Photo & Mindmap

For our media coursework, we had to do a short film which could be either fictional or documentary-based on a photograph. The untitled photograph was the winner of the 2009 World Press Photo and this was our main basic influence on what our film would be like. This image depicts a middle eastern woman as she stands on a rooftop, and she seems to be calling out for someone. After a few lessons of deciding exactly what we should do a film about, we chose to use isolation as our main theme.

We started by making a mind map. Some of the words we initially came up with were fear, dystopia, gritty urban area, imprisonment, poverty, entrapment, war and religion. Although these all had connections to the photo, these were also all main issues happening in the world at the moment. We chose isolation because we felt this word was very diverse.

After deciding to do the theme of isolation, we then had to think of basic but interesting narratives. At first we were set on doing a documentary but then we turned to fictional narratives as we found that making a documentary might be harder, such as with the fact that we had to use real people who actually had experiences involving some sort of isolation.