WHAT IS NATALIE'S NIGHT IN?
‘Natalie’s Night In’ is a 30 minute mockumentary thriller about a “well known” urban legend of a lost pilot from the 70’s in New Zealand. The mystery of the tape is encased and teased in this supposed ‘doccumentary’ comically to play on the corniness of this alternate version of New Zealand where the tape falls into cultural knowledge. The point of the ‘documentary’ is to help boost the filmmakers career by letting the rest of the world ‘in’ on something thats ‘widely known’ in an isolated part of the world. Key elements in the story is to set it up as a ‘kiwi’ story time so that it could be believable to anyone watching overseas with limited knowledge of the Country. T he style and tone of the mockumentary is a mix of ‘Antrum’ and ‘What we do in the dark’. Filming elements will be a lot of handheld camera following behind the director as he does his research around the North island. The majority of the mockumentary part is entwined with on foot research, sifting through people’s old photos and above shoulder shot interviews. The actual pilot will be filmed inside a large recording studio with a stage made for it.
WHATS OUR RESEARCH QUESTION?
Can contemporary graphic designers effectively employ retro aesthetics in film/media to evoke nostalgia while advancing storytelling and visual communication techniques?
DIRECTORS TAKE
I have a deep steadfast belief that there is no art form that takes over your senses, transports your mind, and affects your perspectives as much as the motion picture, other than the familiarity and certainty of living through memory in a current space. I have an extreme fascination with older films as a person who may have died decades ago, is now immortalized on screen through the memory of a lens rather than passed down words. I created the story subconsciously to fit a narrative around my core beliefs as a creator.
PRODUCERS STATEMENT
The production will start its filming of the ‘pilot’ first in the Massey University recording studio near the end of May. This will give us the footage we need to edit it into fake media to present as real in the mockumentary. The pilot also requires a lot of manually added effects. The next step is to photoshop fake pictures of people from the 60’s to later plant them in the interviewee’s homes. Interviewing will go from Palmerston North to Levin then lastly to Paraparaumu, it will be a week of filming and traveling with the documentarian. After we’ve finished f ilming the interviews we will film the fake encounters with people on the streets of Wellington as the last live action interactions. The majority of the project is going to be dedicated to post production and editing.
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