Media Advanced Portfolio - Keira Smalley, Adam Rutherford, Arran Fitzgerald, Dom Michau

Evaluation Part 1 - Dom

2010-04-30T17:21:00.000+01:00

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

We were given the task of making a short film, as a main product, in the style or genre of either social realism, thriller or horror with 2 ancillary tasks consisting of a film poster and review. After doing thriller last year we decided as a group to do a social realist poster. The review was in the style of a review from a film magazine called Little White Lies. The film poster was aimed to target the market of 16-24 male and female.

In the planning stage of the project we watched short films to get the style and conventions that are used in short films. We watched lots of short film in the social realist theme including:

Wasp (Andrea Arnold, 2003)
Eight (Stephen Daldrey, 1998)
Lou Lou lives here (Hazel Grain, 2005)
Conversation piece (Joe Tunmer, 2009)

Narrative

The narrative of social realism has a very typical structure of Todorov's theory of narrative.

Equilibrium is the stage at which everything is normal and seemingly right with the world. The Equillibrium is usually reffered to as the set up as it sets upthe film by introducing protagonists and antagoinsts and the location.
Disequilibrium is the stage also known as the confrontationstage. This stage is when something happens be it the introduction of a antagonist or a event that ruins the state ofequilibrium. a good example of this is in Andrea Arnold's film "wasp" with the introduction of the wasp to the piece as it flys onto the babys food. From my research the confrontation stage tends to be in the middle or not far from the end of the film. This is so that the set up stage is longer meaning we get to know the characters and the situation better meaning that the disequalibrium when it comes is more of a shock. This is typical of British films and especial british short films.
Resolution stage is the stage that the confrontation is is resolved and everything is back to normal but Todorov also says although everything is in a state of equilibrium it's not quite what it was originally! A good example of this is in 28 days later when although they appear to be a "happy family" it is not forgot what has happened (infection, franks death and the soldiers.

In ways we followed Todorov's theory pretty closly up to the end of the film.

The set up/ equilibrium is basically the all the bits that the protagonists are describing about each other. This part tells us a lotabout the characters andmakes us sympathise with both as being everyday teenager in a relationship.
I believe the moment that Tom says "So why don't I love her" and when it's cutting between the three words they both want to say are the moments when the Equilibrium is broken and we move into the confrontation stage. Normally according to Todorov this would litterally effect the character but in our film we developed this stage a bit by not making the audience involved as the confrontation is not between characters but the audience making a different judgement of the character and hopefully if we did wat we tryed to achieve feeling bad and slightly embaressed for Kate.
We challenged Todorovs theory as many short films do by leaving the end very open and unresolved. We did this as it leaves more to the audiences imaginations and means they finish the story the way they want to. However this is not common in the forms and conventions of short film as cliff hangers are often used. A good example of this would be in "Fade to Black" where we don't see what happens to the protagonist but instead we hear it and then it cuts out.

Mise en Scene

Location

The location for the majority of social realism films are often a urban enviroment usuallyup north or in London. It is common in British social realism as the majority of these films focus on working class characters living with and trying to deal with what they have. Our film goes against this idea as it is set in a park then in very middle class looking places. The use of the green park they are walking through at the beginning should instently tell the audience that this is not your typical gritty social realist film but in fact more of a highbrid "socially real romance" film. A good film to contrast out opening park scene with is the scene in Shane Meadows "This Is England" where their is a montage of all the gang messing around the townHowever in form with the social realist posters our poster is a bit misleading as it contradicts this rural setting by having a brick wall behind the main characters as an image.

Costume, Hair and Make up.

The costumes, hair and make up in Social realism obviously have to be realistic in accordance to what people would wear at the time the film is set. In this aspect we have comformed to this and the characters are wearing very basic normal clothes for the time it is set, which is modern day.

Lighting, Colour and Contrast

The lighting colour we used conformed to social realist lighting the majority of it is natural lighting or just lights in a room.There was no need for any additional lighting as it would have taken away the realism of the film. Through the lighting and camerawork we tried to create a sense that what was happening could happen and has happened making it seem more real. However the contrast we used didn't comform whole to the social realist theme as a lot ofthe time the contrast is slightly yellowish and grainy looking giving it a more sinister feel to the piece.

Props

Props are easy in social realism as they are just everdayobjects that people would expect to see. However i feel we did place props well throughout the piece. A good example is true to the description that Kate gives of Tom when they are in the loft to Tom's right is 2 empty bottles of beer, a dirty plate and a coke can.This shows how lazy he is and backs up what Kate has already told us.

Themes and Issues

Themes and Issues commonly dealt with in social realism are:

Working class family life (Wasp)
Overcoming a social barrier (Billy Elliot)
Different social groups (This Is England)
A struggle with a gangster or gang (Looking for Eric)

In our film we deal more with the idea of a socially real relationship as everyone has been or knows someone thats been in a relationship in which one person feels differently to the other one. I feel by pushing the usual conventions of the themes it bring as fresh take on social realism and is different from the nitty gritty depressing films that many British film directors create. A great example of this in British film is "Happy go Lucky" directed by Mike Leigh which is a look into the life of a fairly normal primary school teacher and her life, from driving lessons to getting a boyfriend poppy is a happy character that although annoying at first does bring a bit of fresh air to Mike Leigh fans as many of his over films are very much gritty british social realism.

Arran “Three Words” Evaluation

2010-04-30T15:12:00.001+01:00

Three words is a short film created by Adam Rutherford, Dom Michau, Keira Smalley and I. We all settled on Keira’s idea of a failing romance in the style of social realism. We decided on social realism right from the start as we had recently studied it in media thus the style was fresh in our minds. After discussing the ideas we decided on keira’s because we felt the subject applied to our target audience more than others and the actors could also be our age which made finding a cast alot easier.

Knowing that eighteen to twenty-five year olds are the largest group of film fans (mainly due to disposable income) we decided to put our target audience between sixteen and twenty-five. Relationships are always a popular topic in film and our film would be appropriate for over 12’s so I felt this justified have sixteen plus in the demographic. This was also partly due to the age of our characters being seventeen and eighteen. I wouldn’t say we use any particular stereotypes however a college year relationship may appeal more to a younger age range than older.

Keira’s narrative was perfect for Dom and I as camera men to think up some really interesting shots. The main emphasis was on the three final words, hence the title “three words” the characters contradict each other by one saying “let’s break up” while the other says “I love you”. This made for a perfect shot reverse shot. My biggest challenge was the handheld camera. At times it was difficult to control a steady zoom and also to get the right amount of shake in the camera. I tried to be natural when using the handheld camera to create a naturalistic effect id seen in other social realism films. For example allot of the dialogue and indoor scenes from “This Is England” use a handheld camera. Despite having to take may takes of some of the scenes I feel this effect coupled along with the voiceovers show a definite social realism style and look very natural which is exactly what we all wanted.

Because of the social realism style of our film we tried not to worry about mis en scen too much. We allowed our actors to wear whatever they wanted but had to make sure they changed if the shot was set on a different day. After a bit of a tidy the setting was perfect and didn’t require any props other than what was already there and of course the dominos pizza for my favourite shots. We used very naturalistic lighting apart from the bedroom scenes where we used a torch and lamps to create a night time atmosphere. We also ran into trouble about four o’clock on our first day of filming when the sun started going down. Luckily we were able to counter this by just opening the blinds slightly as time passed. Overall we managed all the filming in less than two days and my group members were great when it came to availability and time management. We were all able to meet without any disturbance to each other’s previous plans and worked really well together.

The shots I feel worked the best are firstly Adams fades of Kate writing in her diary and moving around the room. This was really affective at showing expressing her feelings as well as the passing of hours in a few seconds. I first thought the lighting may have been to dark when we were shooting it however in my opinion it came out perfect when editing.

My second favourite is the Pizza shot that keira and I directed. This is also a time lapse of sorts and just sows the pieces of pizza disappearing followed by a close up of Tom eating grotesquely. This adds s hint of humour to a very serious narrative which I think is needed just to add a light heartedness to the depressing situation. I thought Doms tracking and establishing shot was also great for establishing to the audience this is a couple as well as being well centred and smoothly executed. It fits in perfectly with the voice over and really just helps start the narrative.

Dom and I took a long time deciding on an image to use for the poster. This was mainly because of conflicting ideas on the images and also the availability of our characters for photos. Originally I liked the idea of a poster for “him” and a poster for “her” however the bad quality images and time meant we focused on one poster featuring both characters in the end. My original rough poster was based on the conventions of other social realism posters we had researched. I focused mainly on the “Fish Tank” poster and I think there are obvious similarities.

I would have liked to upload my idea to show the simiralities only the phtoshop file is at college and i have ben ill all week, i will try to upload it at some point.

Before Dom and I even started the poster Keira was brilliant and found us a selection of fonts to use from a website called Dafont.com. We settled on the heart font called “Loverboy” because love is the main theme in our film. We used this font both for the poster and in the film itself in order to create brand identity for the target audience just as major film producers do to build a link and association with that font and the product. I think it is a really fitting Font. We Dom and I agreed to use the hearts only at the start of each word in the title instead of every letter just to keep it simpler and therefore more social realism. The cracks in the font also symbolise both the rustic style of the film and the flawed relationship.

The colour scheme came from the female character in our film “Kate’s” clothes. This works well for the title as we seem to instantly relate more to her and she is after all the more likable character. The font also looks like the love heart sweets, which everyone associates with young love and is why the pastel blue fits with the Title so well. The font is also has the “emboss” and “drop shadow” effects on it so as to stand out against the background.

I stand by our choice of a brick wall background because it is not visually demanding or attractive and also implies the urban setting in which our film and so many other social realism productions take place. For example brick walls are visible in both “This is England” and “Somerstown” posters. I disagree however with the representation of the characters and colour scheme on the poster. The group seemed set on using a “Somertown” like colour scheme. The “Somertown” color scheme works because of the contrast between the natural colours of the curtains and the boys shirt compared to everything else which is desaturated. Our poster however is different, there are no bright colours and bricks are not strawberry red, hence the three negative comments on facebook, all of them on the bricks. I also disagree with the portrayal of the character “Tom” in black and white. When asking people what they thought people agreed with me and presumes Tom was dead because Kate’s character was still in colour. On a good note though the photo Dom took was really good and shows the characters relationship perfectly through there facial expression.

A problem we encountered at the end of the poster was that there just wasn’t enough space for the award logos or comments. We struggled to find a place for them without obstructing the main image. Other facebook comments have also pointed out that the red can be overwhelming in places and that tagline should be more prominent. Overall I feel the poster would have been far more successful had we stuck to one of the earlier ideas, especially seeing as I wasn’t convinced by this one from the word go. It does however succeed in some aspects and was definitely a learning experience.

Technology has been incredibly important through all stages of our media production. I found http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ and http://www.youtube.com/ incredibly useful during my research process. Many shorts were available for free and easy viewing, YouTube also enabled us to show our short film. Unfortunately despite having over a hundred and being "bangin" we havnt recieved any usefull feedback.

Facebook was surprisingly invaluable to all aspects of our product. We used a group to create interest and this helped us decide on the title “Three words” as well as providing feedback on our story, poster and final product. as u can see some feedback was more usefull than others.

My favourite piece of technology used was the HD camera. Last year we used a standard camera and the difference was very noticeable. I found it easy to recall skills I had learned last year such as setting white balance and contrast. This became very useful, especially as it got dark early and we had to adjust the settings when filming in the evening. I am impressed at the quality we managed to get during the scene where Kate’s writing in her diary.

We edited our film with the apple program "Final Cut Pro". I had also used this for the animatic, plus remembered some of how to use it from last year. It’s a really important tool allowing us to cut scenes, place the footage together and choose the different types of cuts. It also lets you edit the colour contrast and saturation slightly which we found useful for the darker scenes.

Being compatible with Garage Band was important as we used it for all our sound. I am pretty confident with my knowledge of Garage Band, however Adam was assigned to the role of sound editor. The animatic was useful though, on deciding on some of the sounds in the final product. We used a mixture of our own recordings and already existing “loops” on Garage Band. Adam decided on an original soundtrack, written by Carl Williams for an original soundtrack. We did use some of the loops I had used in the animatic though, for example the birds singing in the park scene. Our own sounds and voiceover were all recorded onto a tape recorder then transferred and placed onto garage band. Without the clipping and editing abilities of garage band we would never have got the voiceover right, and it did take a while to perfect.

Overall I feel I have consolidated on skills I learnt last year and improved in many other ways. This year’s production is better and I had a clear idea of what we were doing from the start. This was mainly due to my group being great time keepers and all available when we needed to discuss or improve something. Above all our film was of a much higher standard this year than the previous and i think we all executed our roles in the group extremely well.

Evaluation Part 4 - Dom

2010-04-30T11:10:00.002+01:00

How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the whole process of researching, planning, filming and editing all our products we usesd a vairety of different new media technologies:

The internet - BBC iplayer for Shorts(http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/), Virgin Media short (http://www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/) - For research and Planning.
Blogger - To record all the processes of the Main product and ancillary tasks.
Sony HD camera - To film
Voice recorder - Recording the voice overs and some foley
Final Cut Pro - Image editing, titles and credits.
Garage band - Sound
Photoshop - Poster editing and Review
DaFont website (http://www.dafont.com/) - for title font on poster
InDesign - Review
Facebook - Audience feedback on all stages of the coursework.

My role in the group was:

Cameraman
Props manager
Location manager
Editor
Poster creator

The Internet
The Internet has become a useful for people all over the world. It is a relatively new media technology that has become one of the building block for thousands of businesses, helped people to socially network with people from all around the world and has become a tool that people everywhere use daily.
The internet has provided me with so much throughout all the stages of this portfolio, ranging from short films for my research that I could watch online to information about short film distribution and the change in British social realism in the last 10 years. I used the internet to:

Watch the short films that I have written posts about previously (http://advancedportfoliosmalley.blogspot.com/2010/01/dom-fade-to-black-research-and-planning.html)
To blog all all the stages of the project using the blog service blogger
To gain the font for title and credits and the film and also the title of the poster.
Google images gave us the small images on the review (Tweedledee and the cards.)
Youtube has been used to upload our animatic and final product and also for audience feedback.
Social networking sites have been a great source for gaining ideas for the name of the film and also for more audience feedback.

Sony HD Camera

The Sony HD camera we used was provided to us by the college. We were lucky enough to have the use of the HD camera as some people had to use regular hand held cameras . The quality that you recieve from the HD camera makes such a massive difference to the finished piece as it makes it look much more professional and like a proper short film. The camera was easy to use and because I was the cameraman I am grateful that we were allowed to use it. The camera itself has a excellent white balance that madea real difference on our ilm as last year I had a problem with the white balance on one of the othe camera's due to the weather constantly changing whilst we were filming.

Final Cut Pro

We chose to use final cut as it is a much more professional programme to the alternative we had which was IMovie. Also I have Final cut express at home which is a very similar programme and used Final last year for my foundation portfolio and also for my Film AS film this year so i know my way around the programme.

