Assessment 3 final work: the premiere screening of the new short film âThe Space Annihilation Race: The Might of Americaâ.
Group: Christopher Chen, Jacky Wang, Maddie Locke, Felix Partos, Zhiyuan Jiang (Sue)
Topic: Context and time
For our project, we decided to re-interpret an historical event and put it into a modern day context. We chose the space race between America and Russia, and brought it into 2019, re-imagining it as a struggle between America and North Korea to be the first to destroy an alien fleet. We then needed an event to base our presentation around. We wanted to explore the idea of events being viewed and portrayed differently by opposing sides and from different contexts, so our final idea was to create a short film and hold a premiere screening event for it.
Our event takes place in America, an unknown number of years in the future. The scripts for the video, and the preshow and aftershow talks, were written to be clearly biased towards America, and the video paints North Korea as inferior.
We also aimed to take advantage of the hype and atmosphere of a premiere screening to emphasis the sense of patriotism. This hype is contrasted with the purposefully low quality video (rough animation and lack of voice acting), which was referenced a couple of times in the script.
At the end of the presentation, protesters come into the room and tear down the posters, shouting âDonât believe their lies!â etc. This offers some insight into how the event was viewed by different groups.
We took inspiration from several pieces of art and media while brainstorming and writing our project, including:
History Oversimplified (inspiration for the style of animated historical video)Â -Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzALIXcY4pg
Barry Levinsonâs Wag the Dog (the video's satirical portrayal of the effects of politics on media) -Â https://www.scribd.com/doc/59218957/Wag-the-Dog-Analysis
Polandball (the representation of countries as ball-shaped characters, and their comical portrayal) -Â https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polandball













