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Fluoro Tan 

Well after four days of hardcore post-production and some DVD creation, the nightshift documentary is well and truly in the bag. Woooohoooo! Clocking in at just under 20 minutes, ‘Fluoro Tan’ concerns the lives of four individual shift workers at a Supermarket and how the job affects them mentally and physically. Well that’s what it’s supposed to convey but whether I managed to pull it off is an entirely different matter. However I just got news that it will be one of the documentaries screening at the Arts awards night this Monday night at the University so I guess I did something right. Unfortunately that’s the only place it can get screened since I only have permission to screen it for educational purposes because of certain factors (i.e the companies store I shot the documentary in and obviously some musical copyright issues). Not that I really care since this will primarily form another example to put on my show reel for future employment.

I struggled getting to the 20 minute mark as previously mentioned since I didn’t shoot a great deal of footage due to various circumstances. I was watching a behind-the-scenes making of a documentary on TV during the week and they claimed they had 800 hours of footage to condense into a 50 minute doco. I, on the other hand, had maybe 2 ‘bd - 3 hours of footage, condensed into 20 minutes. It doesn’t take a maths scholar to realise that I was in deep shit when it came to having enough shots. I tried flipping shots, colour grading, stills, etc’85 but it becomes pretty obvious that I ran out of images to use. Luckily the interview snippets came through and delivered the goods.

Since the doco was going to be for educational purposes from the get-go and will never, ever make any money at all, I decided to use music from some of my favourite bands and musicians including Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Josh Rouse and R.E.M. (thanks Lyn for the latter musical suggestion!). I didn’t have time to compose my own score for the material (although that would have been fun) but I think the selected music sets an appropriate tone.

Yesterday, I cut together a two and a half minute trailer which sorta gives you a feel of the more serious sides to the documentary but I did inject a fair amount of humour into the final product so that it didn’t become too laborious to sit through. But none of that is in the trailer (and I cbf cutting a ‘lighter’ version either!). I’ve made a couple of web-versions for you all which you can download below in which ever format you prefer. (Remember to ‘right-click’ the link and ‘Save Target As’ to your desktop so that it doesn’t stream. I can’t believe how many people still don’t know how to do that!) :

Fluoro Tan trailer

- Quicktime 480 x 274 (10 Meg) Recommended!
- Windows Media Player 480 x 274 (10 Meg)