Final Project Proposal (Winny & Sebastian)
For final project, we plan to present our recreation of Jorgen Leth’s short film “The Perfect Human” in an interactive webpage. Through this recreation, we aim to build an original dialogue with “The Perfect Human” adding our own understanding, and connect this old film with our present life. Our version of “The Perfect Human” will be based on NYU Shanghai and its students. We will re-record the narration and most likely tweak it to make it more relevant to our university. We are also going to have another version called “The Real Human” made up of bloopers (mistakes made during filming). The message we want to convey through our recreation is that humans are not perfect objects, they have feelings and emotions, they make mistakes; in a setting of our real life, our audience can better relate with this idea.
The two sources we are referencing are Jorgen Leth, the director of the original “The Perfect Human” and Lars von Trier, the director of “The Five Obstructions” version. In addition, we also drew inspiration from Chris Milk’s “The Wilderness Downtown”. We chose these artists as our sources of inspiration as we are intending to produce our own version of The Perfect Human. Moreover, we will construct our video in a different way, more akin to The Wilderness Downtown’s way of having multiple windows pop up. The pop-up windows will have the same scenes but will feature different parts of the school as well as different actors.
Within our final webpage, first, we will show the original versions of “The Perfect Human” and “The Five Obstructions” to give the audience an idea of what we are trying to emulate. We will also have text on the side to help explain the videos and as a result hopefully make it more obvious for our audience to see what the message of our version is. We chose to imitate the “The Perfect Human”, or more precisely “The Five Obstructions” as the editing of “The Five Obstructions” fascinated us. The ability to create something so varied and different, yet with clear roots to the original was intriguing. We felt like our project would be important to our audience (NYU Shanghai students and regular students in general) in dismissing the notion of a perfect human. We intend for our actors to represent all of us at NYU Shanghai (as they are NYU Shanghai students).
After receiving feedback from the class we fleshed out our scenes more. We decided on three different scenes, each with three actors doing different things. One scene is eating. However, we are changing the dialogue, and the scenes will be more relevant to the school. We will have a focus on the three different students eating different things (homecooked lunch, cafeteria lunch, wai mai) and then zoom out to show they are all at the same table. Another scene depicts students walking down the stairs. Lastly, our third scene shows students studying for different subjects. We plan on emulating “The Five Obstructions” style of zooming in and zooming out. We are still thinking about the dialogue/narration as well as the obstructions we want to give ourselves.
We will film around the school using the IMA equipment room issued cameras and tripods. We will also rent out shotgun mics and tascams to ensure a high level of audio quality whether it is for the voice overs or for the audio recording during filming.