Bristol New Wave Brief

     For my contextual study, I researched into the French New Wave movement, focusing particularly on directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Godard especially made an effort to make the audience aware that they were watching a film; he achieved this through various techniques, such as actors looking at the camera and addressing the audience directly; also, Godard used editing techniques such as jump-cuts to interrupt the continuity of the film and give it an unpolished edge. Truffaut's personal style was to attempt to mirror his personal life in his films. A common technique throughout the majority of New Wave directors I have found is the flare for spontaneity in their work, and the desire to capture genuine human emotion, rather than scripted narratives. From researching the works of these directors, I aim to implement similar techniques and features in my own 'New Wave' video. Firstly, I plan to film most of my footage in Bristol during a residential trip, I will be filming simply what we get up to whilst filming our Bristol promotional video, in other words there is no script, therefore the footage will just be our general life while in Bristol, furthermore taking influence from Truffaut by giving the audience an insight to our lives. The lack of script and fixed narrative is influenced by the French New Wave, as directors would encourage spontaneity and genuine reactions by improvising regularly on set. All of the footage will also all be shot on-location throughout the city, with the addition of footage from our commute to the city in order to portray our entire journey, this is also another element of the French New Wave. Following this theme, my plan is to edit my footage into a montage style film, with various different clips from different situations; in addition to this i will have non-diegetic music over the top of the footage in order to convey the emotion of the film. Furthermore, I will perhaps include some form of narration or monologue over some of the footage  as an attempt to experiment and see if it fits in with my film; this in itself follows the New Wave philosophy to bend the rules and experiment with new techniques - whether or not this will be included in the final edit will depend on if it adds to the quality of the video or not. During filming, I will try to maintain the same quality of picture on the camera as much as possible, however I will change them if necessary in order to achieve a good quality picture. Overall I will aim to keep the frames per second figure as fixed as possible in order to maintain a smooth viewing experience when piecing the clips together. However, settings will inevitably need to be changed due to the fact that we will be filming using only the light available, as we will not have access to additional lighting. Therefore transitioning from outdoors to indoors will require settings such as the ISO and aperture of the camera settings being changed. Finally, my New Wave film draft is not meant to be perfect, therefore the final cut is meant to be rough and unpolished.