We Created the film by:

Importing all footage from the camera into Final Cut
Next we dissected the different shots using the slice tool.
We then chose the shots we wanted and put the ones we didn't back into the library of clips in case we decided to use them.
We then ordered the clips by dragging and dropping them into the order that the shot list and animatic had laid out.
We had to edit some of the shots to make them longer and shorter. For example the scene when Tom is eating the pizza we used the speed tool to cahnge the speed of the pizza disapearing to make it a lot quicker (balancing it with making it still look realistic.) and also the bits when he is eating the pizza is slowed down using the same tool.
To put the film altogether we used a mixture of cross dissolves and fade in and out's to keep the film flowing. The fades in and out are usual used when it is going from the park and real time to their internal monologues. and the cross dissolve was a really nice visual image for the scene when Kate is writting in her diary on her bed.
Next we put in the title using the text tool and placing it in the bottom right hand corner when the couple are in the park. We did this by putting the text layer on top of the video layer and placing the writting where we wanted it.
The credits were easy to do as they were just text on a black background.

Garageband

(Above is a Youtube tutorial of how to use Garageband for a Mac.)
Garage band is a sound editing software tool that has various different aspects, ranging from recording live music tracks to film sound and foley. We used garage band to put all the sound diegetic and none diegetic into the piece.
What we did:

Imported the pre recorded voices that we recorded using the voice recorder and the video.
Cut and split the track to enable use to move it around to fit the piece well.
We then added another lay and imported the music that was recorded using the voice recorder thanks to Karl Williams (who is also the voice of Tom).
We cut the music to come in and out at the rtimes we wanted and also had to copy and paste a tiny section of it to make it sound right as it faded out.
We made it fade out by adjusting the levels of the track.

Photoshop

http://www.5min.com/Video/Photoshop-Video-Tutorial-Chroma-Keying-3768921
Above is a link to a Photoshop tutorial
Adobe Photoshop has become a brilliant tool that lots of professional photographers and publishing companies use. The programme is designed for image manipulation and editing. We used Photoshop in both our poster and our review and it was a brilliant tool to have.
How we used Photoshop (Poster):

We imported the image that we wanted to use.
Cropped the image by setting the page size to a A3 portrait and Adjusting the size of the photo to fit the frame.
I then added lots of layers into the project in order to put the text etc.
and the poster was made

How we used Photoshop (Review)

Imported the picture of Tom and Kate in bed
Then created text boxes for the directed by, title, etc
We then inserted the pictures of Tweedledee and the cards
Next we used the colour replacement tool to change the colour of the cards from standard red and white to the themed colour of green and orange.

Social networking sitesI used Social networking sites in order to gain audience feedback and for research and planning.
I created a group on Facebook dedicated to the the project and made all the other members of the group admin to the group so they could change things around and update it as the wish. We uploaded the video to this group to gain audience feedback. The idea for the film was copied onto the group and we received feedback on that and also people were given the chance to help us decide the name. The film was also put in the group and we got feedback from that. I also posted the video on my status and i gain the majority of my feedback from that.

Evaluation Part 1 - Adam RUTHERFORD

2010-04-30T00:24:00.006+01:00

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.

Evaluation Part 2 - Dom

2010-04-29T17:54:00.057+01:00

How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancilliary tasks?

We have done 2 ancilliary tasks as well as a main short film product. The two images either side of this text are (to the left) our film poster for the short film Three Words and (to the right) a review of our short film in the format of Little White Lies Magazine. These two products would be used to disrupt and get the film known if we were to release the film properly.

Film Poster
The film poster is aimed at a demographic of 16-24 year olds and would be a part of the distribution arm of the film process. We used photoshop with various layers, texts and images to create the poster. We had loads of ideas for posters and some of them are posted earlier:

In the end none of the exact poster ideas were used but different aspects were. For example in Adam and Keira's film poster idea there is one single image used that hints at what the film may be about without it being to obvious or cheesy. Orginally we were going to do two teaser posters that are used to tell the audience that the film exists but gives away hardly anything so they gain interest in what it may be. For the teaser poster we were going to us mine and Adam's ideas. However both the ideas gave away to little and mislead the audience in what the film is actually about. After discussing it as a group we decided that the best idea was to have a single image of them both in it as they are the protagonists and are what the story is about. This idea was based on lots of other social realist film poster; a perfect example is the early "Looking for Eric" posters. In which we see the main character Eric looking up in admiration at in a almost transparent desaturated image of Eric Cantona. Hinting at but not telling the audience bluntly what the characters relationship is.
In this way we got our two protagonists and took a few more photos, the images we got were good and we chose the one you see in the poster with them leaning against a wall.
Key Features of the Image

Kate looking up at Tom ( Symbolises her feelings for him and shows that she reall likes him)
Tom is looking away from Kate, almost avoiding any eye contact at all. This combined with Kate looking up shows that there is interest from her and not from him.
To enthusias this Tom has his hands in his pocket where as kate has her hands around his back and clinging on to his arm.
The use of the bricks in the background is very common in social realism as it is symbolic of Britishness.
The colour scheme in the picture is also interesting as Tom is wearing very bland, plain colours whereas Kate is also wearing grey clothes but with a red scalf. The colour red itself is often a symbol as being the colour of love and the heart, this shows her love for Tom.

The critisms I have with this image is the apple that Kate has in her right hand is un-necessary and not in her character at all. Also the image is very bland and boring and doesn't really attract the audience's eyes. Taking this into account our next step was to import this image into photoshop and I cloned the brick next to the one that the apple is covering and used this cloning tool to copy over the apple.

The theme of the poster is shown in the image and title the best. The poster clearly demonstrates that the two people in the poster are either in a relationship or there is some feelings from Kate towards Tom. The font of the title for the poster is good at telling the audience a little bit about the genre and what might happen. The way that the hearts at the beginning of the words aren't the typical heart you would expect to see in a romantic or romantic comedys. It shows us that it is not a typical love story and there is something not right about the final product.

Review
The review for our film was in the style of a review from Little White Lie Magazine. The format of Little white lies is interesting as the theme for the magazine is based around the film on the front cover, for example in the edition where Kickass is on the front the colour scheme is green and yellow and there are little comic book superhero pictures on some of the pages. In this way we based the front cover on a film that was big at the time, Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland".
To keep within the theme of Alice in Wonderland we had the colour scheme of green and orange as to match Johnny Depp's mad hatter.

The boxes with the name of the film and who it was directed by are in orange and green.
We inserted cards onto the top right hand side which we used photo shop to colour in the green and orange.
We added in pictures of Tweedledee as poking out of the side one of the boxes.
Also at the bottom of the page where the number is is a card spade next to the number.

Text

It keeps to the conventions of the magazine in the way that it is laid out.
Is intellectual and uses good film terms that are typical of the magazine.
Reviews at the bottom are accurate to the theme.
The text in the review well represents the finished product and gives the audience a snippet of what the film is about without giving to much away.

Overall I believe that the review and poster work well with the final product and actually complements it. I think this because the way that the review is written and formatted is realistic and believable to the style of Little White Lies magazine. Plus the poster is effective in capturing the audiences eye through the use of colour and image. The poster and review both give the audience only a small idea of what the film is about without telling them too much.

Evaluation part 4 - Adam RUTHEFORD

2010-04-29T10:02:00.007+01:00

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology played a major role in every stage of our film making process, from the original research right through to putting the product on disc. This is also the case with both Ancillary tasks. Looking back on the work I have done I feel much more confident using media technology and feel I have honed my skills well. The following document where I used technology in my product:

Initial Research

Before we came up with the idea for our film I did a lot of research on British short films, analysing them, and working out what short-film conventions they used in order to help me with my product. To do this I used the BBC film network (http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/) which allowed me to access hundreds of short films. New technology such as this and the BBC's iplayer have completely revolutionised how people watch TV and film, as people can just watch it at any time and don't even really need a television any more.

Planning

The main source of technology we used while planning our film was a stills camera. We used this to take pictures of our location in order to assist us with our storyboard and to give us a better idea of the lighting and space that we'd be dealing with. The stills we took can be found in the January section of this blog.
We decided to do our storyboard as an animatic, using a camera to film the shots we'd drawn. We wanted to do it this way because not only would it be easier to load on to the blog, but it is also a better way to get an idea of how long each shot we filmed would be.
The social-networking site Facebook was incredibly useful in getting ideas and feedback for our original idea. We created a group on Facebook and gave our audience a choice of two titles: "Three Words" or "Shit". Without this technology we would not have been able to interact with our audience in such a way, which would have also been disastrous for our feedback we received after finishing the film.

Filming

Filming our product was the first time I have ever used a HD camera before. We decided to use this as we wanted our film to be as high quality as possible in order to end up with a more professional finish on our film. On first using the camera I had to re-teach myself all the things I could do on the XM2 cameras such as:

Set the white balance
learning how to record and what back the footage
inserting and ejecting the tape
setting the contrast, brightness and focus

The latter of these turned out to be a very important feature as we changed the focus in certain scenes (the scene of Kate in her bedroom is a perfect example) in order to capture certain moods.

Editing

To edit our film we used the apple program "Final Cut Pro". I have used final cut many times before as it is an incredibly advanced tool which many major studios use to edit. The functions on it allow us to not only cut and paste scenes together, but also to create titles and credits, different types of cuts (fades, wipes etc) and even the image itself. I found final cut the most useful in the scene I directed where Kate is in her bedroom writing in her diary. I invisiged her sitting in her bedroom, fading out and then in again but sitting in a different position, a technique used by many directors when showing time passing. By using final cut I was able to do this, and ended up creating an effective scene which served it's purpose completly.
To edit the music I used Garage Band, another apple product, and another program which I am experienced in using. The beauty of Garage Band is that not only can you create your music, but there are also many pre-set instrumental pieces, as well as a vast library of sound effects. We decided to record our own piece of music for this film, as we wanted to give our film an original sound that people hadn't heard before. We recorded Carl Williams playing acoustic guitar through the program; a piece we ended up using at the beginning and end of our film. We also used garage band for the voice-overs, recording and Keira and Carl speaking into a tape recorder then uploading their voices onto Garage band and editing them into the respective parts of the film. The clips you hear on the TV at the end were both recorded using a tape recorder which we then transferred onto an ipod, and then onto Garage Band. We took the clips (Gavin and Stacy and Scrubs) off of youtube and put them onto GarageBand to keep up the pretence that the protagonists are watching TV.

Review

To create the template of the review we used Adobe InDesign, a program used mainly by designers and graphics production artists. With the use of this program we were able to successfully create an authentic looking template for our Little White Lies magazine review. Because it was the first time I had used InDesign it took me a while to work out all the functions for it, however once I did I was able to progress pretty quickly. Keira and myself each made a different once which would both suit the magazine and in the end we went for her template as it was more professional looking (see above). We also used InDesign to format our text into the four columns and the section at the bottom for ratings.
As well as InDesign we used another Adobe program called Photoshop to edit the 'Alice in Wonderland" images. To do this we copy and pasted the images onto Photoshop then changed their colours and size to match the typical style that Little White Lies adhere to. The text boxes at the top of the review were also created and manipulated using Photoshop to get the correct colour scheme.

Blog

Since I began this project I have updated the group blog to explain everything I have been doing. The blog we have been using is http://www.blogger.com, "a blog storage system that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries" (Wikipedia). Keeping a record of everything has been made much easier through the use of the blog, making it a perfect reference point if we need to find anything that we have done in the past.

I have gained a lot of useful skills during the making of this film, particularly with technology and in that particularly with the HD camera and the editing program InDesign.

Evaluation Part 2 - Adam RUTHERFORD

2010-04-28T11:02:00.005+01:00

How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

As a group we spent a lot of time on our Poster and Review considering how we could best represent our film through them. The Poster was much more personal as obviously we created it to sell the film and try and give the audience a decent idea of the narrative whereas the review had to fit the visual specifications of Little White Lies magazine, with the text being an honest assessment of the quality of our film. Despite this, the combination of the two create an effective marketing package and an honest representation of our film.

Poster

When creating the poster for 'Three Words" our main aim was to successfully communicate the appeal of the film to our target audience while also trying to express the narrative.

To do this we needed to consider :

Image
Font
Colour scheme
Text Content (reviews)

Image

We decided straight away that we would have both of the characters together in the poster to give the audience the general feel of the film straight away. It is obvious from the poster that the two characters are in a relationship, however because of the body language and the fact that Chmiel is in black and white show that there is something more here then a couple in love. Unfortunately a couple of people we received feedback from thought that Chmiel was going to die in the film, because he is in black and white in the poster. This obviously wasn't the intention, however I can see how this has been interpreted. The intention was to have Barkley in colour and Chmiel black and white to represent her warmth and love for him, and his feelings being completely the opposite. Looking at the poster now I now see we should have tried something different as we could have still got the message across just by Chmiel's body language, meaning we needn't have bothered with the black and white.

Font

After we had finally decided what image to use we began checking fonts out on Dafont.com, a website with literally any font you could want. We wanted one ideally with hearts in it to express the genre of our film better to our audience. We came across two we really liked, one with every letter written in hearts (see image below) and the other block capitals with the first letters of each word in hearts. As you can see above this is the one we ended up using.

We also decided that because the font was so appropriate we would use it in the opening and closing credits of our film. This ended up working really nicely, as not only does the font create a rom-com kind of feel, but it also helps the poster relate to the the film.

Colour Scheme

We found the colour scheme to be trickier then first anticipated as it needed to be prominent but not over exaggerated. We decided straight away that the colour scheme would be red, as it is the colour that symbolises love. When researching posters in preparation for the ancillary task two British film posters stuck out in my mind, mainly because of their use of colour scheme. They were 'Fish Tank' (Arnold, 2009) and 'Somers Town' (Meadows, 2008). The reason these two stuck out was because they were two very plain posters, but brought to life with colour. The 'Somers Town' poster (see left) has a grey background but details such as the sky, the arsenal shirt, and the yellow window add something else to the poster. I decided that it would add depth to our poster if we made two red bricks in the image to go with the colour scheme for the text, using 'Somers Town' as inspiration.

Text Content

Obviously in a real life scenario we wouldn't get to write our reviews, but we were able to use ours to help sell our product and even point towards our narrative. Our quote from the Guardian "Fantastic modern day love story" helps us because not only does it make the film sound good, it also helps the audience see what kind of genre the film is.

The most important text we had to worry about was the tag-line, a crucial part in any film poster. We took a long time deciding what to use, and all had completely different ideas of what would go. We finally whittled it down to "Tom, Kate, Love?" and "Choose them carefully", the latter being a nod to our title. In the end we decided on the former, as it fitted with the story, and was also three words long.

Review

The template for our review was based on the independent film magazine Little White Lies. The layout, colour scheme and general content is based on the front cover of each particular edition, meaning that when creating our review, it was certainly not just the content of text we had to think about.

Layout

To make our review as authentic as possible we needed to get the layout as authentic as possible. We screen-grabbed an image from the film and blew it up to fill roughly 2/5ths of the page. We then split the text up into four columns leaving a small section at the bottom for the ratings system.

We decided we would base our 'magazine' on the film Alice and Wonderland because of the vast amounts of imagery we could create to go alongside our review. If you look carefully (image to the right) you can see Tweedle Dee/Dum poking out from around the side of the orange box and the king and queen of hearts to the right of the screen. We also put a "spade" next to the page number (bottom right).

