New Project | Conspiracy Project

I've recently taken up a new project in my course. It involves creating a 3 minute edit based around a conspiracy theory. After finding this out my crew and I had a meeting to discuss and find a conspiracy theory to cover. Luckily we all have a keen interest in conspiracies so we already had some in mind.

We researched into a wide selection of different theories including: 'Heaven's Gate', 'Norwegian Trolls' and even Michael Jackson. It took a fair amount of time to decide which one we wanted to cover as we all wanted to do the theory we liked most. However, after much debate, we finally all agreed on one. We are going to cover the theory about how Elvis Presley faked his death. Luckily, we all had a relative interest around this subject.

Now that we had found our conspiracy theory, we got straight to planning out how we wanted the film to be. Due to all of us having an idea in our head already, we were able to combine all of our ideas to create a solid plan.

We want the film to begin with one of Elvis' most well-known songs, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. The opening to the song enables us to build pace and introduce new pieces of information to a beat. Using this should allow us to show snippets of Elvis’ career progression within a number of seconds, with each introductory lyric, we his career as it progresses. By doing this we're able to highlight to our audience how successful he was and how beloved he was, suggesting he is someone to care about. Also, opening with this song will immediately tell the audience who the conspiracy theory is about and will hopefully engage them from the beginning due its instantly catchy intro.

After this introduction, we will continue to give details about Elvis’ career by showing footage of his shows and stating statistics on screen of his total album sales, sell-out shows and biggest moments of his career. All of this will help to develop his character and provide the audience with a reason to care about the theory.

In order to transition into the theory itself, we plan to manipulate the sound of applause and merge it into the crying of fans before revealing, through the use of sound clips of news reports, the details of his death. By doing this, we will be highlighting how loved and adored Elvis was, and how much his death effected his fans, to our audience.

After this, by using our evidence, we will start to suggest that this was all a hoax and that Elvis had actually faked his death to escape the pressures and constraints of fame.

After formulating a plan we headed straight into research. We made sure to look through a wide range of sources, such as YouTube, News Articles, Forum Posts. We ended up finding a selection of "strong" evidence.