When creating our film we had to stick to the short film format which meant that the film had to be 5 minutes long which was enough time so that the audience could establish the characters and plot.
For our film we chose the genre social realism this is because we have realistic characters, setting and plot which can be based on real life events such as the bullying however there was only one aspect to the film that did not come under social realism which was the timers on top of people's head and this was the main focus of our film, our film is a hybrid because it has more then one genre. Whilst we were researching short films we discovered that most of the films we liked fell under the social realism genre which influenced our choice and gave us an idea of what were going to do our film on. Friends 4 Ever was one the short films that was researched by a member of the group.
Some parts of this film did fit into the social realism genre as it has realistic characters and real locations however it was more of a horror as it had unrealistic deaths which does happen in our film.
The narrative organisation also follows the horror genre conventions. This is different to our short film because this doesn't follow a linear narrative whereas our short film does and that is what makes it social realism. The print screen below is from the begging and the middle of Friend 4 Ever, at the start of the narrative it shows whats going to happen to them however it cuts back to two hours before, this shows that this film does not follow a linear pattern.
In this film there are 6 characters of which they have different personalities and they are very realistic of which the spectator can see from watching this film. The characters are more known then the character in our short film because their names are told to the spectators whereas in our short film no names are told as there is no dialogue, this means that the spectator can relate to the character more in this film because they have a better understanding of who they are and what they are like.
The mise on scene used in this film shows what type of character Amy Johnson is, the fact that she has pink everywhere and pictures of herself on the wall shows that she is a vein person and loves only herself. The probs used is realistic as it is what would be at a normal sleepover a lot of food and party accessories. The mise en scene in our short film is very similar because like this film they are also very realistic. However the bully might wear more dark clothes and not wear a tiger hat, the hat was to simplize that she was the bully as the audience saw her at the start they needed to know who she was when it came to the middle/ending of the film and it is filmed in Croydon so has a realistic setting as well as this film has a realistic setting because it is filmed in someones house not a built set for the film.
This screen shot is from a short film that we looked at called 2:20 this is a film that we very similar to the idea that we had for our short film. It had timers on top of peoples head however the main character is a man and its shot in the night and it doesn't show anyone dying. The genre for this is a Thriller. The narrative organisation is similar to the one in our short film. Friends 4 Ever is a totally different film from our film and this film and not because of the length that it is.
2:20 is left with an open ending like ours however in this film the open ending is whether the guy dies or not and how is dies. It gives an illusion of a parrell universe with the timers on top of peoples head as this is something that does not happen in real life. The man has the ability to see his own timer through the reflection of a car door, this is how our film and this film differs.
When looking at how long people have left to live it is through glasses whereas our film the person can just see them, in the screen shot above this is how the timers are show but in our film it is shown different as the colour is different as well as it only has 3 bits to it which do not indecate if it is hours, minutes, seconds, days or years.
There is little characterisation in this film as there is only two characters but no dialogue similar to our film. The spectator are unaware of who the characters are and know nothing about them in both this film and our short film. The screen shot above shows the two characters in this short film, one a man and one a women who are both represented in different ways. The women looks like a homeless person as she is psuhing all her things in a trolly which you see a lot in Croydon where are film is bases however this women has these special glasses where it shows how long people have left to live. This is similar to what we did in our film because the spectators didn't know much about the characters or why one of them has the ability to see timers on top of peoples head.
The use of editing is used well in this film as when the man put the glasses on you can tell it looks different from real life as you can see the rounded edges of the glasses and the use of time make this film good. I like how when they look at a person it zooms into how long they got left. These are the same type of techniques that we used when doing out film however we didnt zoom in and we didnt use glasses because it was from first person view.
Our story does require audience to figure out what is happening as at the beginning . Our narrative is left open ended with a cliffhanger so it has no resolution some of the audience have discussed that it needs a second viewing to understand what is happening.
