Swish Blog

The Screenplay:

1.      Dark corridor – protagonist walking away from the camera

2.      Pan to the right down a small corridor to reveal a dark presence.

3.      An upwards swish ends this scene.

4.     We see the protagonist walking up some stairs away from the camera again, as she reaches the top and turns the corner we swish upwards again, to then reveal the presence standing spookily half way up the stairs.

5.      We watch as the protagonist breaks into a run up another set of stairs.

6.     We swish up once more to reveal the presence at the base of the current stairs.

7.     After another swish, we see the protagonist from the front for the first time as she runs up another flight of stairs towards the camera.

8.      When she reaches the top and turns the corner to face an alley way, we swish upwards once more to reveal the presence standing very close in the small alley, the protagonist screams and we cut to black.

9.      Building in volume throughout, we hear The Requiem by Linkin Park.

 The Evaluation:

Swish is a video transition technique which consists of quickly moving the camera away from the subject, either to the left, right, up or down. In the next shot, you then quickly move the camera in the same direction until you reach the subject again. 

For our video, I think that we managed to master the technique ­relatively well, although Michelle had a lot more control over the camera than I did, as I found it difficult to stop the swish movement in the right place, it would either be too high or it would be shuddery around the stop, for the scenes which featured Michelle. 

We tried to come up with a creepy, surrealistic storyline. The way we created it was that I played the protagonist who was running away from a haunting dark presence, played by Michelle. Most of the film was shot on the stairs, with the protagonist climbing higher and higher.

In the editing stages, we added the effects of black and white colouring as well as a glow/distortion effect. For the end of the video we used a blur out effect, I think it was called ink splat, or something similar.