Ed Evaluation Q1

 

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

 

Short Film

 

The original idea for our film followed Todorov’s narrative theory, todorovs theory suggested that most if not all media products follow certain patterns in the successful media world, we decided that the narrative of our short film should follow quite tightly this theory as it will be easier for us to structure our film into parts. Todorovs theory suggests that an in the narrative an equilibrium is that starting phase where things are normal and there has been no disruption to the characters’ lives, this is the part of the short film where Michael the main character is looking around the shop at all of the items, he has not seen the magical mirror yet which cause the disruption stage to begin, Michael realises the mirrors potential when he stumbles across it and sees his future displayed on the mirror and shock comes across him, we decided the first time the main character sees the mirror that the audience do not see what he sees, merely his reaction. This created enigma amongst the audience as they are asking questions such as; what did Michael see in the mirror? And why did it evoke such a reaction. This process was used in one of Bombay Sapphire’s short film ‘Reflections’ the woman and man see the mirror and the mirrors effects however at first it is hidden from the audience view and just the reactions of the actors is shown, when researching short films this not only grabbed my attention as a good piece of camera work but also directly influenced the initial idea of our short film and helped us to develop these forms into our short film. In the film room 8, one of my planning and research films, enigma raising processes were used in the opening scenes; room 8 begins with a prisoner being guided through a prison courtyard by a Russian prison guard, this immediately sparks enigma amongst the audience. questions are raised like why is the protagonist in jail and why in Russia? immediately after this short scene the plain title sequence 'Room 8' shows it is white on a black background plain and simple similar to a prisoners number on his uniform. We used this sequence of enigma raising clips alongside the title sequence being played directly after in order to raise questions which the later part of the film will answer

 

 

 

 

 

 the use of inserting the title sequence then allows a break in the narrative which led to a change in location once the sequence s returns, we attained this influence from room 8. In our opening scenes however the camera was on a tripod in order to keep a still frame, in room 8 however a handheld camera shooting style is used, I believe this was to not give away too much about the characters location adding even more so to the enigma however in our short film we didn’t quite need to create so much enigma and needed the audience to be able to tell the main character is in a vintage trinket shop. The use of a still camera allowed the audience to fully takein the mise en scene of this scene, the ornaments in the shop and the decoration used in the shop. Looking back on our project the décor in the shop could have been a lot more intune with our film as the feelings evoked from the surroundings in the shop may be misleading to the overall feeling of our film, Typically it is very hard to fit any short film into a certain genre, this is the same with ours. This is because our plot has elements of a lot of different genres. The Genres our short film loosely fit into the genres Mystery, Thriller and Horror as our plot involves a supernatural mirror and the scene at the end showing a morbid future this has strong hints of horror. However the rest of  the movie is kind of mystery/thriller as they find a mysterious object and experiment with it, also we are going to use non-diegetic sound to build up suspense towards the end of the film and to convey different emotions. The fact our short story doesn't have a particular category it fits into , means we wont have any particular group of conventions we can put into our short film, if the surroundings in the shop were more applied to our film I believe the shop would have been the perfect place to film the opening a good example of parralel surroundings to the mood of a scene would have been in the maybe one day short film I analysised in the preproduction research and planning phases, the parralel voiceover is narrating the mans boring and mundane life the décor in the mans home is also running parralel to not only the voiceover but also the mans facial reaction and body language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The use of a blue tint to the lighting in the mans home also adds to the overall mood of the scene which from the blue tinge has connotations that it’s a negative mood.

During the planning of our film we decided to have little to no diegetic audio tracks we felt for our film using only ambient and natural location sounds would be more effective and not distract from the narrative of our short film in hindsight I feel we probably should have put in some audio even a non-diegetic mood track to induce a greater sense of suspension in the scenes leading up to the future vision from the mirror.

The décor in these scenes suits the mood we were trying to go for a lot more as it is the room of your standard slightly messy teenager, this adds to the realism and relatability of our characters, they seem like a normal group of friends in a normal surroundings with a deffinatley not normal mirror. One of the main conventions that we developed in our short film was the splitscreen phone conversation, we did similar things in our as production of a thriller opening where we did a triple split screen phone call conversation at the same time. This year we developed that and did a double splitscreen phonecall between four friends, how we tackled this was to have one friend always a constant part of the conversation and the cvonversation is read as if he is speaking to one person and his friends pop up and out when they have finshed there bit, so seane had the first third louisa the second third and then louie the last third and he hangs up the call. We did this as a continuetity challenge to see if it will make sense, I was really prousd with outcome as it communticates well what we were trying to get across. It also really helped us to cut down the time of our short film so it wasn’t too long, as if we had to have three separate phone calls all explaining the same to the other characters our film would have been too long, so this was very successful way to combat this.