This meant we also have an accurate colour scheme. Basing our cover on an image of the 'Mad Hatter' we used the colours orange and light green for the boxes above the text in our review.

Text

The writing style in the main body of text was very much inspired by Little White Lies, obviously to keep our review authentic, but also because we are admirers of the style in which they write their reviews. Because of this we made sure to use the correct film terminology, for example describing Barkley as "The female protagonist". Our main intention with the review was to appeal to both our target audience, and also the target audience of Little White Lies; film literates who tend to be slightly older. This will introduce our film to the target audience of the magazine (mainly males, although females do read it), hopefully persuading them to view this film after reading the article.

It actually took a surprisingly long time to write the "Anticipation" "Enjoyment" and "In Retrospect" sections for this review, as we didn't want to undersell ourselves, but at the same time we wanted to try and keep a certain level of when rating the film. The comments we came up with in the end were I believe fair, because we admitted that there would be a low level of anticipation for our film, however we described the film as "surprisingly compelling" and gave it a 5 out of 5 in the "In Retrospect" section - a rating normally saved for the best of the best.

Evaluation part 3 - Adam RUTHERFORD

2010-04-27T13:50:00.004+01:00

What have you learnt from your audience feedback

Three Words’ has an audience demographic consisting of teenagers of both sex, aged between 16 and 24. Because of this we realized that we could utilize social networking sites, particularly Facebook, as a portal to reaching our target audience.

Facebook is now the most popular social networking site in the world with over 400million active users worldwide. We consider Facebook to be the perfect place to receive audience feedback (particularly in our demographic), and a perfect place to interact with people, and get their honest opinions on our product.

We created a Facebook group and invited as many people as we could, asking for feedback on our short film, poster and details such as the title of our film. I really enjoyed interacting with the audience in this way because not only did it give us an outside opinion on where we were going right and wrong, but also helped us make the film better, and more suited to our audience.

The film “Snakes On A Plane” was a huge internet phenomenon before being released, forming large fan bases online and becoming the subject of many forums and discussions across the internet. Despite “Snakes…” not being a British film or social realism, I took inspiration from the way the film was promoted and discussed over the internet, particularly the way New Line Cinema (the studio that released the film) incorporated feedback from online users into its production, and added five days of reshooting. We were not in a position to reshoot once we had the feedback, but the premise of the idea inspired me all the same.

Generally we found that our audience feedback was very positive. We did receive comments on things we could improve on, which I am very grateful we did receive. One of the benefits of using Facebook is that because we weren’t asking people to give us feedback face-to-face, we were able to get a more honest opinion what people really thought. This also made the positive comments more gratifying, and writing this evaluation easier.

The following is the a summary of the comments we received for particular aspects of filming, with each section followed by my conclusion of what I learnt from the feedback.

Editing

'I like the parallels between the character's views...Also, I like the way it skips so quickly at the end from one to the other and is brought together abruptly at the end as it leaves more for the imagination.'
'The repeated pattern thing but with different views was great'
'...and the alternate views are good and original too not like the typical thing that usually gets done'

People seemed to really like the idea of showing the same story from two different opinions, as it was 'original' and different. One thing we heard which wasn't posted on our Facebook page was that the end of the film could have been edited with more pace to give the ending more tension; a comment we have taken on board. Some people have also said that they enjoyed the ending and how the camera flipped from one character to the other, showing how different their thoughts and interpretations were.

Camera Work

'The framing is very good.'
'Use of hand-held camera was a good touch, making it seem more like a point of view shot.'
'The close-ups of him eating were disgusting which worked well!'
'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'

We were glad people thought that the camera work in the film was effective, as we spent a lot of time on the storyboard and at the locations working out what frames would be the best to convey the characters personalities and tell the story. Most importantly in my opinion our uses of hand held camera and natural lighting were picked up, and even praised, meaning that we managed to create and keep to social realism conventions successfully.

Sound

'The soundtrack goes really nicely. I particularly like the end scene with the well placed parts of telly on in the background.'
'Use of non diegetic sound is very good!'
'...loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out.'
'...one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then.'
'The internal monologues work nicely ...the soundtrack is lovely and compliments the tone of the film overall.'
'The only thing is you can kinda hear where you are starting and stopping the voice recorder.'
'The use of Gavin and Stacey in the background of the final scene was also a really nice touch as a contrast to the painfully awkward situation and as a popular culture reference point which many films and TV shows try to shy away from.'
'...and there wasn't any of that annoying background buzzing noise that ALWAYS happens on media work!'

The feedback we received for sound was once again generally positive however it was also the one convention we received criticism on. Throughout the film we use voiceovers to tell the story. Unfortunately at the end of the film we had great difficulty getting the recordings to match the scenes, as we hadn’t allowed enough footage for the voiceovers. For this reason the sound at the end comes across as quite sloppy and amateur, which is a real shame considering the rest of the film. This had been pointed out in the feedback, and has helped us realized not to make the same mistakes in the future. Apart from this we were very pleased with some of the feedback, especially the choice of having Gavin and Stacey playing on the T.V. in the last scene. We were worried that this would confuse the audience as they might think it a voiceover, but fortunately this wasn’t the case. Carl Williams’ brilliant piece that plays at the beginning and end of the feature went down very well, and conveyed the feeling we were trying to give to the audience.

Mise En Scene

'The interior cinematography was somewhat more professional than the exterior although time lapse might have been quite effective on shots such as the boyfriend eating the pizza.'
'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'
'I liked the use of props, with beer cans and messy room and stuff for him, helped to show their characters.'
'The locations were typical teenage places and her room was more girly which made it more realistic.'
'Use of natural lighting and shadow inside looked nice.'

From this I can see that as a group we really have done well at keeping to the conventions of social realism. One of my roles within our team was Lighting, so it is a relief to see that people have responded positively to the aspects of this I had to take into consideration. The Mise En Scene was always going to be a difficult convention to deal with as we had to keep INSERT LONG MEDIA LIKE WORD. We needed to make sure that the objects and props we had fitted in with the social realism genre.

Narrative Structure

'I'd already read your screenplay so the concept wasn't a surprise, but realised it worked even better than I had anticipated, I thought it was the perfect form for a student film. You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. I liked the end, in that you didn’t milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way.' '...love the story line and their different views on what they both think.'
'so nicely written'
'internal monologues work nicely and it makes sense.'
'The concept of two people being at completely crossed emotional purposes was really interesting. It presents a classic dilemma whilst never showing any confrontation allowing the viewer to decide for themselves what action the protagonists take and heightening the inevitable pain of the situation.'
'Got straight to the point but an in interesting way as neither of them actually spoke and it was all thoughts and they went really well with their facial expressions.'

From reading this I can see that people have managed to grasp the concept of our film pretty well. We were worried that we might have made the story a little sparse, especially at the end, however as shown above, our target audience have an almost perfect interpretation of what we were trying to achieve.

Poster

'Text as well as the stars can be hard to see, the tag line should maybe be more prominent as that's the only chance you have to hook an audience.'
'The credits at the bottom cross over into other lines, "di-rected" that wouldn't be seen on a poster. Like the colour use but the red is a little much, I find, contrasts too much with the black logos at the bottom, maybe as a tag line etc. but I think the credits should be standard black.'
'I really like the colour concept (although i don't get the coloured bricks' meaning). I think the title looks great as well. I agree that the tag line should be more prominent, but I can't help but feel like a little more time spent on it and you could have something more slightly instantly gratifying. It’s a great idea for a tag-line and I don’t claim I can suggest anything better but I reckon you guys could. It also slightly detracts from the importance of the pairs of three words IN the film, as the poster kinda gets there too early and reduces their impact at the climax. But it’s pretty good anyway, I’m just being picky.'
'I think it looks good overall but I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die (/had already) in the film, so I guess it's a bit misleading. It was a good idea though.'

A lot of people seemed to have trouble understanding the red bricks in our poster and they're meaning. This is unsurprising as they didn't really have much important meaning. From studying other British film posters we really like the idea of dull background with sporadic bright colours. A perfect example of this is 'Sommers Town' which Dominic has analysed elsewhere on this blog. We used red as it's the colour most associated with love, however because of our choice to do this we have caused people to over analyse it. Someone even mentioned "I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die" which proves this. I have learnt from this not to feel the need to add more then is necessary to a poster, and keep it simple unless we have a clear and concise idea of what were trying to achieve with it.

Review

Unfortunately we could not post our review on facebook as the image kept coming up to pixilated, and the writing was to small to read (as can be seen to the right). Luckily Kiera went out and got some spoken word feedback from people and wrote it up for us.

'The image isn't very good quality, but it would work if it wasn't a screen grab from the film. It gets your attention.'
'They look really similar, especially the actual text of the review, they look the same. What you've written is good too, it sounds like a proper review, but you've only said good stuff - you haven't been critical like a real review would be.'
'It's really similar, except those edges [referring to the text box with the title in it] should be round. I like the little Alice In Wonderland images though, they make it more interesting.'
'The format looks exactly the same, and the text sounds similar to the style of writing in the real review. You've even got the little numbers at the bottom and the page numbers.'

The feedback we received for our review was generally positive, however there were a few criticisms that I definitely agree with. If I was to do this review again I would remember to not only mention the positive aspects of the film, but also mention the negatives, like other reviews do. From reading all the feedback we have received from other people I think I'd find it much easier to write this review, as we have now had other people watch the film and give us feedback. It's difficult reviewing your own film as youv'e watched it so many times you start to miss things. Comments about the image not being good quality are justified however we found it difficult to make it as big as we did without it pixilating.

Evaluation Part 3 - Keira

2010-04-22T17:38:00.007+01:00

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

To gain audience feedback we mainly used the platform of social networking site Facebook. We used this because our target audience is 16-24, and most users of facebook are in this age bracket. It was also a good base to get comments, due to the sheer volume of members. Here are some facts from October 2009 about Facebook:

"Each day, people around the world spend more than six billion minutes on Facebook, where they post 40 million status updates and become fans of 10 million pages."
"In a little more than nine months, Facebook has managed to grow its user base from 150 million active members to 300 million."

These kind of figures clearly demonstrate how popular the site is, and what a good tool it can be used as to advertise or spread word about media products. We created a Facebook group which we invited people to join, which held a discussion about what we should title our film (whether it would be 'Shit' or 'Three Words') and where we posted our video so people could comment. View this page here. We then also posted the video on our individual profile pages and asked people to comment, from which we got most of our evaluative comments. This is a screen grab from my profile page displaying the comments (which I will discuss below).

For the film product our audience feedback has been almost entirely postitive.

On the camera work, we recieved the following comments:

'The framing is very good.'

'Use of handheld camera was a good touch, making it seem more like a point of view shot.'
'The close-ups of him eating were disgusting which worked well!'
'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'

This tells us that people appreciated the consideration we put into which shot would be used where, and that the close-ups in particular worked well in creating particular images of the characters. It also says that the aim of our handheld camera work was picked up on, which means one of the conventions of social realism which we wanted to use has been fulfilled.

On the editing, we recieved the following comments:
'I like the parallels between the character's views...Also, I like the way it skips so quickly at the end from one to the other and is brought together abruptly at the end as it leaves more for the imagination.'
'The repeated pattern thing but with different views was great'
'...and the alternate views are good and original too not like the typical thing that usually gets done'

This tells us that the main structure of the editing was the thing most appreciated, as it was 'original'. People tended to like the idea of repeating the pattern because it showed the alternate views. As well as these Facebook comments, from word of mouth alot of people told me they liked the ending and how it flipped between the two characters, although they thought the pace could have been quicker there to build the tension more. I entirely agree with this comment and take it on board as something that could be improved were we to do the film again.

On the sound, we recieved the following comments:
'The monologues over the top fit perfectly.'

'The soundtrack goes really nicely. I particularly like the end scene with the well placed parts of telly on in the background.'
'Use of non diegetic sound is very good!'
'...loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out.'
'...one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then.'
'The internal monologues work nicely ...the soundtrack is lovely and compliments the tone of the film overall.'
'The only thing is you can kinda hear where you are starting and stopping the voice recorder.'
'The use of Gavin and Stacey in the background of the final scene was also a really nice touch as a contrast to the painfully awkward situation and as a popular culture reference point which many films and tv shows try to shy away from.'
'...and there wasn't any of that annoying background buzzing noise that ALWAYS happens on media work!'

This tells us that the music (provided by Carl Williams, we let him watch the film without sound and explained the kind of tune we wanted and he came back with a few from which we chose) was greatly appreciated and people generally think that it went well with the action. That our choice of soundtrack to go with the final scene was picked up on, as I picked it to specifically match the action in an ironic way. It's quite surprising but pleasing that people would notice such a subtle choice and choose to comment on it. People seemed to like the fact that the sound was almost entirely non-diegetic, commenting on the nice use of voiceover etc., but this is also stretching the boundaries of social realism as normally there would be far more diegetic than non-diegetic sound. However, as we were incorporating some conventions of other genres it is acceptable. The main criticism (not just of sound but as the piece as a whole) was based on voiceovers in the end scene where Kate and Tom are deciding to tell each other their three words. As I have discussed previously, this was the most difficult part for us to edit effectively and as the image clips were too long we had to try to cut and stretch out the voiceovers so that they fit the time. This has worked to a certain extent but as viewers rightly pointed out the sound 'cut out' every now and again where we'd cut it. Were we to do this task again that would be the main point for improvement.

On the mise-en-scene, we recieved the following comments:
'The interior cinematography was somewhat more professional than the exterior although time lapse might have been quite effective on shots such as the boyfriend eating the pizza.'
'I really like the ‘She’s gorgeous’ close up, which makes really good use of shadow and natural lighting to create a very realist yet beautiful image.'
'I liked the use of props, with beer cans and messy room and stuff for him, helped to show their characters.'
'The locations were typical teenage places and her room was more girly which made it more realistic.'
'Use of natural lighting and shadow inside looked nice.'

This tells us that again the viewers have managed to pick up on small details (such as the use of realistic props and locations) which have obviously made a difference to the quality of the film. It also tells us that we have used one of the conventions of socila realism effectively.

On the storyline and narrative structure, we recieved the follwing comments:
'I'd already read your screenplay so the concept wasn't a surprise, but realised it worked even better than I had anticipated, I thought it was the perfect form for a student film. You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. I liked the end, in that you didn’t milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way.' '...love the story line and their different views on what they both think.'
'so nicely written'
'internal monologues work nicely and it makes sense.'
'The concept of two people being at completely crossed emotional purposes was really interesting. It presents a classic dilemma whilst never showing any confrontation allowing the viewer to decide for themselves what action the protagonists take and heightening the inevitable pain of the situation.'
'Got straight to the point but an in interesting way as neither of them actually spoke and it was all thoughts and they went really well with their facial expressions.'

This tells us that the message we wanted to put accross in the story made sense and was taken on board by the viewers. Everyone found the story engaging (which is highly important in making a short film) and everyone watched to the end because they wanted to find out what happens. It also tells us that the risk we took with the unconventional narrative structure (not following Todorov's theory) worked and was the 'perfect form for a student film' . In our own evaluation of the work we found some of the dialogue cheesy, but none of the viewers have commented on this and someone even said that it was 'so nicely written' which means that either our target audience enjoy the slight cheesiness of it, or it's not as bad as we thought.

