Set the topic

After I got the assigned topic of the second film Disaster Capitalism, I watched a lot of financial television programs to have a brief idea of what happened in the present market, and the most influential financial affairs.

 

After a period of research, I had chosen the Credit Crunch as the topic of my film, and got a few ideas to be chosen:

 

l        Illustrate the Credit Crunch:

After research, I was so happy to have some knowledge of the Credit Crunch that I wanted to make a film illustrate the process of Credit Crunch: how did it happed, developed, and the further influence.

 

l        About illegal immigration and Credit Crunch:

When I did research of the first film, I talked a lot with Ying, who was the owner of a small Chinese supermarket. As a shop owner, she told me a lot about the present local economic situation.

One of them impressed me was that: after two Chinese students had been killed last year, the British government had started to investigate the illegal immigrations. At the same time, along with the Credit Crunch, lots of Chinese restaurants had been close down. As a result, lots of Chinese illegal immigrations who were used to hide in Chinese restaurants as chiefs or waiters lost their job and home. As a result, on the one hand, the illegal immigrations had to keep hiding, because polices were searching them; on the other hand, the job less illegal immigrations had to get money. So that was or would be a serious social problem. And my point was they came to the Capitalism country to seek money, but their dream had been broken in their dreaming Capitalism country.

 

But after Nick showed us some experimental film on a lecture, I changed my mind, because the first idea was too educational, and looked more like a television program. At the same time, the way I wanted to make the film was to illustrate, which means the role of me in making the film was just an editor, and I didn’t have enough space to direct it. To the second idea, although I quite like the idea, but I didn’t think I have enough time to film it, and I had no idea of how to make a film on this actual affaire in a experimental way.

 

So I started to do some research on the Experimental style. At first, honestly speaking, I did not like the style and did not want to make a film following the experimental style, because I did not understand most of the film Nick putted on the blog at all! However, after doing more research, I understood that, films on the blog were just a few examples, and I did not have to exactly following the same way to make the same film. I told speak of what I thought, and he totally agreed.

 

While keeping doing research, a Chinese professor’s article impressed me a lot that as he stated, to the economic aspect, wall street was entitled to be called as a country, because the total assets of wall street was much more than American’s GDP. At the same time, with the new understanding of experimental film, I got a new idea, which was to split the screen into 2 pieces, the left one was to show the Wall Street, while the right piece was to show the American government. And the subtitles in the very beginning which are “On this continent there are two financial empires” combine the left and right part together showing the essence of Capitalism: both the financial market and the government did their best to make money.

 

Getting the footage:

Most of my archive footages were downloaded from the web site introduced by Nick called archive.org. It was so good that I got so many footages from it. Besides, I also searched my key words such as George Soros, NASDAQ in Youtube, and I found some other footage which not that formal but I do need. But I didn’t use the plug-in that Nick introduced, because I didn’t use Firefox. To instead of, I found a web site (http://keepvid.com/) which enabled me to download Youtube videos. All I need to do was to type the video’s web address.

 

Editing the Film:

During my first rough cut, I just simply split the screen and separately showed Wall Street and the White House on both sides to present their greed and they didn’t care about people. However, after I watched the first rough cut, I felt it was too disordered to show my original idea.

 

In the second rough cut, I divided the film into two parts with the subtitle “People are paying the price”. In the first half part subtitles were used instead of the former scenes in which businessmen were counting money and government staff were shaking hands. The second half part was remained that people were suffering from the wars and financial crisis.

 

By the reason of the technique problem, I had lost some data after the revision so that I had to reedit some parts of my film. At the same time, I was surprised by the video of NASDAQ’s screen wall. Images on the whole wall were changing continuously. I found that these images could exactly represent that Wall Street was so attractive that people were led to pursue money and got lost. Therefore I changed my plan again. I put the screen wall of NASDAQ on the left hand showing the fair appearance of Wall Street, and put the long take of Bush’s speech on the right hand to represent US government going his own way. Besides, the background music in Schindler’s List was set to go with the long take running through the whole film to create the feeling of sorrow.

 

Things I quite like in this film:

l        The use of long take

l        The background music set the theme.

l        Treating with the sound

 

Things I may do better in the next film:

l        The most terrible thing while I made this film was that I had not make a detailed script or story board before the second cut. I just wrote some brief ideas down. Because it was not detailed, at the same time, I got so many excellent footages, so I could not decide which footage shall I use, and I was totally leaded by the footage while I was editing. As a result, my first rough cut was rubbish.

l        I had not take notes of my footages. Although I had watched through all my footages, I could not find some beautiful shots while editing. Next time when I need edit other people’s footage again, I should rename the video as soon as I got it.