1. Our film challenges conventions of real media products through our visual research. We watched other people’s short films on BBC film networks, and made appropriate notes to gather information on how their storyline fitted with a catalyst, developed character, circular narrative and British cinema conventions.
One of the short films which took our interest was called ‘Rules of the game’. In this short film, a man is telling the story of what he would do if he caught his fiancée cheating on him with his best man whilst walking round a huge house. Throughout the film, the main character changes his mind and the audience gets to see short clips of what the man has just said he'll do. The main camera angle is a medium shot of the main character as he talks to the camera which gets the audience involved. It follows his as he walks round a house telling the story. It also uses short clips of what the man is talking about, the actor plays all the characters in the film to create humour and show the audience that this is just his imagination. Natural bright lighting is used to make all the scenes clear and a variety of locations are used to help tell the story. The different locations are all set in different rooms of the house. The film is very fast paced, and throughout the whole film the main character is talking directly to the camera which helps to keep the audience's attention, as they feel he is talking to them. The film contains humour however, it has a twist at the end because the character does not do what he says he will and plans to kill his best man which surprises the audience.
With other visual research, including ‘open skies’, ‘The most beautiful man in the world’, ‘butterface’, and 'slap' we planned to use similar techniques in our own film. As a group we decided to have the main character talking directly to the camera, like in ‘Rules of the game’ and also having a big twist at the end of the film, just like ‘Rules of the game’, adding humour for the sinister twist at the end.
Throughout ‘Only If’ we have stuck closely to the five main conventions of real media products. For example the catalyst which appears in all six short films we’ve researched, is the main plot of the story. However, ours is shocking and only at the end do you realise that Andy is already dead. We have also incorporated British cinema into our film through studying Ken Loach. When Loach directs films he only gives the actors a rough idea of what needs to be said and let’s the actors say it how they feel best, giving it realism. One developed character is also another convention, which is also evident through our research. We are giving the audience an insight to Andy’s past, which wasn’t the best, and what he wants in the future, making you feel close to the character. Another convention of a short film is that they challenge the audience's expectations by surprising them. For example in 'Slap' the audience thinks the woman is going to leave her husband to die, however she goes back to her horrible life. We have challenged our audience's expectations in our short film by having a twist at the end, which is our main character dying. Short films usually have a circular narrative which we have followed, however this is has changed by challenging the audience's expectations.
2. To create our poster and magazine we had to choose a magazine in which we wanted our film to be advertised in, one that matched the storyline and style of our film. We researched into ‘Empire’ magazine, which is a British magazine, published monthly. It reviews both mainstream and art house films. Another film magazine we researched was ‘Total film’, which is also a British magazine, published every four weeks. Although not being as popular as ‘Empire’, it still provides a range of features, from full length interviews to photo shoots. The last magazine we looked at was ‘Little White Lies’ which is an independent film magazine that is bi-monthly. It features writing, illustrating and photography, related to cinema. The design of each issue of Little White Lies is inspired by its feature film, represented on the cover by an illustration of its lead actor. The cover film also influences interior aspects, such as editorial icons, chapter headings and custom typefaces. However, the overall template of the magazine remains the same. For our film ‘Only If’ we decided to keep within the style of ‘Little White Lies’ to keep it an art house independent film.
The magazine article I have chosen to get ideas from is ‘Little white lies’. The particular article is called ‘Andrea Riseborough’ which is called ‘I like a good treating’. From this I decided to keep the same layout and have a black and white image also, keeping it simple yet effective. I also like the placement of text and how the sub headings are hand written with an ink splatter next to it. The portrait image has most likely been taken with natural studio lit lighting and is with a shallow depth of field, creating a blurred background. The image is very detailed, almost a macro shot, giving the image a wide tonal range. Although for the actual writing within the article I looked at a review called ‘The Mother’ which was just a normal page review, rather than the double page review I created. I made notes on what each individual paragraph was about and analytically made notes on the emotive language used. For example; I found that a lot of quotes from other films were mentioned within the review and so I took this into consideration and from my visual research also put some quotes in from other films.