I have learnt alot from our audience's evaluation of our film, and it has helped hilight both the things that were most liked about it (some of which I expected, like the ending, some of which I didn't expect, like the narrative structure) and the things that could be improved upon. It's always good to have other people's opinions of your work as it lets you take a step back and view it more objectively. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the comments we recieved.

For the poster product, again we used facebook. I posted the poster as a picture on my profile and asked people to comment saying what they liked and didn't like. The comments we recieved here were generally more negative:

'Text as well as the stars can be hard to see, the tag line should maybe be more prominent as that's the only chance you have to hook an audience.'

'The credits at the bottom cross over into other lines, "di-rected" that wouldn't be seen on a poster. Like the colour use but the red is a little much, I find, contrasts too much with the black logos at the bottom, maybe as a tag line etc. but I think the credits should be standard black.'

'I really like the colour concept (although i don't get the coloured bricks' meaning). I think the title looks great as well. I agree that the tag line should be more prominent, but I can't help but feel like a little more time spent on it and you could have something more slightly instantly gratifying. It’s a great idea for a tagline and I don’t claim I can suggest anything better but I reckon you guys could. It also slightly detracts from the importance of the pairs of three words IN the film, as the poster kinda gets there too early and reduces their impact at the climax. But it’s pretty good anyway, I’m just being picky.'
'I think it looks good overall but I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die (/had already) in the film, so I guess it's a bit misleading. It was a good idea though.'

This tells us that people have noticed a few key things that could have been cleaned up slightly. Alot of people (through spoken feedback) have also commented on the use of the coloured bricks in the back ground and questioned their importance, and wondered if they mean something. We simply put them in to replicate some of the conventions we've noticed in other posters (particularly 'Fish Tank' and 'Sommers Town') and they have no real deeper context than that, which in hindsight was perhaps not a good enouh reason to use them. People also agree with my criticism from section 2 about the possibility that from the poster the film could be interpreted to be about Tom dying due to him being in black and white. However, only one person commented on this so perhaps that is not the immediate assumption viewers make. I think it would have been better, taking into account this criticism, to make the poster more simple than it is, perhaps leaving more background space around the couple for the essential writing.

For the review, our feedback was entirely spoken rather than on facebook, as we were unable to easily post it in a format in which people would be able to read/see the words properly. Instead I showed a printed version of the finished product to other teenagers of 17-18 next to a real review from 'Little White Lies' and asked them to comment on how real they thought it looked. I wrote down some of the comments I recieved:

'The image isn't very good quality, but it would work if it wasn't a screen grab from the film. It gets your attention.'
'They look really similar, especially the actual text of the review, they look the same. What you've written's good too, it sounds like a proper review, but you've only said good stuff - you haven't been critical like a real review would be.'
'It's really similar, except those edges [referring to the text box with the title in it] should be round. I like the little Alice In Wonderland images though, they make it more interesting.'
'The format looks exactly the same, and the text sounds similar to the style of writing in the real review. You've even got the little numbers at the bottom and the page numbers.'

This tells us that we've succeeded in replicating the layout of the 'Little White Lies' version, other than the quality of the image (which couldn't be helped as it was a screen grab from final cut pro of the film) and the edges of the boxes. People also thought the wording of the review was mostly quite proffessional-sounding, though someone rightly pointed out that we hadn't been critical enough and had only said positive things, which isn't representative of the reviews we read for research. To improve on our review if we were to redo it, therefore, it would be more balanced in terms of the copy, and we would use a better quality image (even if it meant re taking it as a photo) and creating the text boxes in InDesign rather than Photoshop so they could be more easily manipulated into rounded edges. Other than these small details I am pleased with how the review turned out and the feedback we recieved.

Evaluation Part 3 - Dom

2010-04-21T09:48:00.004+01:00

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

I gained the majority of my audience feedback via social networking sites such as Facebook. I did this because Facebook is a product used predominantly by members of our target audience that are the 16-24 year old age bracket and both male and female.Seeing as most people in this bracket will go on Facebook a few times a day to at least once a week I felt it was the perfect way to receive audience feedback. I made a Facebook group to start with asking people to comment on everything from the name of the film to the ancillary tasks, which is infact how we decided on the name for our film.(http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=449048835382&ref=ts) I also posted the video on my status asking people to comment on what they thought (see feedback post).

General Feedback
Overall the feedback was very good people liked the shots we used and said the storyline was very retrospective of what modern day teenaged relationships are like.

"You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. I liked the end, in that you didn't milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way." Callum Mclean
"love the story line and their different views on what they both think and using the handheld camera was good touch making it seem more like a point of view shot" Ben Brown

Our main criticism of the piece was on the editing of the sound during the scene when it cuts from Kate in the bathroom to Tom on the sofa.

"The only thing is that you can kinda hear when u are starting and stopping the voice recorder with the voice overs." Ben Brown
"loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out." Abi Walker
"However one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then." Joe Merrion

We spent ages on this section trying to make the voice-over fit with the footage but the problem was that the shots were to long and when we tried to shorten it got very confusing and looked messy. The main fault in the sound editing they commented on was when Kate says "love" which does cut off very abruptly. If I were to do this again I would either try to lengthen the speech or make the shots cut better together better so it was at a good pace to fit the speaking but also not to fast that the whole thing looks like a blur.

Storyline and Narrative

“so nicely written”
“...love the story line and their different views on what they both think.”
“Got straight to the point but an in interesting way as neither of them actually spoke and it was all thoughts and they went really well with their facial expressions.”
“I'd already read your screenplay so the concept wasn't a surprise, but realised it worked even better than I had anticipated, I thought it was the perfect form for a student film. You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. I liked the end, in that you didn’t milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way.."
“The concept of two people being at completely crossed emotional purposes was really interesting. It presents a classic dilemma whilst never showing any confrontation allowing the viewer to decide for themselves what action the protagonists take and heightening the inevitable pain of the situation.”
“internal monologues work nicely and it makes sense.”

The Feedback above is encouraging to what the audience felt about our film and it is nice to see that the main concept of the film not to make a typical social realist love story has actually interested them and made them watch till the end. In the majority of feedback from people that i have had via word of mouth it seems they liked the binary opposition of the two characters feeling towards each other. We decided not to use Todorov's theory of narrative (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_9dPtEKC0NW4/R060mwfWhOI/AAAAAAAAAXY/esiJpB-BK0o/s1600-h/Todorovs+theory+of+narrative.jpg) and it seems to have been enjoyed by the audience as all of them found the narrative "interesting" and kept them interested, something crucial to a short film. Ancillary Task - Review As for the ancillary tasks people really liked the layout of our review and said that the little pictures made it looks as though it was a proper Little White Lies page. Some people did mention how the photo on the review was a bit grain but this was simply because it was a screen grab and it couldn't be improved. The text boxes not being round was something that we completely over looked and in reflection we should have taken a bit more time on the fine details. The feedback below pointed out this problem and I feel if it was done again we would concentrate harder on the finer details.The text received good feedback which is good but didn't match the smaller reviews in the bottom right perfectly, this would also be revised if it were done again.

"The image isn't very good quality, but it would work if it wasn't a screen grab from the film. It gets your attention."
"They look really similar, especially the actual text of the review, they look the same. What you've written is good too, it sounds like a proper review, but you've only said good stuff - you haven't been critical like a real review would be."
"It's really similar, except those edges [referring to the text box with the title in it] should be round. I like the little Alice In Wonderland images though, they make it more interesting."
"The format looks exactly the same, and the text sounds similar to the style of writing in the real review. You've even got the little numbers at the bottom and the page numbers."
" I like this a lot, however the picture is a bit grainy. the layout is really good and the text brilliantly written, only criticisms on the text is that the whole review bigs up your film too much for the ratings it is given I feel."

Ancillary Task - Poster

"Text as well as the stars can be hard to see, the tag line should maybe be more prominent as that's the only chance you have to hook an audience."
"The credits at the bottom cross over into other lines, "di-rected" that wouldn't be seen on a poster. Like the colour use but red is a little much, I find, contrasts too much with the black logos at the bottom, maybe as a tag line etc. but I think the credits should be standard bla
“I really like the colour concept (although i don't get the coloured bricks' meaning). I think the title looks great as well. I agree that the tag line should be more prominent, but I can't help but feel like a little more time spent on it and you could have something more slightly instantly gratifying. It’s a great idea for a tagline and I don’t claim I can suggest anything better but I reckon you guys could. It also slightly detracts from the importance of the pairs of three words IN the film, as the poster kinda gets there too early and reduces their impact at the climax. But it’s pretty good anyway, I’m just being picky.”
“I think it looks good overall but I thought from seeing this that Tom was going to die (/had already) in the film, so I guess it's a bit misleading. It was a good idea though.”

The comments on the poster were good and the main feedback we got that was that some people thought Tom looked dead in the poster but after watching the film saw the significance of him being desaturated. The meaning of the bricks wasn't made clear as it doesn't really have a meaning in theory by people commenting on this it means that the aim to use the brick colours to draw the audience in and look at the poster has worked. The research I did into posters made me found a poster for the 2008 Shane Meadows film "Somers Town" which uses the random colour to attract an audience. (http://www.wildaboutmovies.com/images_7/SomersTown_poster_big.jpg). Also in my research I found that many film posters don't just use the standard black for the credits at the bottom of the poster. We did try to see what it looked like but it looked out of place with all the other text on the poster.

Evaluation Part 2 - Keira

2010-04-19T00:44:00.006+01:00

How effective is the combination of your main product and your ancillary tasks?

POSTER:
For the poster we found it difficult to think of an image that could sum up the content of our film and create intrigue without being too stereotypically rom-com in style. We had to be careful to not make it too cheesy, so we studied other social realism posters to inform us of some of the conventions of the style.

The font was the first thing we decided on. Using Dafont.com, I searched for one which used hearts (to connote the romance side) and got a few examples, from which the group chose the best one. We chose 'loverboy' because whilst clearly showing that it's a story involving a relationship, the hearts are cracked slightly which could suggest to the audience that it's not entirely happy. We tried the title both completely in hearts (as above) and just the first letters of each word in hearts with the rest just block capitals. We decided the latter looked less busy and wouldn't overdo the hearts idea to make it too rom-com and not enough social realism. We used this font both for the poster and in the film itself in order to create brand identity for the target audience so that they could recognise the link between the two subconsciously and build up an association with that font and our product. This would mean that whenever they saw that particualr font or something similiar they would think of the film. On the poster, we have made the title 'embossed' and put a drop shadow on it so that it stands out more against the brick wall background. The letters are the same colour as Kate's clothes which gives a hint to the target audience that most people will sympathise with Kate more. It also heightens the contrast to Tom being desaturated so that it is more noticeable.

The image was taken with the idea that we wanted to show the characters' feelings towards each other without making the ending explicitly obvious. We chose the brick wall as a background because it's miscellaneous and could be anywhere, following the idea that this story could be applied to many relationships in different situations rather than just the particular context that we have put it in. It also shows the urban setting which is a traditional convention of social realism - it's rare to find them taking place in the countryside, so we wanted to reflect this also.
We tried the image with both Tom completely desaturated and Kate in colour (suggesting the warmth of her feeling towards him and the unfortunate lack of feeling of him for her); and the other way round (suggesting how they see each other). We decided that first option was better as it seemed to more obviously put across the message we wanted. Looking at the poster again, a drawback to this idea is that the viewers may assume that Tom's character dies and that the film is about Kate clinging on to him because she doesn't want to let go. This is similar to the poster for 'P.S. I Love You', a romantic film in which the man passes away, and in the poster we can see is slightly desaturated and darker than her. So in hindsight perhaps it would have been a better representation of our film to leave them both in colour, or perhaps just desaturate Tom slightly rather than entirely.

As our film has a similar target audience to 'Fish Tank' and 'Sommers Town' (16-24, but predominantly the teenagers of that group), we looked at these posters in detail and took certain aspects. In 'Fish Tank' (-->), there are two clear colours used for the text (blue and pink) to represent the main character (perhaps suggesting her conflict between being a tomboy but also a girl). We took this idea by using grey to represent Tom and his lack of feeling, and the red of her scarf for Kate to illustrate her vibrance and that she's loved-up. 'Sommers Town' inspired us for the use of black and white with colour, picking out certain images (the football shirt, for example) to draw attention to and catch the viewers' interest. We have drawn most attention to Kate because our target audience is more towards females (as she is the character whom we intended the viewers to most sympathise and feel sorry for) and we have taken the idea from 'Fish Tank' of colouring parts of the background wall behind:

We have put our two subjects in the centre of the frame because it will draw the eye and is more aesthetically pleasing

I came up with the tagline on one of my draft posters:

I wanted it to be three words long (to echo the title) and be simple yet memorable. I first thought of 'choose them carefully' , but decided it sounded too threatening and better suited the thriller genre. Then I thought of 'But they're not always the ones you want to hear.' which, although suiting what the film was about, somehow seemed too long and complicated. I thought of 'Tom. Kate. Love?' because it mentioned the two characters (which might stick in people's minds better, especially if they know anyone by those names which is likely), using punctuation to make the words more poignant and the 'Love?' to pose a question and create intrigue. This was also inspired by the '500 Days Of Summer' tagline: 'Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.' which uses three very short and simple sentences in a twist on a well-known phrase which is bound to be memorable. I tried to create a similar thing, as in fact this tagline could easily work for our film also, but swapping the 'girl' and 'boy' over.

The whole idea of the poster is to communicate why people should watch the film, and for us the main reason is that it's not a conventional love story. I think we have achieved this to a certain extent, but it was difficult to push this without giving the end of the film away, and as such we have ended up with quite a vague poster which gives no specific information about the film (other than that it's a love story) and could be misleading. However, I think it would generate interest effectively for members of our target audience which is the primary aim of the film poster.

Another criticism I would make is that the awards and reviews look cluttered as there wasn't much background space on which to write them without covering up the main image. Ideally we would not have included these at all, but all the posters we've studied in the social realism style had them and we felt it a necessary convention as it would generate more interest from the industry were we to release it for real.

I had alot more involvement with the review than with the poster as we allocated 2 people in our group to do the poster (Dom and Arran) and 2 for the review (me and Adam).
REVIEW:

For the image I chose a screen grab that would be instantly eye-catching and make a reader choose to look at the review rather than just flicking past it. This image is quite humerous (due to the couple's juxtaposing expressions) and targets our 16-24 audience effectively with a quite blatant reference to sex. This is also fitting with the conventions of social realism as it doesn't shy away from showing more shocking images. Were the review designed to feature in a different magazine, it may have been too risqué, but as 'Little White Lies' prides itself on being independent (see its website here) I thought it would fit well and be better to capture interest.

