Final Project Treatment

For my final project, I want to expand on some of the basic ideas of my self-portrait piece, which showed me typing at a computer. This project will not be a self-portrait, but instead will deal with questions about the shifting boundary between the creator of a story and the audience, and the way a story gets recreated when it is read/viewed/heard. I will not show anyone’s full face, but will rely on using extreme close-ups of the eyes and hands of at least four different people to create the feeling both of an audience and of a collective group of people producing a story.
The story being told will be a single sequence from a TV show in which a woman shoots a man. I want to look at how images of women with guns are often used in mass media to show women as powerful and dangerous while simultaneously objectifying them, and how this recurring “story” is understood by a female viewer. Therefore, all of the actors in my video will be women. The actual story will be a literal but poetic description of what the fictional viewers are seeing on the TV screen (the TV will not be shown). The text will refer to the viewers as “you” and document the experience of viewing the scene. It will be told through text on the screen (and occasionally through extreme close-ups of letters on the keyboard). I plan to experiment with font, size, and color, as well as the shape of the text on the page, to create a rhythm that mimics the rhythm of watching television (fast cuts, flashy special effects, etc.) but also questions it because it is text and not images.
To emphasize this rhythm, I will use the sound of the keyboard typing, which may go faster or slower than the letters appearing on the screen. This will be the only sound except for a few others, such as the sound of the television turning on and off and also possibly the sound of a gunshot or something symbolizing a gunshot.
In terms of lighting, I am imagining pretty sharp lighting with a lot of contrast, especially when showing the keyboard and the eyes and hands. The lighting on the computer screen will probably depend on what makes the text easiest to read.
I have already written most of the text, so my schedule will be the following:

4/10/08-4/15/08 Finish working out the text, storyboard, and arrange times to shoot with actors
4/15/08-4/22 Shoot video
4/22-4/29 Edit