I’ve been caught between two basic ideas that I want to do:
A) A gifset exploring corporate attempts to take advantage of meme culture and social justice terminology
This would be titled “Dances I Do When The Anxiety Hits” and its gonna be a 3×4 grid of 12 or so gifs of a person doing different dances. The character will be animated and doing any sort of silly dance, but their face will be blank, sorta like this:
This is gonna look hilarious, because just imagine this face looking straight ahead on top of a body like this:
The point of it all is however to show something that is get begging to be made into a meme, with an eye-catching and #relatable title regarding mental health, to point out how this sort of content can be used as a clever marketing strategy by corporations. What if, under one of the gifs, you can see a McDonald’s logo? What is that gifset saying? I want to explore this idea of the friendly corporation that “gets” youth culture, not out of care for its customer’s actual mental health, but out of a desire to encourage people to buy more stuff.
B) A short film on privacy infringement
This one would focus more on how advertisers try to get your information by setting a dialogue between two characters – one, a consumer/social media user, and the other a sort of personification of an algorithm trying to ply out data from the user. The resulting video will be a sort of comedy bit with the algorithm devising all sorts of leading questions to get information from the user. The point of it being to illustrate in a more human way how easy it is for any number of companies to have your information and predict what you’ll do, in a way that isn’t as dark or edgy as your typical Black Mirror set.
This will require a script, a storyboard, actors, at least three different sets, and hopefully a person to help me film, not to mention the hours of post-production work, so I don’t think this project is as likely to get off the ground as the other project, unless I manage to produce a script and half a storyboard by next week.