The lay out is taken directly from 'Little White Lies' magazine, which we used as a template because of its clean, simple design and diverse range of reviewed films across all different genres. Each issue of the magazine is themed to a current blockbuster (see the 'Where The Wild Things Are' issue to the right), and as a quick task to help design the reciew I created what could be the front cover for the issue in which our review appeared, themed on Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland':On the actual review template we then put in references to the film (a Tweedle Dum poking out from behind the 'directed by' box and a Queen and King of hearts card fanning out at the far right of the page). I used the bright orange and green colours from the front cover image for the text boxes and the fanned out cards. I think this makes the page more interesting to look at and is more realistic to how the real review would look.
Before writing the review, I read alot of the real reviews in 'Little White Lies' to try to get a feel for the style as we wanted it to sound authentic. The copy is aimed at both the film's audience and 'Little White Lies' readers, and when writing it I tried to strike a balance between formal language / terminology (such as 'the female protagonist') and coloquialisms (such as 'living happily ever after in a perfect little cul-de-sac far, far away') so as to engage both. We decided to mention the fact that it was social realism: 'in classic social realism fashion...' and '...and in that way (amongst many others) it is social realism through and through' as we thought it likely that many readers of this magazine would be interested in social realism, given that it's aimed mostly at independent film-watchers. We also made a point of the fact that it isn't a traditional romance story: '...laying bare the characters’ thoughts and emotions and adding an unexpected depth to the story.' as we all agreed that was the important selling point for our film. We also talked alot about the fact that it might 'be frighteningly mirror-like to many members of the audience' which insinuates that we have both directly targetted our teenage audience and stuck to the boundaries of social realism enough to make it believable.
We tried to keep the Anticipation, Enjoyment and In Retrospect section short and sweet as they often are in the real magazine (sometimes as simple as 'Wow.') as we didn't want to repeat everything we'd just said.

To match the font of the text boxes to the ones in 'Little White Lies' I used Dafont.com again (-->) to find one that I felt was as close as possible to the real thing.
Criticisms I would make of the review are that :

The text boxes don't have rounded edges as we couldn't find how to create them, a small detail but still different to the real magazine.
It is not formatted to the same size as 'Little White Lies' and is still A4, as most of it was created on Photoshop which doesn't allow you to change it to the correct format.
We could have had more references to 'Alice In Wonderland' to make it more obvious; although, perhaps too many would have distracted from the article itself.
The copy doesn't contain virtually any criticism of the film, which is not realistic to a real review. There are insinuations that at the start you assume it's going to be another generic love story, but this is really the only negativity it contains. Perhaps it would have been better to include some more critical comments in order to make it more authentic.

Evaluation Part 4 - Keira

2010-04-19T00:43:00.030+01:00

How did you use new media technologies in the construction, and research, planning and evaluation stages?

I feel I have developed my skills in all areas of digital technology in the foundation portfolio, as more practise has allowed me to improve and use the tools more effectively.

Camera

I am now far more confident using a camera as I did more of the filming for this project that the foundation portfolio, and have learnt how to set the white balance, brightness and contrast, manual focus, record and playback on an entirely different camera (HD). The ability to change focus on this camera was particularly useful for certain shots, when at times we wanted a sharper or softer image. We also used it in a similar way to 'The Space Between Us', to create a raw and innocent atmosphere when one of our shots (in Kate's bedroom) starts out of focus and comes in, revealing her sitting on the bed:

Editing

I also feel more confident using final cut pro, and have learned how to control it properly. In the foundation portfolio we used iMovie to edit, so having now been trained in both I feel more able to switch between the two depending on what the project requires. This also makes the editing process much speedier and efficient as I don’t have to constantly ask how to perform certain tasks or what certain tools do. The skills I have specifically learnt in Final Cut are how to put in effects such as fades and dissolves, how to write titles and how to make shots fade up or down, all of which I didn’t know before and have made our film flow much more smoothly.

A particular difficulty was with the sound editing, with which we kept transferring back and forth from Final Cut to Garage Band, because we'd realise there was something extra that needed to be added or cut out etc. However the process has helped me become far more confident with that also, as this was the first time I had used Garage Band and had to be taught as we went along. But

by the end I was confident, and successfully recorded Carl's guitar and the voiceovers and transferred them onto the programme without too much trouble. I also used a tape recorder to plug my iPod into, on which I had saved the sound from an episode of 'Gavin and Stacey' (for the end scene when the couple are watching the TV) and then transferred that sound across to the Mac to edit the bits we wanted into the right place. Being able to alter the volume levels was consistently useful as sometimes parts of the backing music overpowered the voice over and needed to go down slightly, and at the end the sound from the TV gets louder to suggest that it echoes the characters thoughts (we specifically chose a part which was highly relevant to the moment in the film).

Research and Planning

Having had more practise with Blogger, I can now more easily insert images and videos without help, which helps to make the blog more of a multi-media platform rather than just continuous essay writing. It has been useful to use this to demonstrate the research and planning that went in to our piece, because it means I can pick out specific references to shots with screen grabs and videos to illustrate my points and allow me to talk about them in more detail.

I used sites such as Youtube, BBC shorts and Virgin Media shorts to watch the short films for research, and used the print screen keyboard button (then pasting it into paint and saving it as a bmp. image) to get stills for my evaluation of these films. With more practise this process became faster and my navigation of these sites improved.

In the planning process, we took still photographs of the locations we'd use (for example, the loft of Tom's house and the college smoking area):

For these photos we used a digital camera borrowed from the media department, from which we downloaded the photos via a USB connection and saved them onto our college J-drive (and from this we were able to put them on the blog).

We also made an animatic storyboard, for which we used a Mini DV camera:

This produces worse quality moving image videos than the HD camera which we used for the actual film, but we felt this didn't matter as the animatic is more of a brief outline of how the finished product will run and therefore doesn't need to be expertly done. We edited this together in final cut pro and put in some diegetic sounds (such as birds and a kiss) to help get a general feel for the film. When it came to the actual filming, we had a better sense of the chronological order in which the shots should be filmed due to the animatic, and also knew roughly how long each shot should be. I also made a shot list (written on Microsoft Word) which we took to every filming session to ensure we didn't miss anything out.

Ancillary Tasks

For the review I used a combination of InDesign (for the layout and overall structure) and Photoshop (for the more fiddly parts such as the title and the 'Alice In Wonderland' images). Before this coursework I had not had much experience with InDesign, but it soon became clear after playing around for a while. I first created the template for where the image, copy and title boxes would go, which looked like this:

We then used Photoshop to create the Tweedle Dum and Cards, by taking the images from the internet, cutting and manipulating them using the freeform tools and paintbucket and colour-replace to change the colours on the cards to orange and green (so they matched the text boxes, which I also created on Photoshop). I then saved that file and re-opened it in InDesign, where me and Adam pasted the copy of the review from Microsoft Word into the text boxes I'd created and formatted them so they fit to the four columns. It was then a case of refining the final details (such as inserting a page number and the numbers for the scores of the Anticipation / Enjoyment / In Retrospect sections, which we pasted as new layers and sized.

As a small extra task to help format the review, I created a possible cover for the issue of 'Little White Lies' in which our film would appear.

For this I used Photoshop. I used google image to find the image of Johnny Depp's mad hatter from Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland', which at the time was the current blockbuster. I used the 'fresco' tool in image > adjustments in photoshop to make it more cartoon-like (to fit with the other covers of 'Little White Lies' i've seen) then put the contrast up slightly to make it stand out more. I then got the LWL logo from google images, pasted it into photoshop and cut it out, then pasted it as a new layer onto my image. I put it on his hat as it fit nicely and was in the centre of the page. I then used the paintbrush tool to write 'The Alice In Wonderland Issue' as I didn't want to use any of the standard photoshop fonts I'd seen. I finished by placing a small barcode in the bottom right hand corner for authenticity. Creating this helped develop my skills so that they were better when it came to making the actual review.

For my draft posters, again, I used Photoshop entirely. I got the image (one of which was a screen grab I'd got from the editing in final cut pro, the other was a still we'd taken on the first filming session of the couple sitting on the sofa). I used the shift keyboard button when I expanded the images to fit them to A4 size so that the width to length ratio didn't change and the photo become wonky. I then changed the brightness and contrast to try and make the image a bit clearer. For the image right, however, this was more difficult as it is of a much lower resolution than a proper photo. The text was done with the text tool, and I spent a while choosing what I believed to be the most appropriate font. I settled for a fairly simple one, with white writing, as I thought it would best represent the reality that social realism tries to communicate.

Dom and Arran also used Photoshop for the final poster, and they used similar tools as I did. Although they selected the entire image apart from Kate and desaturated it and also used the colour replace tool to change the bricks in the background to the same red as Kate's scarf, as with the title.

Gaining Feedback

To get evaluative comments on our film and poster, we decided to use social networking site Facebook. We did this because our target audience is 16-24, and most users of facebook are in this age bracket. It was also a good base to get comments, due to the sheer volume of members. Here are some facts from October 2009 about Facebook:

•"Each day, people around the world spend more than six billion minutes on Facebook, where they post 40 million status updates and become fans of 10 million pages."

•"In a little more than nine months, Facebook has managed to grow its user base from 150 million active members to 300 million."

We found this a highly successful platform for recieving feedback as we could post it as many times as we wanted to keep asking for more comments.

I have learnt alot about a variety of new media technologies from this project, which I hope is evident in the work we've produced as a group and what I've done individually.

Evaluation Part 1 - Keira

2010-04-19T00:43:00.027+01:00

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

Social realism as a style began as an attempt by film makers to represent those who were often stereotyped in film (for example, the working class) in a more true-to-life way than they had previously been, a key example of which is 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', directed by Karel Reisz in 1960. This meant developing the format of film to have a more realistic feel than the more melodramatic style that had been used up until then. We stuck to this key idea predominantly, providing a more truthful representation of many teenage relationships than what would have been provided in, for example, a fairytale love story where everything always ends happily. However we also decided to draw upon another genre (romance-comedy) in certain ways to engage our target audience of teenagers more effectively. This meant divulging from an entirely realistic style at times, which I will discuss later in how we challenged the conventions of our chosen style.

For research and planning I looked at a number of films of the social realism style to help further my understanding from what we'd learnt in class, and it was helpful to see it in practise so that the particular elements we wanted to use and didn't want to use were clearer.

How we used forms and conventions:

From Andrea Arnold's work, the unsteady camera movements which make the audience feel more involved in the scene rather than just passive viewers, and is a more documentary-style of filming which adds to the naturalistic feel. We wanted to put this across to our audience at certain times in the film (for example, when the couple are standing in their separate groups of friends we used a shaky camera effect to make viewers feel like they are more involved) -->

Naturalistic mise-en-scene in terms of lighting and costume and props. We didn't use any of our own torches or redheads for lighting the scenes and instead decided to rely on sunlight and the lights in the house because we wanted it to be entirely natural. If we had filmed at night, of course, this may not have been possible but as all our action took place during the day this wasn't a problem. The only time we had an issue with this technique was in the continuity of the final scene (when the couple are watching TV) as we had filmed the shot above earlier in the day when there was lots of sunlight coming through the window, then came back in the evening to film a tracking shot of Kate walking back into the room, which when we looked at it was unsuitable because of the sudden change in brightness. Luckily, this shot was not needed and we just filmed it to see what it would look like so there is no continuity problem in the final product with lighting. For the costumes we simply asked the actors to wear whatever they would normally, as they both dress in appropriate ways for the representation of a modern female and male teenager. We did ask Tom, however, to wear the same thing twice (even though in the film the scenes take place on different days) because we wanted to communicate the laziness of his character. This was further built with the placement of specific props (for example, the beer can next to him when he is playing bass). I suggested this after watching 'Conversation Piece' again and noting how the characters are built through the focus on props around the living room in the title sequence:

Realistic characters are an essential part of social realism as the audience need to believe the story could be true, as the stories are often comments on important and very much real issues in society. This was taken into consideration when choosing who would the couple in our film and to make it as realistic as possible we used a real couple and named the characters after them.

Additionally, a locations were a main consideration for realistic mise-en-scene. We gained inspiration from films such as 'Happy Go Lucky' (Mike Leigh, 2008) and 'Looking For Eric' (Ken Loach, 2009):

Which both respresent the parts of the country in which they are set (London and Manchester) with on-site filming rather than using studios. Obviously, this was convenient for us and we chose to film in the actors' own houses and college and local park with which they are very familar to make the action more realistic.

We used mainly eye-level shots, which we discvovered as another traditional convention of social realism (shown here used in 'Eight' by Stephen Daldry <--). These are used as a method of making the audience identify with the characters as we view them at their own height, almost face-to-face. It also helps to show the character's status as neutral, neither above nor below the others, which is what we wanted to do for Kate so that her and Tom are represented equally in terms of status.
When editing a social realism piece it is essential to maintain continuity as any mistakes would break the believability of the film. Therefore one of our main concerns when editing was to make our piece flow so that the cuts weren't obvious and didn't detract from the action. We achieved this using the rules of continuity - we deleted any shots where the camera broke the 180 degree rule, used match-on-action in a few shots which jumped from further away to closer up (for example, in the park scene where they walked along the path in extreme long shot then it cut to mid shot):

-->

We also used a lot of cross dissolve and fade transitions which we felt helped the piece flow.

We also used some of the forms and conventions in the rom-com genre. For example, the plot contained romance and in the way of that romance were obstacles (e.g. Tom's imperfections, and the fact that the relationship is unbalanced in terms of feeling). The mise-en-scene used locations such as the park, college, bedrooms which you often find in rom-coms. Using some close ups on character's faces to show their emotion. Moments of comedy also created by close ups on expressions (for example, when the couple are in bed together), we framed the shot to create the idea of Kate trapped in this awkward situation.

How we developed forms and conventions:

The themes and issues explored were a different twist on a generic storyline (boy meets girl, they fall in love) and it challenged the traditional expectations of romance by considering what happens when a relationship is unbalanced. The idea of an imperfect relationship was inspired a short film I watched called 'The Space Between Us' by Magali Charrier (watch here), in which we follow the story of a girl who has anxieties about her relationship with her boyfriend, whom it turns out loves her just as much. We took this basic idea and pushed it further by ending it on an unresolved and unhappy note, in which Kate is about to tell Tom that she loves him, while he is about to break up with her. This kind of uneasy ending is typical of social realism and achieves our aim of leaving the audience wanting to know what happens, and craving a happy ending.
Another key element of the above film that inspired me when creating the original concept was the use of voiceover. The woman (Anita) narrates by telling the audience her feelings towards the man (Paul) like so: 'A month ago I met Paul. And I fell for him. That was it I thought - love, simple and undemanding. Perfect. But I'm still falling - relentlessly, scarily. I wonder if he's falling too.' In the same way, I wrote the script entirely as a voiceover, but developed this original concept by having both characters narrating rather than just one. For example, Kate's opening lines are: 'We haven't been going out for long. Three months and 11 days...but I've liked him for ages.' and Tom's later on are 'We've been going out ages...like, 2 months at least. She was always staring at me so I knew she liked me.' I thought this would provide an interesting concept for the viewers and would give them equal perspective on both sides of the relationship. Here is a clip of 'The Space Between Us', to illustrate the effect of the voice over:

How we challenged forms and conventions:

The narrative structure of our piece was unlike any films we had watched for research. When trying to think of an idea for our storyline, 'The Space Between Us' made me think about the insecurities in relationships and that it might be interesting for a viewer to see both sides of one and their thoughts
about each other. I wanted to create a parallel between the two characters by showing similar images when they talked about each other, but saying different things. For example, over an image of pizza, Kate's dialogue says: 'He's always eating...and I mean ALWAYS eating. It's quite disgusting actually. He never leaves any for me and he's got no manners.' While Tom's voice over later of a similar image says: 'She always lets me have the most and NEVER complains.' We had several of these in a sequence to show the differences between them, and it switches from Kate to Tom and back again throughout, providing an equilibrium between the identification with the audience. Unlike in Todorov's theory of narrative structure where by the end the equilibrium has been restored, our film ends on a cliffhanger (but one in which the audience are aware of what will happen) and the story has mounted to a climax which we are left with. In classic social realism fashion, the story is more realistic to real life where everything doesn't always become easily and happily resolved.

