite creative with this idea, combining some quite fast, visual imagery and even experimenting with colour to convey emotion. We have planned to have another meeting tomorrow to extend our ideas and develop on this initial idea.