Welcome to Dungeness

Click here to view on Vimeo: Welcome To Dungeness

(The first 10 seconds are intentionally soundless...)

The ‘Welcome To Dungeness’ video was created in response to a two day project brief based around a trip to Dungeness. Given a day of preparation a week before the trip itself, our group (myself, Ellie Curtis, Jamie Spink, Rebecca Morris and Toby Hudson) decided that we would take a humourous approach and try to create something that was either a spoof family holiday or a guide to Dungeness as if it we were rebranding it as a cool new seaside holiday destination.

While we did not plan every last detail, there was a discussion of the tone of the piece – or how we would like it to be at least – and how we might go about achieving this. Once we had settled on the concept, we listed the locations that we might use on the day (power station, pub, shacks, boats and so on) and tried to think of other ways of portraying the area, such as wildlife, attractions and locals.

It was also decided that we would try and incorporate sound into the finished product, as one of the team had access to a portable recording device that could be used to capture field recordings. Sadly, the sound of the wind drowned out most of these and it was quickly decided that 5 minutes of distorted wind as a soundtrack might be a bit much (though one small recording survives at the start of the video). During planning, we had talked about using a piece of existing music associated with the seaside or holidays, but somehow degrading it to match the general run down feeling of Dungeness.

In the end, we found that Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ worked perfectly with the visuals and on the second day of the project (back at college) Jamie was able to work on the sound while the rest of the team worked on other aspects. It was a shame that the field recordings didn’t come out, but I don’t think the final outcome would have been half as impressive without the gradually degrading music played over the top (and timed to change slightly with each image / slide).

Knowing how the music would sound, we tested a couple of slides with some quickly written, ironic captions and then proceeded to select 20-30 images that would work as a sarcastic or ironic tourist guide to Dungeness. We had been able to consciously do some of these on the day (the sunbathing, the beachfront properties) but the majority were improvised on the day in the hope that they would work when we put it all together the following day. The blank sign and ‘Dungeness catchphrase’ were late additions at the end of the trip, when we thought we were done but by that point I had begun to look at everything as an opportunity to mock or undermine the area in some way, at least for comedy value. We had thought to use a boat as a location but it wasn’t until we got there that Ellie wisely suggested it should be an advert for a boat party. Other lucky finds were a football, an intact beer bottle, some bones and something with wheels that we could pretend was a Segway. Full credit to everyone for willing to be stupid on camera as well. I think once we got into it, we knew we had something good and this just spurred us on further. I hadn’t been sure how we would get a good photo of some ‘locals’ but as soon as I saw three of our classmates in the distance and got them to wave, I knew we had the ‘friendly locals’ page, with the added bonus being that they would be watching the slideshow later on.

Back at college the following day, the slideshow began to structure itself as we thought about which images would work as an introduction and then what the hierarchy of information would be: housing, facilities, attractions and so on. A few ideas for thrown out along the way simply because they did not fit and we worked as a group to choose the right words for each image and achieve the maximum impact.

Choosing a typeface for the captions was initially a problem until we found a version of ‘Cooper’ that looked suitably naff and added to the overall cheapness of the guide. We looked at the Pontins logo for colour inspiration and found the yellow with pink outlines to be suitably cheesy. Just to hammer home that Dungeness had a power station, we added our own radioactive glow to the type.

Despite having spent all day with the images and Cliff Richard, we still found it funny and hoped from that that everyone else would.

Creating a purely cynical narrative might have been too easy and probably less entertaining. Five minutes of Cliff Richard was probably also pushing it a bit but we got away with it as the images were well paced and consistently amusing. The music itself is so well known that Jamie’s broken version of it subverted any associations that people might have had, in the same way that the images and captions in the slideshow subverted each other and the idea of a seaside holiday.

While this was ultimately a silly, light hearted spoof, it was great to play around with images and their meanings and how these can be altered by the addition of words and tone. Most of the video is far from subtle but we were able to create a narrative from the images we took – and the places we found ourselves – that was a combination of planning and good fortune.

I had not planned to create anything like this for my main project but enjoyed the process and the results so much that some of my initial visual narrative experiments took a similar form. Hopefully these will be ongoing throughout the course of this year and will appear here to form their own narrative.