The editing of our film was probably most of its most important and distinguishing features, and helped us to create a more original and interesting narrative structure within the short film format. I came up with the idea of using parallel editing to create irony at the end when the shot switches between Kate and Tom quite quickly, and they are both thinking the same words but with different meaning behind them. I faced a difficulty in editing at this point as we had to edit the images together before the voiceover had been recorded, which meant having to estimate the amount of time it would take for the characters to say each thing before switching shot back to the other. For most of them I was accurate, but for some I left the time for too long which meant there was a gap between one character finishing talking and the shot changing, which looked untidy and didn't create the quick-fire effect I'd imagined. We got around this for the most part by cutting the sound up and putting more gaps in between to make it last longer, but with this there is the danger of the viewers being able to hear where it's been cut. However, I think it was mostly successful and the only bit which doesn't look quite right in my opinion is on the word 'love' where the sound seems to have been cut slightly to close to the word and it sounds shorter than it should.

In a similar way to '500 Days Of Summer', there are elements of our film which are somewhat reminiscent of fantasy. The fades and dissolves between each of our scenes are an effect often used for dream sequences, and the use of voiceover throughout rather than any diegetic sound (other than birds at the beginning and the television at the end) is challenging the boundaries of social realism and introducing elements of other styles. There are also a couple of shots in the pizza eating scene which we either slowed down (when he is taking a bite) or sped up (when he is taking the pieces) the shots very slightly to increase the comedy, though not enough to be too noticeable and divulge from social realism.

As for the poster, there are also clear conventions for social realism within this medium. For example, the above poster for '500 Days Of Summer' is an original and interesting design, but still holds some of the same basic rules for a social realism poster that I have identified through research. Below I will go through these conventions and see which we have stuck to:

The main character(s) clearly displayed - Yes. Tom and Kate are the main image, in the centre and taking up almost the whole poster.
Reviews and awards - Yes. We have two reviews and two awards shown. However, these are not necessarily easy to see or read and are somewhat messy-looking. In the other posters I have looked at the reviews are made very obvious. See 'Happy-Go-Lucky', for example (--->) Very simple layout, but with the reviews clearly displayed on a different coloured section in large writing at the top.
The use of more demure colours (greys, whites, dark blues) juxtaposed against bright colours - Yes. We have desaturated everything in our image apart from Kate (to show her love towards Tom), the title (to draw attention to it), and a few of the bricks behind them (to echo the poster for 'Fish Tank'):

The director and actors' names clearly shown - No. You can only see these names in barely visible writing at the bottom. We did this because it's usually only well-known names that are put largely on posters to sell the film, rather than newcomers. However, perhaps to better stick to the conventions we've learnt we should have pretended we were well-known anyway. 'This Is England' is a good example of this technique:

It says direcly underneath the title 'A film by Shane Meadows', which is a highly well-known name for the target audience of this poster and therefore a selling point for the film.

The setting for the image shows where the film is set (which in the case of social realism is almost always urban, working class sorts of areas). We have tried to mirror this as best we can with the brick wall behind them, although it is quite irrelevalnt to the film which could be potentially misleading. Perhaps it would have been better (considering other posters I've seen) to take the photo against a background of one of the locations actually used in the film.

Tag line clearly displayed underneath or next to the title - Yes and no. Our tag line is made clear by it being in red, as a contrast to the grey behind it, but it is in quite small writing (compared to the other posters I've looked at) and is at the bottom rather than directly next to the title, meaning the viewers' eyes aren't immedietely drawn to it. We made the decision to put it where it is, however, on the basis that any writing against the brick wall background is quite hard to see (as the reviews demonstrate) and it is far easier to read against Tom's shirt.

Short film distribution research - Dom

2010-04-18T15:41:00.005+01:00

Distribution Research

Good websites for short film promotion

http://www.atom.com/
www.shortfilms.com
http://www.youtube.com/futureshorts
http://www.virginmediashorts.co.uk

Festivals that include or are dedicated to short films

Bang!
LA international Short Film Festival
Encounters
London Short Film Festival

Short Film Distributors

Dazzle (http://www.dazzlefilms.co.uk)
Omni (www.omnifilmdistribution.com)
BBC film network

From my research about all of these ways of distributing short films there seems to be a common consensus that the best way to get a short film seen is via the internet. Linking this to our product, we have kind of taken the first step to getting the film distributed in this blog and the video being on youtube and social networking sites such as facebook. If we were to carry on with distributing the film I personally would enter the film into Virgin Media Shorts competition and then try to get it into a film festival like Bang! or London Short Film Festival, this would not only get the film seen and promote it but it would also give potential distributors such as Dazzle to see it and possibly distribute it.

Final Film Feedback - Dom

2010-04-12T12:34:00.000+01:00

Here is feedback from people on facebook and thier ages to show they are in our target market.

Ben Brown 17- sik film man, love the story line and their different views on what they both think and using the handheld camera was good touch making it seem more like a point of view shot innit.

The only thing is that you can kinda hear when u are starting and stopping the voice recorder with the voice overs. you need some criticisms nice work thou mate

Callum Mclean 18 - I'd already read your screenplay so the concept wasn't a surprise, but realised it worked even better than I had anticipated, I thought it was the perfect form for a student film. You guys didn't attempt anything over-ambitious, it was a charming snippet of teenage innocence with some kinda profound undertones. ... See moreI liked the end, in that you didn't milk the sadness, it stayed light-hearted in a way. Excellent acting guys, was chmiel even playing a different character? :)

Abi Walker 17 - the repeated pattern thing but with different views. so nicely done and written :). loved the music in the background too. The only thing i would say is sometimes the sound seemed to cut out. but it was amazingly directed. seriously. impressive.
love it.

Tahsina Rahman 17 - The framing, plot, editing and use of non diagetic sound is very good! Great work guys :D

James Bourn 24 - i liked the camera work and editing the best! good use of voice over guys well done.

Joe Merrion 16 - Really good people, good editing, scene change, filming, camera angles, quality of film and theme selection. However one criticism could be that the sound should be polished a bit more as the sound cut out every now and then. Otherwise well done x

Film Poster Research - Dom

2010-04-12T12:09:00.001+01:00

I like the use of the colour in this poster and how they have put a desaturated background with a very bright and actually artificial looking sky. Then in the desaturated picture there is things that really stand out like the bright yellow curtain that is the same colour of the title and the red arsenal shirt that tell the audience that the film is set somewhere like london. The use of the colour contrasting with the desaturation of the rest of the picture is effective as it draws attention to the poster.

Review - Keira and Adam

2010-04-01T16:09:00.000+01:00

This is the final draft of our review, which we are very pleased with having spent a lot of time perfecting the details. The theme (as previously posted) for the magazine is Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland'. This has informed the design and colour-scheme (as you can see above).

Keira and Adam

Film Review final text - Adam et Kiera

2010-04-01T13:33:00.000+01:00

With time you come to expect the same generic romance story which always ends in one finding one’s ‘true love’ and living happily ever after in a perfect little cul-de-sac far, far away. Rarely is it that you come across a film of this style brave enough to challenge those boundaries and seek more original ways to entice its audience. From the title, you’d expect ‘Three Words’ to be the former: another timid, sickly-sweet attempt at capturing the nation’s hearts with the words “I love you”. Alas for Kate, the female protagonist, this is not to be as her messy, rude, smoker of a boyfriend doesn’t quite cut the traditional picture of Prince Charming.

Aimed directly at the modern teen, this edgy yet somewhat-comfortingly-familiar tale of dysfunctional adolescent romance acts as a voice for males and females who’ve been in the same position as Tom and Kate. The frustratingly close-to-perfect (yet just missing that “certain something”) state of their relationship hits the nail on the head as a study of current times, and may be frighteningly mirror-like to many members of the audience.

Barkley captures the essence of female teenager with ease, bringing her own subtle mannerisms which colour the character beautifully. While Chmiel brings a wonderfully uncomplicated mesh of your typical slobbish teenage boy features (eating, smoking, sex-driven) They work in harmony to paint the audience a clear picture of their relationship, even in the short 5 minutes for which we encounter them.

Carl Williams’ guitar opens the film bringing with it a ‘Juno’-style indie-friendly feel, which gives the impression of another innocent teen romance film. This mood changes completely when the music stops leaving only the voice over, laying bare the characters’ thoughts and emotions and adding an unexpected depth to the story. The music doesn’t come back in until the end credits - a gentle echo of the emotions at the start - and although remaining the same it brings with it a whole new meaning to the innocence and naivety of first love.

Not unlike ‘500 Days Of Summer’, the film explores its themes partly through voiceovers and manages to soften it’s harsh message through the use of subtle comedy. The contrast between the lead characters and their interpretations of situations is the result of a very well scripted piece of film – giving a true insight into the way men and women (especially teens) think of their opposing sex. It helps that the filmmakers are represented equally by both gender giving this film a unique and knowing insight into relationships of this age group but also managing to appeal to audiences of a variety of age.

This film makes no pretence to be what it’s not; there are no fancy effects, costly sets and costumes or gut-busting action, and in that way (amongst many others) it is social realism through and through. However, the film-makers have added a new dimension by introducing moments of humour and stylistic ways of presenting the story which are a pleasant surprise, and help to effectively communicate the emotions throughout.

For example, the voice-over acts as our personal guide through the character’s heads, telling us bluntly and without pretence their feelings towards each other at different times. This builds up to (in classic social realism fashion) a suspenseful ending where all that we’ve seen must come to a head and it’s those final moments that will really grab the audience’s attention in a chokehold, the awkwardness and nerves practically pouring out of the screen.

For debut directors Keira Smalley, Dominic Michau, Adam Rutherford and Arran Fitzgerald, this is a team teen triumph which is bound to earn them a successful grounding in the film business should their joint endeavours continue. ‘Three Words’ is not going to break any records or change people’s lives, but it will leave you with a satisfying sense of truth and reflection which will echo the feelings of many frustrated teens around the country.

Final Film Poster - Dominic, Arran

2010-04-01T09:53:00.000+01:00

This is the final film poster that we have decided to use. We continued with the theme of binary oppostion from my previous poster by desaturating Tom and keeping Kate in colour this shows the people looking at the poster a sense of coldness and lack of emotion from Tom and Kate is full of love. We decided to use the colour of kates scarf which was a rose colour to paint the bricks that colour. This like the poster for Somers Town it draws attention to the audience and continuing with this theme we also put the title in the colour of scarf and the hearts in the colour of the jumper.

Little White Lies Cover - Keira

2010-03-31T08:46:00.001+01:00

For our review, we have made a quick cover for the whole magazine which we felt would help us to get the feel for the colour scheme inside and what we need to be doing with the layout of the article itself. We chose Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland' as the film of the issue, as it's current and quirky and would be a fun theme to have running through the magazine:We made the image look more cartoon using photoshop and added the Little White Lies logo, a barcode and the title of the film to replicate what it might look like in real life. We will now use this colour scheme and theme as a basis for designing the look of our article.

Keira

Editing Process 4 - Keira

2010-03-30T11:01:00.001+01:00

We have now completely finished the editing of our film (as you can see above), and we are very pleased with the product although the sound took alot longer than expected.
The voice over in the end was recorded with myself as the female part and Carl Williams (who also played guitar for the sound track) as the male part, due to availability and for the sake of ease. We had some trouble editing it (particularly in the part where it cuts quickly between the two voices) as there wasn't enough of a gap left between each word so some of them ('love' in particular) seem to end very suddenly.
We also had alot of trouble downloading the video (Scrubs or Brief Encounter) from Youtube, so we had the idea of using a different source to illiminate this problem. I downloaded an episode of Gavin and Stacey from iTunes (episode 1) which Adam suggested would be appropriate to the theme as the final words are:
'I told myself if I ever saw you again that I'd tell you something.'
'If you say it I'll say it back.'
'I love you.'
'I love you too.'
(Watch below, from approx 8:00 onwards):

We cut it at 'If you say it i'll say it to', as in our story Kate is just about to say she loves him and we know Tom won't say it back, so we thought to have that as the last line on the TV they're watching would introduce some cruel comic irony.
Despite the difficulties we faced with the sound we are all pleased as a group with the final product and with the feedback we've recieved so far.

Keira

Film Feedback - Keira

2010-03-29T13:39:00.000+01:00

To gain feedback for our film we are using youtube and facebook as platforms for people to leave comments, which we have tried to promote as much as possible via word of mouth and email.
To view our youtube video please click here...

To view our facebook page please click the link on the right (titled 'our facebook group')-->

Once we have a steady flow of feedback we will publish some of the comments on the blog.

Keira

Draft of copy for review - Keira and Adam

2010-03-29T13:36:00.000+01:00

Here is what we have written so far for the review:

With time you expect the same generic romance story which always ends in one finding one’s ‘true love’ and living happily ever after in a perfect little cul-de-sac far, far away. Rarely is it that you come across a film of this style brave enough to challenge those boundaries and seek more original ways to entice its audience. From the title, you’d expect ‘Three Words’ to be the former: another timid, sickly-sweet attempt at capturing the nation’s hearts with the words “I love you”. Alas for Kate, the female protagonist, this is not to be as her messy, rude, sexually unsatisfying, smoker of a boyfriend doesn’t quite cut the traditional picture of Prince Charming.

Aimed directly at the modern teen, this edgy yet somewhat-comfortingly-familiar tale of dysfunctional adolescent romance acts as a voice for males and females who’ve been in the same position as Tom and Kate. The frustratingly close-to-perfect (yet just missing that “certain something”) state of their relationship hits the nail on the head as a study of current times, and may be frighteningly mirror-like to many members of the audience.

Not unlike ‘500 Days Of Summer’ in the emotions explored, ____

This film makes no pretence to be what it’s not; there are no fancy effects, costly sets and costumes or gut-busting action, and in that way (amongst many others) it is social realism through and through. However, the film-makers have added a new dimension by introducing moments of humour and stylistic ways of presenting the story which are a pleasant surprise, and help to effectively communicate the emotions_____ . For example, the voice-over acts as our personal guide through the character’s heads, telling us bluntly and ___ their feelings towards each other at different times. This builds up to (in classic social realism fashion) a suspenseful ending where all that we’ve seen must come to a head and it’s those final moments that will really grab the audience’s attention in a chokehold, the awkwardness and nerves practically pouring out of the screen.

For debut directors Keira Smalley, Dominic Michau, Adam Rutherford and Arran Fitzgerald, this is a team teen triumph which is bound to earn them a successful grounding in the film business should their joint endeavours continue. ‘Three Words’ is not going to break any records or change people’s lives, but it will leave you with a satisfying sense of truth and reflection which will echo the feelings of many frustrated teens around the country.

