Settings

I have had a few thoughts about the settings of our film.

We have a shot in or storyboard where the girl is in her room and she is looking out of the window whilst she is feeling alone, i thought we could use the view from my bedroom window for this because the view is quite plain looking over fields and i think this would work because it gives the feeling that she has no one around her or to turn to. Also if we needed to use a bedroom to use for the girls room we could use my bedroom because the colours may suit the feeling and it is quite a wide room so we would have room to film in it.

At the beginning of our film the girl is in a graveyard, we will film this in lutterworth because it is easy for all of us to get to and is a nice setting because we also want trees in this shot and there are a few here.

Also in our storyboard there is a shot of the girl on her way to school on a bus, we were not sure how to do this but we spoke to Mr Smith and he gave us the idea of using one of the school buses because we could film it just before the end of school when no one is on it, this would work better than using a service bus because we may need to film it a few times and would have to pay every time.

A few of the shots are filmed when the girl is at school, this will be easy to film because we can just film this in school and find an empty classroom to film in.

If we were going to film any of our shots outside i thought we could use the park where i live because it is quite quite and slightly run down, i think this would be good because it is not like a stereotypical park and would emphasise that our character is lonely.

We have had a few problems because we have had a few ideas of things we want in our film, e.g. a bathroom cabinet with a mirror, we are not sure how we are going to film this because none of us have the type of cabinet we want but we only need it shortly so maybe we could ask someone else, if not we could just change it to a bedroom cabinet with a mirror and use one of ours.

I will now take some pictures of the settings and see if they will look good in our film.

music

finally managed to embed my music onto blogger :)
i have been looking for some slow piano tunes that could be used in our film and found three possibles ones from competch.com that are not under copyright and so could be used :)

Cryptic Sorrow - Kevin MacLeod

Wounded - Kevin MacLeod

Sovereign - Kevin MacLeod

Another idea...

As i was writing out the character profiles i thought of another reason why the boy could be following the girl by adding another twist.

We have said that at first we are going to make the boy look as thought he is up to no good by following the girl to the grave yard and make him look a bit eerie on the way the camera angles follow her as thought creeping up on her and looking through the eyes of the boy, then as the film progresses we were going to have the boy in the background of the shots of the girl and have him looking at her, when she drops her pen on the floor he will then go over and help her, this then will make it seem asthough he fancies the girl.

Here's the other twist i thought of, The girl has a photo of her dad with her all the time but it is torn half and it looks asthough someone has been ripped off the other side next to her dad, towards the end of the film i then thought we could end with the twist that the girl is in the grave yard again and she is holding the picture and the boy holds his half of the picture next to hers and the find out that they are brother and sister. almost like the twist in 'Parent trap'.

Character profile: Boy

This character is going to be our secondary character in our short film. He is going to be in the background most of the time but he is still going to be an important role in our film, this is because he is going to help the girl through her tough time even though its not made obvious to her or the audience till the very end.

The boy at the beginning of the film is going to seem like he is stalking her and as the film goes on it seems more and more like he is. He is always in going to be in the background and we may make his facial expressions seem as though he is a bit strange by the way he looks at her and by making her look nice so we can incorporate in the male gaze, however, as we have mentioned before there will be a twist to his role in our short film and we will see why he has been following her.

Character profile: Main girl

The main character in our film is a girl who is going to portrayed as the stereotype of lonely, this is because she has lost her dad and her mother is never there for her and is basically 'just a post-it note', by making the mother like this the girl would feel more lonely because her father was always there for her and now she seems to have nobody.

The girl as we know is lonely, to show this she will always be seen on her own in the shots and have a sad expression on her face whils not having the best time because nothing good really ever happns to her.

However, we seem to break her being the stereotype of lonely because all the way through the film there seems to be a boy of her age following her or watching her, this is where we will use aspects of the male gaze because she must be attractive to the boy to make him keep following her or watching her, this seems quite eerie at first but towards the end there will be a twist to his role in our short film.