While editing the shots together we kept it simple with straight cuts which went into each shot. Most of the shorts were realistic as they were filmed on location, there was only one shot which one of the actors had to use green screen which meant we had to edit this to make it look realistic. As the character are real people this confirms that this film is social realistic film and they are effected by real themes are issues.
In our film we used diagetic and ambient sound as this creates social realism, there is a soundtrack in our film however it is only used for certain parts of the narrative. The music used in a lot of short films that was researched reflected on the emotions that were going on, in the scenes that we used music we couldn't find anything that stood out and that we really wanted to use that would fit perfectly with the shots so the soundtrack that we ended up using doing have the same emotion that other films does.
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When designing our poster we all had the same ideas so we based our final product on that. The research that I did on posters showed representation of gener with the characters as well as audience, esecially with 'The King's Speech' with the two main character both men at each side of the frame and London background in the centre of the frame. In some of the researched posters that we looked at the character takes up most of the frame so we kept that in mind for when it came to taking pictures for our poster and because in social realist films the character is usally the main focus this is what we had in mind when doing our poster so it could reflect it. The necessary parts of the poster design like the production, actors and funding is justified around the main character however it still allows the audience to see what is in the background because the fact that the spectators can see people with timers on their heads is a main part of the narrative it had to be included when designing our poster as seen below.
When designing our review we had to use the structure of 'Little White Lies' Magazine a bi-monthly creative film magazine that doesn't just focus on big film releases but also reviews lesser known short films. the age group of consumers who would buy this magazine are at the highest end of our target audience with 51% of the magazine readers being 25-35 and 34% being 18-24. We had to follow the dimensions of the review so we could position the text, titles and picture in the correct place. We had to also find the correct font used in the managazine of something similar to it and had to round of the corner of the image so it looked it like came from this magazine. Something else we added was a litle symbol next to the page number at the bottom. In each copy of 'Little White Lies' there is always a feature film and symbols from that film would be used and put next to the page number. We did this in our review as we thought that the next feature film might be 'The Hunger Games' so we got the a logo which is a circle with a bird inside and made it smaller and put it next to the page number.
2.How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Our target audience was 16-24 year old people due to the themes and issues that went on in our short film, when getting feedback for our film and poster these are the people that we went to as this was the audience that are film we made for. To get audience feedback we put our work on social media sites such as FaceBook and Youtube. There was one main issue with our work and that was that people didn't understand what was going on or had to watch it more then once to understand and they thought the plot was something different then what it was. From the feedback below the audience have said what they liked and disliked about the film.
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We did have a few continuity errors which the audience picked up on, one of the main ones seemed to be getting on one train and then when getting off its a different train.
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Some people thought that the suicide was unrealistic and some thought it was a use of good editing skills however it was not easy to do and when doing this bit we spent a lot of time on it to get it right and we still was not 100% sure about if it looked good or not. The timing of it was a bit of a issue because we had to think how long it would take for someone to jump off a building and die and match that into real time. It was a long hard process to get everything how we wanted it and in the time that we had and although we did not get a lot of it right we would of changed it if we had time to go back and do so, so that the audience would not have to watch it twice and would understand it from the start.
This is feedback from youtube as you can see the audience wasn't sure of what was going on in the plot and took them a few plays to get the gist of what was going on. As you can see the audience gave a lot of feedback, these were other media students and each of them had a different view of what the film was about.
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From the feedback we have recieved I feel that we could of done a lot better in our work and planned it more better so that the audience would fully understand what the film was about. I have learnt that although people did enjoy watching the film and thought that it was good they thought it had a challenging narrative and was hard to understand. This is something that we did not plan because we set out to make a film that would be a bit different from other films but have a social realistic feel to it and it didn't go as we planned. If we had the chance to do it again we would plan our time better and think of a better idea as well as use a better variety of shot types so that it would become visually interesting. This film could do with a lot of re editing and re shooting some scenes however it is good to know that our target audience do like it and see it as a good short film even with the complicated narrative.
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Prezi