Evaluation Part 1 - Adam RUTHERFORD

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
The whole idea and concept of our film was to challenge the conventions of the typical Rom-Com template and treat it as social realism. Through the narrative and directorial style we have gone for, I believe we have succeeded in this aim, and created something that challenges it's genre while also managing to adhere to it's rules.

Social Realism cinema in Britain began in the early 1900's, influenced by Italian Neorealism, an art movement which aimed to show film as a view on real life. Cecil Hepworth's "Rescued by Rover (1905)" was pioneering for the genre as it captured Edwardian England perfectly, relating to everyday people who went to see it. Another example is James Williamson's "A Reservist before the war, and after the war (1908)" which is considered to be the first British film which used it's social realism as a protest against society. This theme has carried on through to the 21st century where social realism is used to raise issues such as race, class and poverty.

The main ideas of social realism (discussed above) appealed to us when making "Three Words" as we wanted to make a rom-com which an audience could relate to. When writing the script we decided we would discuss a more truthful representation of what teenage relationships are really like, rather then the extreme examples many films and TV programs (C4's "Skins" (see link below) is a perfect example) depict them as. Despite this we realised that the best way to show this would involve slightly stepping outside the usual barriers of social realism, and hence where we challenged the conventions of a real media product.

The typical conventions for a social realism film are:

• Camera

• Hand-held camera scenes to make the audience feel like they are observing the scene in real life
• Establishing shots to show the audience the real locations
• character close-ups to emphasise emotions in a realistic manner
• shot's filmed at eye level to help the audience relate to the characters
• off framing shot to give the film a more realistic feel 
• Group shots (see above)
•  Mise En Scene
• Naturalistic lighting in order to give the film a more authentic, less manufactured theme. 
• Costume and make-up dependant on the character's surrounding, class and lifestyle
• Parts of script left up to actors to improvise making the dialogue seem natural and reactions genuine
• Actors normally unknown making their performance more believable 
• Props dependant of character and their gender, personality and most importantly class.
•  Sound
• Accent usually working class, dialect relevant to surroundings. 
• Diegetic sounds can be heard to make the audience feel like they are there
• Non-diegetic sounds mainly kept to a minimum so as not to direct attention away from reality

Our film managed to keep to most of the conventions, especially to do with mise-en-scene and camera-work, however there are many parts of our film where we stretched the usual techniques used in social realism. The conventions we used in "Three Words" are:

• Camera

• A mixture of static and hand-held camera shots
• Mainly medium shots filmed to help the audience relate and feel closer to the characters
• kept to the 180 degree rule
• Long shot's to show the couple's togetherness, and in parts the distance between them.
• camera begins one scene out of focus, then as it moves across it comes back into focus 

All of our shots with exception to the last one fit into the techniques used in social realism. Because the camera starts the scene out of focus it takes away the reality of the scene. This is the same with the fade outs we used in the same scene. In order to make the film seem like reality we used a hand-held camera to shoot a couple of shots. This helps the audience feel like they are observing inside the film and make it feel real.

• Mise-en-scene 
• Naturalistic lighting such as sunlight and lights in the house. No lighting aides used
• Costume and make-up relevant to the characters and surroundings (middle class, Haywards Heath). 
• Props relating to characters personality's - Dominoes Pizza, cigarettes etc

The mise-en-scene is again accurate to the the usual conventions used in social realism films. Most social realism is based around working class protagonists, however we challenged this convention by writing a script with a middle class couple in mind.

• Sound
• Non-digetic sounds throughout (Voice-overs, soundtrack)
• Only diegetic sound is the TV in the last scene, and the birds at the start
•  Accents in relation to where they live

Sound was probably where we challenged social realism conventions the most, mainly through our use of voice-overs and lack of diegetic sound. We wanted to tell the story through voice-overs to help tell the untold story of the protagonists relationship. Even though everything looks good on the surface, there are conflicting emotions going through both characters. Despite this taking some of the reality out of the story (a key factor of social realism) we feel we justified our decision as it brought something new and different to the film and gave it the depth it needed.

When making the film we took inspiration from other British Film directors who are known for making social realism films. For example Andrea Arnold is known for her use of hand-held camera to emphasise realism in her films. This technique makes the audience feel like they are taking part in the film as the hand-held camera seems to be like a point-of-view shot.

In the film "Looking for Eric", Ken Loach studies the main character Eric Bishop, and all the problems he has in his life. Eric Bishop begins seeing his footballing hero Eric Cantona who, acting as his conscience helps him overcome his problems. I really like how Leigh stepped outside the conventions of social realism to study Eric's character, a technique that we incorporated in our film by using voice-overs to tell us what Tom was really thinking. 
 
Poster
When designing our poster we studied other British films posters in order to draw inspiration:

• Shane Meadow's 'Somers Town' has the perfect poster to represent it's film. This is because of it's  mainly black and white background with parts of very saturated colour in it. In my opinion the black and white represent urban London where the boys live, whilst the bright colours connote the boy's dreams of getting out of London. We took the idea of a black and white background to add bits of colour to our as well (see poster on other post), making two or the bricks red; A direct nod to 'Somers Town'.
• "Ken Loach's "Looking For Eric" is another poster which I drew a lot of inspiration from when helping to design ours. In the poster, Cantona is in black and white and is very saturated, whilst Bishop is in complete colour looking at him. In our poster w have take basically the same idea, of Kate looking at Tom for guidance as he looks the other way.  

 
 
 





I believe we've combined the elements of social realism with our original ideas to create a hybrid of social realism, and rom-com, two genres normally set very far apart from each other.