The production team has changed slightly since our last production, sadly Daniel Derring is no longer working with us, also our production teams name has been changed to 'Deaf Defying Productions'. This is a reference to The film that we are about to produce.
Our roles within the team have also been altered with Joe Wedgebury taking over the directing duties, Lucy Baker becoming the official producer and Eve Beddows is joining me in the edit.
We choose a script from a pool of scripts created by both second year 'Planning and Making a Film' classes. We toyed with the idea of choosing the script, 'Connect 4' a story set in a restaurant, but decided on the script 'A Good Listener' because of its flexibility and also because we felt it would be more achievable to make.
Our first decision as a group was to rewrite the script. This was done by Eve Beddows. Eve also renamed the script 'Talk To Me'. I really feel like Eve has greatly improved the script, the dialogue in particular is far more believable.
Before we started production on this film I wanted to take a look at previous examples of deafness in cinema, so I watched the 1986 film 'Children of a Lesser god'. Before watching the film I knew that Marlee Matlin had become the first deaf person to win an Academy Award so I naturally had quite high expectations. I was not at all disappointed. I found this film an invaluable watch as the story really shows the plight of a young woman in here situation, trying to deal with relationships with people with hearing, without relying on gimmicks. Here is a clip from the film:
This clip shows the way the film really understands how deafness effects a person and also people around them. We should definitely be thinking about the subjects when creating our short film.
