Original Treatment

Treatment

Liverpool: City of Culture vs. City of Depravation

After winning the city of culture award in 2008, Liverpool proved to be an exciting and colourful city resulting in a vast amount of economic growth. The development of the city centre is impressive and has made a big impact when it comes to tourism and bringing money into the cities private sector. However, based on several news stories not all is what it seems. Many of the areas outside of the city centre seem to have been forgot about and several housing estates are completely derelict, resulting in the people who live/lived in these areas being deprived of basic social needs and resulting in a huge amount of social problems in these broken communities.

Our documentary starts in the city centre where we intend to represent it as successful and thriving. This representation will then be juxtaposed with shocking images of the derelict homes and the forgotten areas of Liverpool. In this section we will highlight the key issues these estates are effected by. Then we will introduce the ‘Welcome to my world’ exhibition which is part of an art programme that helps young people express and raise awareness of the social issues in there areas. Using the artwork the young artists have created and an interview with the leader of the programme my team and I intend to tell the story of the forgotten teenagers of Liverpool and raise awareness of the social issues present in the places where they live. After addressing the issues and we aim to find out whether the exhibition has helped in anyway and then to find out what else needs to be done to put these areas back on the map.

The documentary we are going to make needs to look very art house to go with the theme of creativity and expression. The mood of the documentary will be shocking and saddening. However, we want to finish on uplifting note that inspire people to help raise awareness of the forgotten parts of Liverpool. The way, in which we intend to do this, is by careful application of juxtaposition and sound design.

Some documentaries that have inspired our visual images are: ‘Dark Days’, ‘Skateistan’ and ‘As I Am’. Each of these short films has a tone, mood or visual style that we want to apply in our film. ‘Dark Days’ has inspired our intended lighting choices, ‘Skateistan’ has inspired our concept and we intend to emote our audience in a similar way that ‘Skateistan’ does. Finally, ‘As I Am’ has influenced our cinematography and has inspired our story to be told by visual images.

As this is a University project our primary audience is our tutors and peers. However, what we really want to do is help raise awareness of the suburban depravation and social issues in these areas being sidelined by other mainstream news in Liverpool. Therefore, we intend to aim our video at the politicians that can do something about the tragedies occurring in Liverpool.

With this treatment it will be clear where we want to go with the story. The deprived areas of the city are one of our main places that we want to visit and shoot as they will help the audience visualise the areas that have not been affected by the economic growth. We want to raise awareness and introduce people to everyday Liverpool not just the pretty city centre that the tourists visit. My main focus will be on getting the message across with subtle text and great visuals as every film is based on its cinematography and the story it tells not only with the sound but also with each frame.