The Dynamics of Roommates
For this documentary video project, Mohnish and I wanted to explore the topic of roommates. The specific question we want to center our documentary video around is “To what extent has having a roommate changed your life?”. The reason why we chose this question is because it’s pretty much a given that you’ll have a roommate at one point in your college life. Whether it was in Freshman year where it was required for students to live at a college dorm, or the other years when it’s more economically reasonable for one to have a roommate or even roommates throughout their years in college. Specifically, the problem that we’re addressing through our project is the concern that many incoming college students may have on why it is required of them to spend their first year in a college dorm and to have a roommate.
As much as some people might have had a problem (or still do) with the idea of co-existing with other individuals in the same room or house (that isn’t family), we’re sure that it’s still been a huge learning experience for most students. Our target audience is specifically incoming students coming here to the University of Illinois –Urbana Champaign, as they might have questions and concerns with having a roommate or roommates their first year here. And our proposed solution or “answers” that we hope will be relayed to the audience through our documentary video is that having a roommate will be a great learning experience for anyone. Whether it’s by learning how to successfully and peacefully co-exist with other students who may not have the same lifestyle or whether it’s learning how happily befriend and become closer with other students, having a roommate is a great stepping block from moving out of one’s home and finally getting a taste of how it’s like living in the real world. Because it’s quite common that even after college, there may be many moments where one chooses to live with a roommate or roommates as well.
For footage, we’re hoping that the commentary from inside our respective living situations can make for compelling content. In this sense, the footage will have (naturally) lots of dialogue. We’re stylizing the footage after the hit-show The Office, and we’re using elements of that show - from recording each character’s perspective to stylizing the cinematography - to highlight the more interesting parts of a mundane reality. In a sense, we’re trying to take the ordinary (having a roommate) and transform it into something compelling. We want our roommates to establish narrative, reveal conflict, and push the film forward. Most importantly, we want to document our roommates honestly, and we want everyone involved to have their own take represented in the final film.
For filming, there's a few problems we can anticipate coming up. One is the issue of getting compelling footage. As said earlier, the topic isn’t the same as following a murder case - it’s relatively ordinary, mundane, and it’ll take compelling footage to make for a compelling film. Hopefully, we can make creative decisions in the loose scripting before hand that’ll naturally predispose us to interesting scenarios, interesting discussion, and conflict that we can capture within this documentary. Having a roommate and undergoing the day-to-day triumphs and difficulties with them is inherently interesting to us because we’re key players in these scenarios - trying to make these personal relationships interesting to others, will be a separate challenge.
Another challenge: audio and footage. Generally, equipment can be as simple as an iPhone, but the problem is that of getting the audio to be (ironically) audible. We’re not focusing on sound (like the sound essay) but instead, we’re focusing on the shot, and when characters are far away (for instance, a scene where two roommates are cooking), if there's interesting conversation, it’ll be hard to snag it on tape. This is where proper equipment comes into play, and that’ll be it’s own learning challenge.