Evaluation (Will Price)

1) In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop Or Challenge Forms And Conventions Of Real Media Products?

Short Film:

It was always clear from the research earlier on in the course that an incredibly large and complex story with many twists and turns simply wasn't going to be possible as all the example i looked at all had incredibly basic story with a straight forward narrative and not much fussing about with setting of scenes, allowing the mise en scene to explain such factors instead of dedicating valuable time on things such as establishing shots as it simply wasn't necessary or needed. However i did manage to break away from some of the usual conventions of short films that i found whilst still taking snippets of inspiration from others.

• They were always centered around one event and not much else, in order to really explore that event in the few minutes given. However i have played around with this convention somewhat as despite there only being one drive in the story like most short films, in this case the fact that the main character is hungover and trying to recall the events of the previous night, there are still many other events that are revealed within that scenario, this serves to branch the film out a bit and make it more than just one event, as is so exhibited in the award winning short film 'The Hole' which despite containing several events as such, it has little build which i believed made it slightly more predictable than it perhaps could have been.
  
  



• Something that films like 'The Hole' and the simply remarkable 'Sign Language' made me realise to great effect however, is how the film doesn't have to be on such a large scale like a full length feature, it is a short film and thus large area's in which to film and different locations make things slightly tricky to fit in and in fact is quite needless given the situation. For example The Hole doesn't move from within the office where it is set, a nice and straightforward setting for the audience to comprehend quickly and shift their attention to the actual events themselves something equally exhibited in 'Sign Language' in which the setting doesnt at all shift from a street in London, as opposed to having several locations which have to be comprehended first before the events truly mean anything to the audience, overall making the delivery of each event snappier and more crisp.

Characterisation:

The main factor that i have taken to heart when it comes to characterisation is how the characters are established; it seemed to all be based around mise en scene, allowing the judgement from the audience on their personality be draw from their surroundings, clothing, facial expressions and body language. Such as in ‘The Hole’ where the grumpy, bored office worker has his personality moulded by his clothing (the top button of his shirt undone and his tie loose) as well his slumped posture and vacant expression, giving off the impression of tediousness and dumbing down to the point of brain washing.

I have exhibited this use when constructing the main character in that his facial expressions right off the bat is dazed and confused while his body language in the way he walks is unsteady and laboured as though his limbs are heavier than they should be, this coupled with him just being in his underwear and a baggy T-shirt makes for a good ploy as a hung-over youth, playing on the stereotype of an unkempt appearance and an untidy house courtesy of numerous amounts of mess lying around from the previous night. On top of this, the use of close up shots on the main characters face to emphasise the emotion and mid shots when appropriate to show the full range of body language used so as to convey the full scale of emotions displayed, although admittedly these full body language displays are only ever used to convey anger.



Genre:

As my film is a hybrid it is clear that it must cross over two conventions, those of comedy and those of thriller. On the thriller side of things it keeps to the classic convention of a ‘who dunnit’ murder mystery only i have slightly tweaked this so that it is only revealed to be a murder mystery near the end of the film. On the comedy side of things however, I’m afraid that the conventions are fairly basically followed. Basic use of taboo such as swearing and advanced taboo such as a swastika on the lawn in the garden are themes used by many sitcoms although i must confess that this film follows a comedy style fairly similar to The Inbetweeners, in that complex writing takes a back foot to general abuse and taboo.

Post Production:

The use of non-diegetic sound in short films is something that has always interested me as it is a good way to build suspense be it music or SFX. The SFX that truly amazed me was in The Hole, where the hole itself was accompanied by some sort of low humming drone, this not only built suspense but also served to give the hole an identity of its own. I have used such hard to identify SFX to build suspense near the end of the film at which point there emerges a gigh pitched wine backed by a low throbbing pulse, this is to give the final array of flashbacks some gravitas and suspense as they reveal what really happened during the final gruesome events of the previous night, this accompanied by some quick cutting between the flashbacks and a close mid shot of the characters face serve to build the events before revealing exactly where the main characters girlfriend is.

Another thing ive done in post production is editing the footage itself for the flashbacks, such as lowering the saturation and adjusting the focus slightly whilst playing with the light to make it slightly softer so that it looked slightly odd to the human eye, making sure that there was absolutely no question that it really was a flashback.




2) How Effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillery tasks?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfSvH_n57wk

3) What Have You Learned From Your Audience Feedback?
Below is a table highlighting a survey i conducted by hand after showing the film to 30 people representing 3 demographics chosen at random. The blue bar is the demographic i catered to (youth of 14-25) the red and green as you can see are 2 other demographics wistfully ignored to compare against.

As you can see, the majority of my demographic described the film as ‘good’ and all of the reviews were in the positive section of the chart, meaning that i was right in catering the film to this age group and that taboo and sex jokes seem to hit the spot with the youth vote but doesn’t really do much on the part of the older generation. A quote that often joined the rating with the youth part of the survey when they were further questioned was that they ‘liked how the events are totally unconnected so you really don’t expect the girlfriend to be dead’ and that ‘the events during the film caused them to forget about the calendar saying that it was their anniversary at the start of the film’ this told me that the plot doesn’t exactly need to be coherent as such and that all the events in between the beginning and end don’t necessarily have to be relevant to the overall idea of the film and can simply be thrown in just to manoeuvre the characters to where you want them to be for the final moments of the film.