The girl through out the film will be thinking as will the audience that she is lonely and has nobody but in the end she finds out that she mite not be as lonely as she thought.

shuffle....

whilst writing my last few posts, i have had been listening to my ipod on shuffle. a song by 'The Fray' came up called 'Never Say Never', i really quite liked listening to the track and the feel of the song was very similar to the feelings i want the songs in our film to portray. i think this was because the use of the piano throughout with the rather slow tempo was effective. i have been looking at several pieces of music similar to this , which i hope to share with you soon, and I'm really finding that the piano is becoming an effective instrument to portray the sad feel of our film. 'The Fray' certainly uses piano frequently in its music and so this little stumble upon this track in my shuffle has turned out being quite inspirational and so i shall continue to look for some sympathising piano tracks. however i do not want to use any music that has words, but it was not the words i was focusing on in 'The Fray' track but the use of the piano.

further thoughts...

after thinking further into this idea of the mother, whilst watching the film 'Matilda' with my younger sister, i came to realise that the mother character in that was a lot like i saw our mother character being like, but just not ever being shown in the film. a certain point in the film made me think this, when everyone leaves the small child, Matilda, alone for the whole day in the house. before the mum leaves she gives the girl some instructions on how to get herself some dinner and then leaves her to fend for herself. obviously the point being tried to make in 'Matilda' was the fact that the girl was much to young to fend for herself and this isn't what we are trying to show in our film. however the same principles are there about the mother not being there for her daughter and this is what we are trying to show in our film. Matilda is also shown with having no friends and being on her own just like our protagonist and one of the reasons for her loneliness is her mother's neglect.

character profile: mother

i have begun to think in more depth about the characters of our film. i have particularly been thinking about the mother, and how we are going to never show a person but show messages and requests left by the mother for our female protagonist to find. in effect her mother is simply post it notes. this shall emphasise greatly on the protagonists loneliness, and really bring to home how close she was with her father. her father being the one she spoke to about her problems and the one she made most contact with.

from the amount of messages left, it shall show that she is very rarely around for her daughter and so wrapped up in her own world and thinking that communicating this way is better than nothing but in actual fact it is a lot worse. half of the time we show the girl not paying attention to these messages, showing that she doesn't really listen to them.

her mum will be shown as thinking that she is looking out for her daughter but the fact that she is never seen in the film and purely represented by a post it note will show that in actual fact she is never there. the mother could be seen as a binary opposite to the father, if the audience are told in some way that the father was always there for his daughter and the one spoke to her about everything.

Laura,
Next lesson shall we get a tape and film a few shots like timelapse and match on action, we could use this to get a better idea of how to do the shots and to see if they would look good in our film and then we could add the shots we will use in our storyboard.
wb.
Amy x

The male gaze

Laura Mulvey (1975), "Visual pleasure + narrative cinema". Laura Mulvey believes that 'The male gaze' means that the audience of a film have to view the characters through the perspective of a heterosexual male.

The male gaze for femenists is:

How men look at women, How women look at themselves and How women look at other women.

The Male Gaze:

The camera lingers on the curves of the female body and the events which occur to the woman in the film are presented mainly in the way the man would react to these events or want the woman to react.

In our film because our main character is a female i think we may have to look at the male gaze to keep the male audience interested because the film is aimed mainly to women and this could make our film not as successful, i feel that because our character is 17 we could incorporate the thought of the male gaze by having a girl who is pretty to look at but not having it to obvious because this may ruin our film and not stick to the story line.

Stereotypes.

Stereotypes as we learnt in the lesson are important to a film because it helpes people be able to relate to the characters in the film and understand the film and different groups of people in the film easier.

Tessa Perkins in 1997 said that stereotypes contain a number of assumptions that can be challenged, using different assumptions: They are not always false e.g.- Cowboys do wear cowboy hats or in terms of our film, young girls tend to be emotional. They are not always negative e.g.- Lonely girls do not always commit suicide.Not always about minority or less powerful groups e.g.- Our girl is unfortunate in what happens to her but she is upper class.They can be said about your own group e.g.- another girl thinks our girl is lonely and maybe depressive.

Problems with a stereotype can be that they over look an individual, place people in groups or people are often exaggerated in their stereotypes which create caricatures.

In our film we are going to use a stereotype of a young lonely girl. I feel that the stereotype of someone who is lonely is that they are quite depressive and keep themselves to themselves, in our film we are going to make our girl fit the stereotype so that the audience can see that she is lonely but we will not make her into a caricature becasue we think this could ruin our film by making it seem too depressive. Our character may break the stereotype slightly because she doesnt keep herself hidden, however, she will be a quiet person.