Filmmaking / Directing : Would very much value your opinion! by Doris Brendel

cool idea - I love the girls voice on the track is she from the N.East too?

Hey. Well done on producing the music and videos, and you have lots of positive feedback on the video on youtube. Here's my thoughts. From a technical point of view it's nice and pacey. Personally I'm not sure it treats the subject matter in a particularly sensitive way - i think the light/comic feel of the music would have been served better with a more serious visual story as a contrast. I think the song itself deals with the material well, but in combination with the video it comes across as making fun of it. For me it had confused visual imagery - are the family supposed to be "real", or are they like that in her imagination? They have a grotesque / comic relationship with food, which, if real, undermines any psychological issues the girl might have (I don't think anyone would want to eat at that table!). Also making the protagonist of the story a puppet means there's no-one for the viewer to relate to in the piece. We meet her "mirror" personality (who I'm assuming is how she see's herself) - but we don't see the "real" her as she's a puppet. The tragedy of the condition is that even when "normal", they see themselves as overweight, let alone when they are dangerously thin. So the visual of making her into a stick thin puppet is odd - who's perspective is that supposed to represent? For me I think i need a real person to connect with here otherwise it's an odd experience. I think you gave yourselves a pretty tough challenge for your first project there! Kudos for getting it together, and great work from the student crew as well. Good luck with the rest. Matt

Thank you both for taking the time to comment. Trevor - the singer is London based. Matt - I really appreciate your detailed comment. We did actually intend to use a real anorexic initially, and even found one who wanted to do it. But she turned out to be incredibly unreliable which, after talking to a psychiatric nurse specialising in eating disorders, is to be expected as the malnourishment generally leads to other psychological and physical problems. We simply couldn't risk organising everything and then having the main 'star' not attending, due to our budget constraints. So 'Annie' the rake was born. We always meant to make it a video of extremes, hence the 'fat' family. After having written a song for The Reunite charity for abducted children a couple of years ago, which was done incredibly tastefully and sensitively, we were dismayed at the poor reaction it received and largely put it down to charity fatigue. So it was a conscious decision to make this a little subversive in order to hopefully get more of a reaction and thus promote discussion, I'm not sure we've completely hit the mark and it seems her 'mirror image' as you pointed out is cause to some confusion. Lee & I do have an unusual imagination & sense of humour, so I don't think we'll ever play it safe. Looking forward to more projects! Thank you again for your comments. Doris