However there was one criticism of the film the was mirrored in most reviws across the board, and that was that the films ending was rather flat, yes the discovery was good, but the rather sudden ending and cut to the credits simply wasn’t particularly impactful and thus failed to really leave any sort of impression on them once the film had ended. The problem i have with this statement is that i am simply not entirely sure as to how i would have addressed it. I dislike the idea of trying to change the ending concept of him finding what happens to his girlfriend however i think its the final line o the film that causes it to fall flat, the simple ‘Lisa?’ Leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to genuine impact.

4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?https://prezi.com/secure/d51853fa6dc4e0accef91dfd451768558cc93a30/

Final Work (Will Price)

Poster

The Film

The Review

Progress (Jamie)

The actual making the film part of our project is now completed as we have successfully edited our product into what i believe to be a good quality film. Having gained much experience in the editing suite on last years project, we were able to jump straight in and get straight down to turning our raw footage into some structure. The fact that we had a lot more footage than we needed to fill the 5 minutes was of massive help to us as we were able to whittle it all down and structure it with a great amount of choice. The work we did on Garageband was both a lot of fun and very productive as sound was a quietly important part of our film.

• Poster ideas (I have done a couple of draft ideas that i need to get uploaded)

• Review: I have decided to take responsability for the review part of our ancillary task as it is something I am quite interested in doing. I have researched into the magazine Little White Lies, looking at the style in which films are reviewed on it. A couple of things I have noticed

Update (Will Price)

I realise the lack of time that either of us have been spending on this blog or the lack of time that has gone towards thinking about it and i for one apologise, however contrary to popular beleif we have more than one subject in the works at the moment and i have been bogged down by Communication and Culture whilst doing this, so i beg for your forgiveness. The following is an update on what we have accomplished so far since the last post.

Filming
We have finished the filming and we managed to get it done about a day before the rushes were supposed to be in, it would have been finished earlier however we had a few complications that slowed us down slightly. One of which was corpsing, as the main character in this film I as you well know have to walk down to the kitchen to find one of my fellow partiers draped over a table fast asleep with their arse hanging out, in this instance we cast a friend of mine named Verity Bridger to play 'The Arse' someone who i know rather well, so it was ever so slightly difficult to actually keep a straight face, it is of course one of the longest shots that doesn't have any cuts in it within the entire film, so not laughing at the fact that a very awake Verity had her arse hanging out ready for me to draw on will go down as an interesting moment in my life.

A second thing that slowed us down would be the weather, the heavens decided to open up onto the house we were using and even drawing the curtain failed to block out the noise of the rain hammering against the windows and down on the roof, thus as it would no doubt be a bit strange for it to suddenly piss it down in between the main character going in and out of the bathroom we decided to take a break and get all the other scenes ready whilst having a beer.

The third and final point however was rather uniquely, animals, as my sister has 2 cats, neither of which had seemed to grasp the fact that walking through shot meowing for food would be ever so slightly hinder-some in the grand scheme of things, we gave them both food but they decided to wander round the locations of the house we were currently shooting in instead, so we ended up locking them in a room upstairs, where they made so much noise that the camera picked it up, so we gave them even more food and catnip and finally they shut up. Thats right. We drugged cats. What of it?

Editing

Has also been accomplished and went off with only one single hitch when the fiootage needed to be converted twice for Garageband as it hadnt done it properly the first time which left me staring at a prgress bar on a Mac for most of it which forces you to try and put your life into perspective while you wait simply because you have nothing else to do. My brain was exploding by the end of it but it was finished about one day before the deadline which i think is perfect timing considering the amount of fiddling with focus and saturation i had to do to get an adequate flashback effect that i actually liked and didnt just look like looking through the eyes of someone who had misplaced their glasses but still had to watch the end of Cessamy Street with his son.

Poster

I have taken on the task of doing the poster and Jamie has taken the duty of doing the review, i'm currently photoshopping like mad and trying

My Chip In For Poster Pitches (Will Price)

Well, i confess to not paying much attention to the blog as of late but this would probably be because, as hard as it may be to believe, i have other subjects as well which currently are insisting on being rather time consuming. Never the less, i have but 2 idea's for possible posters for our little short film.

As you can plainly see from my in-depth labelling, the imagery is centred around the glass of beer which with some photoshopping has the faded face of the main character in the glass. This would be fairly suitable and symbolic as the film is after all based on a drunken teenage party, coupled with the idea of the films name 'Early Mourning' carrying very heavy overtones of death, which in the poster could quite easily fit in with the idea of 'drowning your sorrows'.

The second of my ideas may not look like much, but my idea is rather hard to draw, i am to make the main character himself blurred whilst keeping the rest of the room completely unaltered. This is aimed to recreate the idea of the drunk person being all fuzzy and incoherant but the rest of the world resolutely stays the same.

Film Name and title ideas

We have made a joint decision to name the film 'Mourning'. We wanted the name of the film to be relevant to the theme of death that arises at the end of the film. Also the fact that the film is set in the morning allows for a double play on words with our title. We are now looking at ways in which we can design the film title.

One website we have found which is great for design of a film title is http://www.dafont.com/. It features a wide variety of different styles that could be used as our title. We want our title to have a sort of grainy, distorted effect that ties in with the tone of our film.

Here are a couple of examples that caught our eye...

Film Name Idea's

Well, the filming is complete, all we need now is a name for this masterpiece of visual artistry.

Possible Idea's

Amnesia
Nectar
Eh?
Beer
Is It Morning?
Polishing Minnasota
Legless
Fog
Early Mourning