Preparations

Tuesday was a day of preparations and trials. As our main tool for raising awareness is film, we wanted to ensure that our audio-visual materials had a good quality, especially once being shown from a bigger screen (40 inch).

Surroundings

We started off asking ourselves what surroundings we wanted to place our interviewees in. Was creating a sense of (visual) isolation the right atmosphere to place them in? Or should we use a more homely and friendlier background - as if you were actually having a conversation with these people? Interestingly enough we found our answer in our Culture Probes. One of the strongest visual illustrations of social isolation were of an individual in a completely black surrounding - the person was utterly alone. Based on this strong image we decided to place our international interviewees within a black surrounding, thus returning to the visual presentation of social isolation.

Lighting

But placing a person in a room with a completely black background was quite a challenge - we struggled for a long time, trying to set up the lighting in such a way, so that the interviewees shadow would not be seen on the background wall, while also ensuring that the face had enough light to have a dynamic appearance. Simultaneously, we fought with creating enough contrast between background and protagonist - either was the background too bright or too dark which meant that the interviewee's dark hair became lost inside the dark background.

Insight into our light preparation process

After many trials and errors we finally felt confident with the images we produced. Even when displaying them on the bigger 40 inch screen did the video look presentable (although this also had its own hiccups).
Now we felt we were ready for the interviews.