 

 

Film Posters

Film posters are a form of promotion just like a film trailer. Because a filmposter is a physical piece and it is not a film piece, the posters can promote the film in a lot of different ways and places. Film posters are often seen on billboards buses as posters in bus stops in shop windows underground stations train stations and even displayed down the side of buildings in extreme cases, they are also displayed on nearly every wall inside of a cinema to show future releases.these pieces aim to catch peoples eye for them to read the information on the poster in hopeof making them interested in the product and therefore interested to find out more. Icons have an importance in film posters these icons tell the audience something through the imagery for example in the I thought I told you to shut up poster, the font is a bubbly and bold font with two exclamation marks at the end of the title, there is also humuroes illustrations littering the background and a larger illustration of a milkman seeming to be hitting his milk van, from first glance I can tell that this short film is very likely to be a comedy about a milkman, I have used the icons of the poster to find this out. In our film poster the dark background with mirror dirt overlayed on the top points towards our movie being a horror/thriller, the titling and the imagery being reflected horizontally down the middle of our poster adds the mystery aspect to our film posters genre. 

 

a large influence for our final film poster design was the film poster from the short film the 414’s as even though the time frame for our movies were very different the way the film poster is laid ouut and the dark background and not very revealing imagery helped to promote the alternative thriller genre attatched to this shortfilm, although rather genreless our short film conformed to a few of the conventionss regarding the thriller/horror/mystery genres so a film poster that semi-accuratley displayed this was a huge help to get influence from disregarding the time frame references of course.

The film poster for the 414s is a dark poster with bold lighter font displaying the titles and actors names etc. the actors names are displayed on the bottom of the poster, the fact the actors names are noticeably smaller than most of the other font sizes on the poster tells the audience that the actors are not very well known. above the title is a sun dance film awards sticker showing it has made its way to winning a sun dance award, this tells the audience that although the actors are not very well known the actual short film must be very good as it has won awards. the main chunk of text 'The 414's' is placed over a dark black background meant to be shadow, this makes the title stand out especially in the colour chosen, the style of the text is almost a metal chrome that is slightly aged, this fits in with the time frame of the movie as from what the imagery on the poster is telling us it is set in the 80s, we can tell this from the style of clothes the man in the picture is wearing but also from the props the old style t.v and phone and the newspaper clipping up on the wall shows latest news story's such as 'details emerge on raids into US computers'. The tagline for the movie is 'change your passwords.' this not only links in with the title 'teenage hackers' but also fits in with the imagery on the poster with computers and keyboards. The website is displayed on the bottom of the poster www.the414s.com. there are no critics comments at all on the poster, this helps with the look of the poster as it is an aesthetic poster and looks very nice, more text would clutter the image, however critics comments would help to give the viewer of the poster a better idea of the quality of the film. A lot of these convetions we applied to our film poster as they were very effective with this one3 and when it came to choosing our final poster design this really stood out as an effective poster. We also used snippings directly from our film so they were recognisable once the film has been seen. We also disregarded a few conventions in order to build enigma, we left out a small motto or line underneath the title which about 80% of the film posters seemed to have, in hindsight adding this in may have been a better idea as our film poster may be lacking in actual information for the film even thought the imagery chosen and the way it is presented in a mirrored style is quite revealing to the storyline.

 

Little White Lies Review

 

Little White Lies is a high end, internationally distributed film magazine. The content is split into 3 different acts. The first being the lead review, then there is a series of feature articles inspired by the film on the front cover, the final section is the reviews section which can also feature interviews from different directors and stars of the movies. There is a certain group of people who buy and read "Little White Lies". These are firstly men, aged between 25-35 who work in the creative industry. The magazine itself costs £6 per copy but many people buy it on subscription, this maintains the audience and shows that you have to have money to spare to buy the magazine or be dedicated to the content. The readers of the magazine will be very different to the audience of our short film, this is because our target audience is both sexes aged between 15-19. The part we focused on for our ancillary review was the film review, we wrote a generic review of our film following the magazine conventions of little white lies, not only in layout as shown in the picture of my analysis of an existing film review, but also in language. We had to learn and copy language techniques used for example rhettorical questions, used in order to make the audience/reader think about the answear without the option to reply because its words on paper.