As you can see there are gaps to be filled and it is not yet completely finished, but we are happy with what we've written so far.
We will try to get the next draft or final version posted as soon as possible.

Keira and Adam

Review Template

2010-03-22T11:18:00.000Z

Here is a print screen shot of creating the template for our review on InDesign, following examples of layout from Little White Lies magazine:

Adam and Keira

Sound Editing by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-03-19T12:06:00.000Z

I have found the sound editing to be incredibly difficult with this film as it's completely different to anything i have worked on before for a couple of reasons:

We are using voice-overs throughout the film instead of using speech direct from the footage
We are using are own music rather then the tacky and cliche presets offered to us on garage band

The voice-over have proved incredibly difficult to record as we were hoping to use the actors used in the film, however it has proved to be a problematic feat to find time where we are all available to do so. We have opted for the next best thing and used to preforming arts students to do the voice-overs instead. The task of recording has proved difficult in itself as the voice-overs in the film are all based on very tight timing.

The idea to record our own music came easily, as I couldn't be more fed up of the presets on garage band. "Emotional piano" and "delicate guitar" just weren't gonna cut it, making me realise that recording some actual guitar would be a better idea. We enlisted the help of friend and fellow music student Carl Williams to lay down a guitar part with a real Rom-com "Juno" kind of feel. I couldn't be happier with the final result, as i think it fits into the film perfectly keeping to the genre perfectly.

White Lies Magazine - Keira

2010-03-16T15:53:00.000Z

Here... is a link to Little White Lies Magazine online, which we have researched in order to start to get a feel for the magazine section of the ancilary tasks. The writing style (from the reviews i've read) is quite formal but maintains a broad audience appeal by being easy to understand by not over-using long words and complex phrasing.

For example, this is an extract of a review of Alice In Wonderland:

"The result is a film both familiar, and inventively different, from Lewis Carroll's nineteenth-century fantasy novels for children, not to mention John Tenniel's accompanying illustrations. Adaptation is not just the medium, but a central theme, as one Alice, half-guided by a book and a vision, is transformed into another."

Some colloquial phrasing is used ("not to mention") but it comes accross over all as a highly intelligent and well-informed review, convincing the audience they know what they're talking about. This is the kind of style we will aim for with our magazine piece, therefore.

Keira Smalley

Editing Process 3 - Keira

2010-03-16T12:02:00.001Z

The final scene is the climax and most pinacle moment of the 5 minutes, and is the only scene which is present-time rather than telling what's happened up until this point. Because of this, we have decided to keep all the original sounds which were recorded during filming (e.g. Kate kissing Tom, opening and shutting of doors, sighs etc.) to make it more real and tell the audience this is what's happening now. This will also stick to the conventions of social realsim better.

A problem we face with this is that the couple are watching TV in the scene. This is a problem for the sound because when we cut between shots (for example, when it goes from medium long shot to medium close up) the sound of the TV jumps to a different place. Because of this, we have decided to get different sound from Youtube to replace it. We want something that will be ironic or make a point about the scene, so we decided to use a romantic moment from a film that they could be watching to make the atmosphere more awkward.
Brief Encounter seemed a good choice to use, as we all know it so well and it is a classic romance film. It would also show a big contrast to relationships then and relationships now, which might be an interesting theme at the end of the film. If we were to use Brief Encounter, it would probably be this clip (it being one of the most famous from the film):

However, as in the actual sound we recorded during filming is from Scrubs (what is more likely they'd be watching) and which also fits in with the atmosphere, we may decide to keep that. Another bonus of this is that we wouldn't have to delete the original sound from the scene completely, meaning we also got rid of the diegetic sounds i mentioned earlier (walking, kissing etc.). Therefore, I have found this clip from Scrubs that I feel would make the atmosphere most awkward at the point where Kate comes back in the room and they are about to tell each other how they feel:

We can do a version with both and see which works best.

Keira Smalley

Editing Process 2 - Keira

2010-03-15T15:24:00.001Z

As a group we have almost completed our short film. The moving image editing is completed, but we have had a few problems with the sound as recording the voiceover has proven more difficult to complete than anticipated. On several occassions we have tried to get this done but it hasn't been possible either due to technical difficulties (the voice recording equipment not working) or because the actors have had to cancel last minute. We had considered using different people to record it (for example, just members of our group) but would rather have had the people we originally intended as it would allow us to see it as more realistic. However, as the deadline has now passed we no longer have the luxury of choice we have had to try it with other people (Kiah and Kris from our media class).
The music for our film, on the other hand, works well with the piece and we are very pleased with it. It was recorded on guitar by a friend of the group who made up a very simple tune which (having watched a silent version of our film and being told what it's about) we agreed suited the tone. This will play through the first (approx) 2 minutes, then fade out as the tune could get a bit repetitive for the audience and become a distraction, it also doesn't suit some parts (for example, when Kate's describing the bad parts of Tom). It will come back in for the credits at the end to act as a backdrop and remind the audience of the start. The simplicity of the tune is similar to that in 'The Space Between Us' (the short film which was the main inspiration for ours). Listen here:

As for the foleys, Adam has decided to make a version both with them (for example, birds in the park, walking, the sound of Tom snoring etc.) and without, because he wants to see what better suits the mood of the film. It is most likely that the foleys will be used as they stick to the conventions of social realism, but we felt it was important to test different ideas.

Keira Smalley

Dom Film Poster idea

2010-03-12T10:48:00.001Z

This poster was originally a poster for the 2007 film control. When doing my film poster research i came across this poster and thought that it really showed that the character had a good and dark side represented by the use of black and white background. This was very similar to the whole concept of our film as there is Kate who is in love and Tom who wants to break up. The binary opposition throughout the film would be well represented by this poster. The colour of the title is also interesting as the use of a rose colour gives two impression; either love or hate.

Poster Draft by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-03-12T10:45:00.000Z

My idea for the poster came from the idea that as a group we would produce two poster's, one with a picture of Kate and one of Tom. We've decided instead to use one poster with the page cut in half with thier individual faces on either side.

The concept for this poster was fairly simple using a screen grab of Kate from the film to show in a reflective mood, an idea I got from the Fish Tank poster, with Katherine Jarvis looking out the window. I really liked the idea of Kate looking into the mirror with determination showing her to be a strong character. Because of the original idea of using two posters I wanted Kate's to really appeal to women by using a effective shot showing her stregnth. Mike Leigh and Andrea Arnold are both well known for creating strong female characters so I drew my influence from them.

The text I used for the 'reviews' isn't as professional as it could have been but because this was a draft I was thinking more about the placement of the words and size of font. I am happy with the way the poster looks and think that it could have been an effective marketing tool if we had of gone down the route of using two posters.

Poster Idea 2 - Keira

2010-03-09T15:42:00.001Z

This is my second poster draft. This is an image we took as a group quite early on in the process (see earlier posts) as a potential poster photo as it represents the couple's general feelings towards each other. However, it could be argued that this image doesn't look realistic and looks more posed which would not be appropriate for social realism. I have still used the tag line of 'Tom. Kate. Love?' but placed it away from the title, which perhaps doesn't work as effectively. The tagline under the title ('Choose them carefully.') is not appropriate as on reflection it seems more like a thriller tagline and gives off the wrong impression. The colours of this picture are too bright and if we were to use this image for the real poster we would manipulate it to be slightly darker. We would also re-take the photo as a whole as the bowl of chips in Tom's hand is not a clear enough prop, whereas a bag of crisps or something more obvious might serve the purpose better.

Poster Idea - Keira

2010-03-09T14:12:00.000Z

This is my first draft poster which shows Kate and Tom in bed together (it's a still from our film). As the title is 'Three Words' I have used three words to sell the film 'Kate. Tom. Love?' then the line underneath the title in the bottom right corner is 'A comedy drama about real relationships.' which gives the audience an idea of the genre and content of the film so they can be more aware of whether they'd want to see it. The image itself is eye catching as it's a bit risqé and would attract attention, and also communicates the comedy which we've intergrated. However, this image doesn't effectively represent the story of our film as in the story Kate is the one in love with Tom but here she doesn't look it.

Arran: Poster Idea

2010-03-05T11:08:00.000Z

This is a layout that i think would work for our advertising poster. I think it is suitable because it shows both the characters which is a trend in most social realism advertising campaigns.

For the title i will need to research fonts further;

Three Words

Love You More still - Keira

2010-02-26T12:51:00.001Z

This is a still from 'Love You More' (see review below)

Similarities can be drawn between our film and this, although the themes explored and characters are entirely different.

Here is a still from our film:
This shows we are taking into consideration films we have seen, and using them to inform our own work.

Keira Smalley

Editing Process - Keira

2010-02-26T12:16:00.000Z

We have edited the majority of our film, and as a group we feel it's gone well. In Adam's post were some screen grabs from what we'd done so far, and here are some more:

This is one of the closeups of Tom playing bass, that goes with the voice over when Kate says 'There's just something about him.' It is filmed in a rough shaky style (similar to that often used in 'Wasp') to both incorporate a traditional social realism and to show that it's like she's watching him.

This is one of the eating shots which goes with the voice over of Kate saying 'he eats...A LOT.' For this we are considering slowing the shot down so that there is more emphasis on how disgusting his eating is. Likewise, with the shots below, we have edited them so that the camera stays in the same place but Tom takes each piece of pizza straight after the other to suggest he's eating really fast. By changing the speed of the shots we would be breaking a convention of typical social realism, but it may improve our film by introducing some comedy. Many of the social realism shorts we've watched have been hybirds, including elements of other genres, so we believe it is justified to break this convention.

This shot goes with the voiceover of Kate saying 'And he even wears socks in bed.', which again (we hope) will bring some slight comedy for the audience. All these shots juxtapose the ones where Tom is talking about Kate (e.g. 'She's beautiful') because he is thinking about her good points and she is thinking about his bad points. This forms the basis to the idea of our film that relationships aren't simple.

In the editing process we have decided to include fades and dissolves, in some cases to show the passage of time and in some to make the shots flow together better. In this scene, Kate is lying on her bed writing in her diary about Tom and in the shot she changes positions while the camera stays in the same place - this tells the audience she's been writing for a long time. To the left is an example of our dissolve, this is a still from in between two shots. For the lighting here, Adam suggested we make the room darker and use one table lamp to light the scene so it looks like evening. This has worked well as a contrast to the other daytime shots.

We will continue editing in our frees, and need to start thinking about considerations for the voice over. We might have a few more shots to film, but that depends on how we feel having watched what we've done so far.

Keira Smalley

Screen grabs by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-02-26T10:39:00.000Z

Just a few screengrabs from our film so far. This should hopefully give a good idea of the narrative were going on and also our usage of lighting and shots. More to come later

More Film Promotion - Keira

2010-02-21T15:53:00.000Z

'Colin' (2008) from Nowhere Fast Productions is an extremely low-budget zombie horror that aims to make its viewers think by positioning them in sympathy with a member of the undead, Colin.
View the IMDb page here....

See the poster:

The film's promotion strongly features the fact that the film had such a low budget. If you can see underneath, the tag line for the whole film is 'the £45 zombie movie!' This draws people in as they want to see how effectively such a small amount can be used to make a film.

The choice of title is mocking of other zombie and horror films, as it's slightly humerous in the fact that it's just a normal name rather than following the same lines as 'Dawn of the Dead', 'Return of the Living Dead', 'Night of the Living Dead'...a clear pattern emerges. The choice of bold red font (connoting blood) juxtaposes the title which is another deivce to create intregue. The image (which is used in all the promotion and the DVD cover) is shocking enough to make people look, whilst also showing the non-mainstream concept with the lack of special effects (such as white eyes or other typical zombie features, see right). It puts accross the point that he looks like a normal human acting like a zombie, which again challenges our ideas of the genre.

Although our film is not horror, it is useful to examine any promotion (particularly that of such a low budget) to get more ideas of how to present our own poster.

Keira Smalley

Filming

2010-02-21T14:34:00.000Z

On 11th February we filmed all the inside shots. As a group we feel this was successful as we completed the list of shots we needed and having watched them back on the camera, they seem to look good. One issue might be with the continuity in lighting from shots that are chronologically next to each other but we filmed at different parts of the day, and the light coming in from the window is different. If we feel this is noticeable when re-watching the shots on the computer, these can easily be re-filmed another day.
We were supposed to film the park shots on 18th February but the weather was inappropriate (heavy rain) so we decided to postpone until a day when we know the weather will be better.
We are definately filming on the 24th February for the in-college shots, so maybe this would be a good oppertunity to do the park ones as well.

We will post again after watching back our footage so far.

Considerations for the poster - Keira

2010-02-08T09:30:00.000Z

We have started to think about possible imagery and information to be included in the poster, in order for it to best represent our short film. We have decided to keep it simple in design (as that seems to be a recurring feature of social realism posters) and hope to think of a catchy tagline to draw the audience in. We have also been considering posible fonts for the title ('Three Words') and the best we have found so far is here..., which is from dafont.com and is called 'Loverboy'. We felt it worked because it uses hearts to indicate the story is based on a relationship, whilst not being too fancy or pleasant, to indicate it's not necessarily all happy.

Keira Smalley

'Love You More' - film review - Keira

2010-02-05T10:53:00.000Z

This is a review from the Guardian online of a short film called 'Love You More', directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, that won 'Best British Short' at the British Independent Film Awards.

The review talks of its premiere at the Hay film festival, saying it provided some 'much needed sunny optimism'.

Here's a still from the film:

I think reviews such as this will help me learn how to write in review-format and to use the appropriate language etc.

Keira Smalley

Shot List

2010-01-29T10:55:00.000Z

Shot list

Straight cut. Close up of her face looking at writing and smiling. Shaky. ‘neither could I. It didn’t matter…’ (8 secs)

C Fade cut. Long shot of Chmiel playing bass (sitting in bimm room?) ‘there’s just something about him.’ (6 secs)

C Straight cut. Extreme close ups of his fingers playing, quick cuts (fades)? (4 secs)

C Fade cut back to park, medium long shot as before, they sit down on a bench, camera pans and tilts to follow. He leans and kisses her on the cheek. ‘We’ve been going out ages…like 2 months at least.’ (10 secs) – 1 minute

C Fade cut to group of friends talking from before. His friends nudge him and point, he turns and looks at her (shaky pan to her, smiling). ‘It took me a while to notice her, but my friends were so jealous that she liked me.’ Pan back to male group, friends raise their eyebrows and shake heads.’ (12 secs)

C ‘Apparently she was something special’. Medium of Kate laughing in her group. Pos slow motion? (5 secs)

C Fade back to park. ‘I know that he isn’t perfect.’ Getting up from bench long shot. Start walking. (4 secs)

C Straight Cut. Smoking area. Close up of Chmiel putting cigarette in his mouth and lighting it. Change of d.o.f. half way through ‘He smokes.’ (4 secs)

C Straight Cut. Chmiel’s kitchen. Close up pan and tilt following him taking piece of pizza from box, stuffing it in his mouth. ‘Eats A LOT.’ Sped up shots of him taking piece after piece until box is empty. Last shot was pos slow motion ECU on Chmiel’s mouth. (10 secs)

C Medium close up of Chmiel asleep in bed (snoring his face off) and Kate lying next to him covering her ears and looking traumatised. ‘Snores’ pans down the bed to…

C Close up of Chmiel’s feet coming out the end of a bed, wearing HORRID socks. ‘And he wears socks in bed.’ (12 secs)

C Back to park, getting up and walking away, this time camera is in front of them. She’s chatting away, he’s looking uninterested ‘But I don’t mind, to me, he is perfect.’ ‘She’s perfect…’ (10 secs)

C Same shot as before in the smoking area, Chmiel lights a cigarette, but with Kate in the background smiling. Static. ‘She doesn’t care about the cigarettes.’ (5 secs) – 2 minutes

C In Chmiel’s Kitchen, Kate takes one slice of pizza and puts it on her plate. Close up pan and tilt. ‘She always lets me have the most.’ (4 secs)

C (Something about being amazing in bed) Medium shot, very high angle shot of Chmiel looked very pleasured

C Medium close up in bed, Kate asleep, Chmiel looking at her ‘ And she’s beautiful’ (5 secs)

C Back to park, they reach the camera, and walk past, Chmiel has concerned look on his face while Kate is still smiling and chatting away. ‘So why haven’t I fallen for her?’ (7 secs)

C Kate in common room ELS then shaky zoom to MLS, people walking past in front of camera.