The film poster which I created was one of the ancillary tasks, I researched other posters from the ‘Little White Lies’ magazine although the blue ray film poster stood out to me as it’s blue textured background looks almost as if its actually furry. The background is made up of an image of a lady who looks worried or disturbed. The background is dark, with a slightly lighter blue strip along the right hand side, with pink and white typography. The colour pallet within this poster is all mostly blues and purples with a contrasting text colour so it is easily visible. The ‘HMV’ logo and ‘Studio Canal’ logo at the bottom of the poster are very important as it gives the poster advertising and shows its importance and provides credibility. We as an audience know that if HMV is presented on a film that it’s going to be well made and would be worth watching. In my opinion my poster and magazine are very successful, fitting with the 'Little White Lies' niche audience.
3. Firstly to get audience feedback we decided to create a survey on the website; www.surveymonkey.com and made a ten question questionnaire to see how successful our film was. We included asking the audience if they thought our film followed conventions, how much you can relate to the character and the genre of our film.
We then uploaded our film to www.youtube.com which is a video sharing website, on which users can upload, share, and view video’s. Next we posted the link of our film to all of our friends and family on a social networking site; www.facebook.com, to get a wide variety of responses from various ages. By advertising like this we hope to get valuable responses on survey monkey which we can take into account to gather results.
This bar graph links with the question; 'What genre would you put our film under?' The chart shows that our audience mostly thought our film was a drama/comedy which is correct, 13 people gave our film two genres, this can be seen through the results from our questionnaire. I have not included results from the genres of Romance, Sci-Fi and Action, as none of the reviewers considered those genres to represent our short film. It is interesting that someone considered our film to be a 'horror' film, they have made this decision as our film is definitely not conforming to the horror genre conventions. This result is away from the trend.
The pie chart on the right shows the survey responses to where they considered the film to be advertised. The responses show that TV was the place they expected the film to be advertised most. However, this could potentially show a lack of knowledge on short films, as they cannot usually afford television advertising. The survey shows that 'Little White Lies' was the highest magazine choice shows our ancillary tasks have been successful as this was where we aimed for our film to be advertised.
4. Our short film uses a variety of new technologies to help with the production and the end product, to create the most effective and well-advertised film as possible. One of these is the BBC film network, which is a new film outlet where you can upload your own short film, which is then put in various different categories, such as comedy, animation, music, or documentary. All of our visual research for short film was completed from this website, taking notes on all five major conventions. By doing this we have clear links visually and in general with the one developed character in particular.
Examples of new media include Photoshop, this is a graphics editing programme, developed and published by Adobe. The programme was used to help with our film poster, creating different layers and text, which is used daily in the design industry when conforming to briefs. The brief I was conforming to was to make a poster to represent our short film ‘Only If’ so it could be advertised in magazines or in newspapers. Although sticking to our chosen magazine, ‘Little White Lies’ the poster had to be in a similar layout and fit in with the rest of the niche audience film posters which were also advertised in the same place.
Another programme which was used throughout this project was In Design. It can be used to create works such as, flyers, posters, brochures, newspapers and books. Designers and graphics production artists are the most frequent users, creating and layering out publications, posters, and print media. For my magazine review I chose to use this programme to create different sizes fonts and text, keeping them within a certain border from the background and margins. The programme was a lot more effective than Photoshop as it specifies more with layout options, giving it the most aesthetic and neat finish. As my piece was in the style of ‘Little White Lies’ I took ideas from one of their articles and linked closely with my own.
All of ‘Only If’s’ pre-production was all uploaded to www.blogger.com instead of being hand written. This if a lot more efficient as it is accessible to everyone whenever and however they wish. It is a lot neater and can be easily read by anyone. As we were in a group of three, all of us could work on the visual research together, from our houses, adding information whenever needed. However if no internet access is available for any reason then this becomes a problem, and work which needs to be on here might not be.
