Ideas Pitch

When it came to the individual pitches for our main project, I went back and forth between ideas, searching the internet for the strangest possible places and people I could find in Brighton. While I was doing this, however, it occurred to me that strangeness would only achieve so much, and be a mere novelty if there wasn’t a narrative to explore beyond aesthetic or general quirkiness.

The place I decided on was Apocalypse, a metal night club in Brighton, and the only one of its kind in the area. While there are plenty of alternative venues and locations in the city, this is the one real ‘club’ scenario for the metal community. Having been there multiple times before, I felt like I knew enough about it in order to form an interesting documentary idea around it.

I took into account everything I learned in the first session about documentary focusing on people, and decided that I would center my idea around not the place Apocalypse itself, but the people it attracts. There are many stereotypes about the metalhead community, such as its members being antisocial and miserable, but Apocalypse, just like any ‘mainstream’ club, is full of people dancing and having fun. It’s an incredibly social and positive place, so by capturing this on camera, I thought I would be able to conclusively disprove a lot of the stereotypes, and challenge society’s perceptions of the metalhead community.

Out of the two documentary modes we had available, this would have been participatory, since I would have wanted to incorporate interviews, music and narration throughout.

After everyone pitched, my group decided to go with Zain’s ‘Beach Of The Dead’ idea, where we’ll be focusing on its creator, Katie Amer.