C CU over shoulder of Kate’s note pad covered in I love Tom!

C Corridor near common room Chmiel and mates walking with mates. Tracking shot from behind him.

C Switch to over way as he turns round. See the girl wink as he walks by and he turns round to give her a second look over.

C Long shot of the ugly couple sitting on sofa!

C Close up of Kate looking up at him.

C POV low angle close up on Chmiel not moving.

C Long shot of her getting up, stays on him.

C Her in bathroom looking in mirror. Over shoulder shot with kate in the right hand of the frame. (sighs)

C Straight cut to him, close up in left side of frame finishing sigh.

C SC back to her. ‘I can do this..I—

C SC back to him ‘can do this. It shouldn’t be—

C SC back to her ‘this hard. (sigh) I—

C SC back to him ‘Let’s—

C SC back to her ‘Love—

C SC back to him ‘Break—

C SC back to her ‘You—

C SC back to him ‘Up.’

C SC back to her. She quickly fiddles with her hair and makeup and smiles.

C She comes back in, camera tracks behind as she opens door (shaky) Voiceover = ‘Shit, shit’

C Over shoulder shot of him watching her come in (shaky) Voiceover = ‘Shit.’

C Original long shot of them sitting on sofa. Couple of seconds of awkward sitting, both straight up, not looking at each other.

C Medium close up (2-shot) of them in the same position, sitting next to each other. They both turn and take an in-breath to indicate they’re about to speak.

C Straight cut to black. Credits.

Wasp funding info by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-01-28T15:45:00.001Z

Wasp

Location: England, UK

Project name

‘Wasp’

Who is the applicant?

Cowboy Films

What is the project?

A 23 minute short film. Zoe a single mother is in search of an evening escape with an old flame but her romantic aspirations are hampered by her four small children waiting outside in the pub car park.

Who gave the money?

UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund

What was the grant programme?

The ‘Cinema Extreme’ short film scheme co-financed by the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund and Film Four. The scheme was created in 2002 to encourage and develop directors with a distinctive directorial voice and cinematic flair.

How much was given?

The project received a total production budget of £53,250, fifty per cent of this amount was awarded by the New Cinema Fund and the remainder by FilmFour. Additional funds were made available by the UK Film Council to clear music rights and promote the film at international festivals.

Where is the project located?

The film was shot in and around Dartford, Kent. The ‘Cinema Extreme’ scheme is open to filmmakers and production companies based in the UK.

Why was the project so good?

The completed film has enjoyed enormous critical success and won 36 awards at international film festivals, including the 2005 Oscar® for Best Live Action Short Film.

It has firmly established director Andrea Arnold as one of the most interesting up-and-coming directing talents from the UK. At its premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival the film attracted the interest of Denmark’s Zentropa and Scotland’s Sigma Films who subsequently commissioned Andrea to work on her debut feature ‘Advance Party’.

‘Wasp’ also helped to launch the career of Nathalie Press who stars in the film as Zoe. Nathalie has since drawn huge acclaim for her role in ‘My Summer of Love’, stars in Martha Fiennes’ ‘Chromophobia’ and is appearing in the BBC’s ‘Bleak House’.

All information taken from
http://www.lotteryfunding.org.uk/uk/lottery-funders-listing/uk-film-council/ukfilm-wasp-case-study.htm

Arran: Conversation Piece

2010-01-27T10:42:00.000Z

Conversation Piece is a short film directed by Joe Tunmer for the BBC. Produced by Enrico and Junior from New Treatment.

http://www.newtreatment/ .co.uk

One sleepy Sunday morning, Jean notices a chip on a treasured vase. She accuses Maurice, her husband since whenever. He denies it. Employing a variety of tactics, Jean attempts to get to the bottom of the situation.

The film takes place in a typical English middle class home. The characters themselves are rather stereotypical, or I could argue traditional. Jean is cooking to potatoes for a roast Sunday dinner and her husband Maurice settles down to read his paper in his dressing gown with his toast. There costume is old fashioned as are their roles (Jean working in the kitchen while Maurice relaxes.) I also think it ads to Maurice’s character that he keeps everything in his pockets. His toast, a handkerchief and superglue to fix the pot add the end. It’s funny and just makes him a little more interesting.
The sound is what makes the film so unique. A conversation piece is a track of music which sounds as if two instruments talking. This track is written by Rex Stewart and is a 1966 jazz piece. In the film the couple talks only while the music is playing. We cannot here their words but the instruments play when their mouths open. It is an ironic, funny and a strange ending. The track plays again and jean returns to the room for another conversation. It makes us wonder if they can only talk when the piece is playing.

The story is linear following just these two characters which is a good format for a short film. There is a cliff-hanger ending as we wonder what Jean has returned to say to her husband. It is a musical comedy and as such it is quite light hearted. As an audience we do not find ourselves taking sides but simply viewing a petty household argument.

A shot i found inspiring was the depth shot of the vase, where the first shot is focused on the vase and we can see Maurice out of focus behind it. The next shot although the same focuses on Maurice instead. This emphasizes the importance of the vase then shifts the attention to Maurice very successfully. This is something we could definitely include in our own film.

Arran: Wasp

2010-01-27T10:39:00.000Z

Wasp takes place on a council estate in London. It is a well made and gritty social realist short film. The camera work is especially typical of social realism using a shaky hand held camera. There is no use of lighting or non diagetic sound. The only music is from the jukebox in the pub and the sound effects are genuine.
Costume hair and makeup are very typical of a working class area of London. Short skirts tracksuits and a ford escort belonging to the main male character.

Allot of close ups were used to reveal facial expression on the characters in the film. In just twenty minutes this really helps us to develop opinions on the characters fast along with the dialogue.

The editing crosses between the children and there mother, starting together, parting and coming together again many times. This works well for a short film as there simply is not enough time for a complicated narrative or too many characters.

The themes are very hard hitting and realistic. A mother is close to loosing her 4 girls to social services because of there poor quality of life. The girls are dirty, hungry and unhealthy however are happy and love there mum as she loves them. When the mother leaves here children outside the pub all evening to enjoy her fist night out in a long time it brings out sympathy and anger in the audience. A mother should never abandon her children like that however we are sympathetic because the mother herself has been abandoned with the children, she is broke and is in desperate need of some fun.

The characters are pretty stereotypical of the area represented but with there own unique aspects too to create more interesting characters. For example David, the guy the mother meets is a typical geezer, tracksuit and accent, getting her to buy the first round of drinks. He does however show understanding and generosity when the wasp causes the children to be revealed at quite an awkward moment. Instead of being angry at the mother or abandoning them all he takes them for chips, then takes them all home to talk it over. Although angry at the mother for leaving her children and feeling sympathy for them, we also feel sympathetic for her, her situation and anger that people have to face these problems.

Arran: Lou Lou Lives Here

2010-01-27T10:37:00.000Z

Lou Lou Lives Here is a short Film, under 4 minutes long. It is a thriller and shares many of the conventional trends of both horror and thriller films. The sound is very typical of these genres with howling wind and the sound of crows in the woods. The music is diagetic and dark. It builds tension when it is required.

The story is linear following just one character who either is a dog, or somehow morphs into one. This super natural element would fit with the other horror conventions in the film.

Stereotypes are used, for example the man who is after the child is in a white van which usually holds bad connotations. The filming itself is very interesting. It is filmed in black and white which makes me wonder if this was to create a darker atmosphere or because dogs are colorblind. There are also shots almost fish eye like in the way the edges of the shot are blurred or burned out, again maybe to create the feel of through the eyes of a dog.

The plot is quite hard to understand. I believe the girl resembles the free spirit of the dog. I think we are supposed to view the man in the van badly due to the stereotype attached and the fact that the dog returns home after mauling him. The man seems nice to the dog however and i don’t sympathize with the dog or the girl. Maybe it was simply supposed to be viewed from a neutral point of view of an incident involving a dog.

Guy 101, Gouldstone, 2007, by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-01-27T09:24:00.000Z

http://www.live.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p005dsmr

Guy 101 is the story of a man who meets a gay guy on a chat site and hears about his unusual encounter with a hitch-hiker. The film is a drama which uses 2d animation and a voice-over to tell it's story. The animation is completely original and brings a really interesting contribution to the film, setting it aside from your average drama.

The beginning of the film uses a dial up connection sound and classic 8-bit animation to show the narrator logging on to the Internet. As the words come into focus on the screen the audience finds themselves in a chat room. The rest of the film uses different types of "old school" computer animation to match the narration. The best scene in my opinion is when we hear about guy 101 driving down the highway and picking up the hitch hiker. As we hear the events discussed we the story unfold in the style of as if it was happening on the Internet. An example of this is in the picture above. The sign above the car says "Hitch-hiker has entered the room".

The sound used in the film is very simple but clever, consisting of the sounds of the Internet, such as dial-up connection, and the constant narration which acts as not only dialogue but also a suspense builder because of the way it's written.

There was no real message I could take from the film. I thought it was shame that the film really played on gay stereotypes, such as the guy having a handlebar moustache, and taking a hitch-hiker home for violent casual sex and claiming his only regret was that he didn't get his number. I wouldn't say the film is intentionally negative to homosexuals but the only point I saw in the film was gay cliches. Guy 101 won a bafta for best original short film in 2007 and best student film at the Bradford Animation Festival for it's "creative use of contempory graphics"

http://www.onedotzero.com/track.php?id=89&dvd=2810311

http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/BAF/2006/review.asp

Lighting by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-01-26T21:24:00.000Z

The lighting used in social realsim films is almost always naturalistic giving the film a realisic feel. Films by directors such as Andrea Arnold and Ken Loach are classic examples of films that stick to this ethos. By using Natural light such as the sun or an indoor light, the audience subconciously feel like they are living the film because it adds to the realism.

The image above is from the short film Wasp (Arnold, 2003) and is a perfect example of filming using naturalistic lighting. The sun is to the left of the shot and has the same shadows on the cast as it has the trees and cars. This shot looks like a real family in a real neighbourhood making the film realistic right from the start.

One of the video's I watched on youtube while researching lighting was fairly rubbish but did have one useful piece of advice on filming out doors. It says "Don't wait around to film on a sunny day, use overcast days to your advantage, they usually give you equal lighting. The lighting is gentle and even and best of all - it's free". Here's a link to the video:

Wating for a nice day is risky as the weather in England is unreliable at best, and a sunny day can also cause hot spots on the body when filming outside. Filming on an overcast day you can basically choose how light it is, and with living in England that shouldn't be to difficult. If we do end up filming on a sunny day we can use a white t shirt or something to act as a defuser.

Indoors we have some scenes where we can just use windows and house lights when filming, keeping the natural feel. However, there are scenes that we will be able to use a basic three point lighting system to illuminate the scene but get rid of deep shadows. I would definatly prefer to use lamps and house lights though because I think it'll make the film look really realistic.

BY Adam Rutherford

Dom Michau Audience Feedback on Idea

2010-01-26T19:27:00.001Z

Feedback

This is our feedback group on facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=13005&post=97695&uid=449048835382#/group.php?gid=449048835382&ref=ts

Dom Michau Location

2010-01-26T19:05:00.002Z

Current Location Ideas

This is a sample shot of the place that the final sequence will be filmed.

Kitchen we are going to film in for the scene when Tom is eating pizza.

Bedroom we will use. After it's been tidied a bit of course.

Claire Hall park in Haywards Heath.

Smoking area at Central Sussex college for the scene when the protagonists are standing in two groups of friends.

Dominic Michau

Dom Michau Props

2010-01-26T18:48:00.000Z

Prop List

Domino's Pizza
Note pad
Cigarettes & lighter
Folder for when they are around college
Mirror
Dirty socks

Information on Conversation Piece by ADAM RUTHERFORD

2010-01-26T15:41:00.000Z

Conversation Piece is a short film directed by Joe Tunmer for the BBC, released in 2009.

After Premiering at the Brief Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol it has now been selected by British Council for international festival distribution.

For all information on the cast, crew and production company info check out:

http://www.britfilms.com/britishfilms/catalogue/browse/?id=56948F131d5913623EMQXRC74E42

Arran : Funeral For a Friend, Roses For the Dead

2010-01-26T14:47:00.000Z

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsaamq0E964

First of all this is a music video and not a short film however I felt it followed the same trends and narrative as one so have decided to analyze it. I feel the editing techniques and setting are far more relevant to the area we would be filming in than some of the other videos we have been shown.

When asked to analyze a social realist film i instantly thought of this video despite having not seen it for about 3 years. I feel the urban setting, grey skies and grainy flashbacks. The story is a sad one using parallel editing to tell the story of a boy named Arron and his mother after his suicide. Teenage suicide is a hard hitting subject and a big issue these days as numbers are higher than ever.

I especially like the way the stories run parallel so we presume they are happening at the same time, but when we realize what the Arron is doing we then understand his mum is stripping his room and sorting his stuff while mourning after his death. This is helped along by some great close ups to reveal facial expression. The tracking shots put emphasis on Arrons journey which i presumed was just back from school the first time. The atmosphere, absence of bold color and setting really add the the anxed vibe of the video.

Set in Wales there are obvious typical British stereotypes. The boys who shunt Arron on his way home are wearing hoodies, one with his hood up, the other with a shaved head and we are encouraged to dislike them through their actions towards the character we are following. Time is slowed slightly when Arron crosses the two boy’s then carries on normal speed when he is past. This ads climax and tension.

The contrast between fast panning on Arron and then the slow still shots of his mother are really effective at creating two different atmospheres and there is a pan outwards from Arron when he sits to think just before he jumps. This implies loneliness and desperation as well as peace in the vast empty white floor of the building

I find this piece very inspiring because some of the shots i would not have considered before are used to great effect. I also like how simple the video is, it tells a story to great effect using nothing more than 4 actors, everyday costume, a room, a rooftop and a pavement. This shows as a group we can create something great without making our film too complex.