Forum Film Pitch Box: Exeposé Screen picks your Top Five ideas!

Everyone loves free cake. If you turn down free cake, it’s a definite sign that something’s wrong. You’re an alien in disguise as a human, with no understanding of this wondrous offer. Or you’re so upset about something that you don’t really notice, which is distressing because free cake would almost certainly help ease your worries. Maybe you suspect that the makers, bakers or purchasers of said cake have tampered with it, maybe they don’t look trustworthy at all…

Image Credit: Craig Browne

Exeposé Online occupied the Forum last week to promote the website and force students to participate in silly games, like Guitar Hero, which certainly doesn’t seem that heroic to us. Anyway, the free cake has already been widely publicised but you could also get involved with the Screen section by coming up with an idea for a film or TV show and dropping it in our Film Pitch Box.

We wanted your imaginations to be as crazy and colourful as possible. My feeble powers of creativity are evident from the opening paragraph of this article. I mean seriously, aliens disguised as humans? Already done to death in the Men in Black franchise and elsewhere. It’s really hard to conjure a truly unique idea for a film or TV programme out of thin air!

When we set up camp in the Forum then, we were looking for nothing less than genius. Below are the entries that you submitted in our box, followed by our Top Five picks, including our winner. All the suggestions have their merits, but obviously the Top Five have the potential to spawn lucrative movies or shows.

Enjoy! (We accept no responsibility for some of the disturbing ideas submitted…)

• I got a fever and the only cure is more Christopher Walken

• ‘Being Nicholas Cage’ a remake of ‘Being John Malkovich’

• Big Brother in the Forum

• Marketplace comedy skits – “who took the last ham sandwich Barbara?”/”Johnny. From Cricket. Thinks he’s a big cheese”

• The Dark Knight + cooking show = Ready, Steady, BAT!

• Zombies invade school – one young boy raids the sports cupboard and fights back, killing one undead bastard at a time

• Everyone takes drugs and does Takeshi’s Castle

• Cumberbatch and Fassbender making sexy eyes @ the camera

• Biopic of Ellie Swingewood

• Ben Affleck talks about beards for 2 hours

• Fifty Shades of Grey – both the guy and girl are played by Emma Watson

• Remake of Schindler’s List with every character played by Samuel L Jackson

• A soap set in a museum

• Bryan Cranston tries on hats for an hour

• Period Drama (meaning ambiguous…)

And now, the Top Five!

5) Christopher Walken is Jane Eyre – he’d be brilliant, wouldn’t he?

4) Boobs – extra points for originality. This pitcher understood that sex sells!

3) Craig Browne trying to score a slam dunk – an endless struggle against circumstance and life itself. Only an Oscar-winning actor could do this idea justice.

2) Topless Men Baking – a brilliant high concept idea, easy to summarise to potential investors and even easier on the eye for the ladies. Simon Cowell might get hold of this one.

1) War film from the perspective of a maggot – an ultimately disturbing but irresistibly dark and different idea. War films all look the same these days, but this one wouldn’t. A visionary filmmaker could make this into an abstract study of battlefield horror. Or Pixar could make it into a fun adventure story, about one maggot escaping from his grim destiny to the delights of a peaceful world…

Congratulations to Jessica Cath for submitting the winning idea. Maybe watch a comedy DVD to banish some of your demons though?

Behold a poster for your film…

Image credit: soil-net.com

New Year and the blogosphere

The phenomenon of blogging… it’s like Facebook, but with strangers, and it’s not your social life, it’s your interests. Free websites such as Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress have become the new platform for amateur artists to display their work freely without any dictation or restriction from higher authority. The varieties of talent levels available on such platforms are exhilarating. From newly starting artists who simply fancy getting ideas out there and some advice, to professionals selling their work on posters and mugs, blogging can serve as inspiration to anyone.

 

Photo by David Berkowitz on Flickr

From a viewer’s point of view, the website provides a new, fresh, and abundant database of art like never before. If you are yourself an artist, it is much easier to find artists that are similar to your work and that you could draw personal inspiration from on Tumblr, for example, than in a gallery. This does have its disadvantages as in a gallery everything is pre-selected for you to be guaranteed good quality, whereas on blogging websites, by typing ‘collage art’ into the search, there will be much sifting to do before finding something that works for you. But the advantage of this is that such works exists and are readily available for you to use. The diversity is exciting and it is amazing how many artists you can explore in little time. It is also easy to print anything of anyone else’s and experiment with it instantaneously, and make some of your own art based on other people just like you.

 

As a user, blogging is very much like personal advertising of your own work, except that you can’t just put it out there and expect people to ‘discover’ you. It is an interaction. You follow and comment on other people’s blog to then receive follows and comments on your own work. It is dedication. In this sense it is truly fantastic the support system you can get from people you don’t know. Blogs will also have the tendency to push an artist to keep creating. If you want to keep your viewers viewing, you need to keep posting and creating. Blogging also provides the possibility of increasing any part-time job you may want as an artist. Many artists use blogs as a more casual surface, with sometimes less professional pieces, to grow a fan base and community and then link this blog to their website.

 

So overall, social media is making art more accessible and is making it easier to self-promote online. Having only recently joined the blogging world I have to say I was surprised at how encouraging it is to see other people at similar levels doing the same things as me. It does serve as a pushing force to keep creating very often, and to keep posting. Blogging with art is something I recommend, if not for the long term, for a month or so.

 

By Naomi Pacific