Filming... can it possibly be finished!?

Yesterday Laura and I were trying our hardest to find a boy to star in our film and after being let down three times we thought this would be hard, we found this was the case as Laura asked two of them and they both said they had other plans. After some thought, and trying to get hold of every boy i knew, someone said yes! :)

I spoke to him and arranged with him to meet me and Laura to do some filming in the morning, when he arrived we got all the shots we needed and a few extra because he was very cooperative which was such a relief as our short film needs to be finished by Friday and we are now on a very tight schedule to get it finished, our boy has also agreed that if we need him tomorrow he should be able to come in. :)

After finishing our filming we had planned to get a camera and import our filming onto the mac, this is where we struck another problem! there was another group using the mac we needed and the camera too, we then decided to get on with our preliminary task (the poster).

Whilst we were filming in the graveyard we also got some photos of the background we wanted for our poster and a photo of the boy to use for the silhouette, we needed more photos because the ones we had didn't achieve the golden spiral rule and we needed the silhouette to be the main focus of our poster, so when we found we couldn't start editing we decided to make our poster and finished it before the end of the day, this means we are now one down.. two to go! then our media is finished :/

Tomorrow... because we couldn't get any editing done today we have decided that we are going to edit our film and finish our magazine film review for the best part of tomorrow and if it comes to it we will have to stay after school to finish it as it needs to be done by friday.

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.

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.

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.

our pitch

Our Short Film Pitch 1

View more presentations from lauraandamy.

presenting our pitch went really well. As we spoke of our ideas, new ones were spurting in my head as i spoke and found new inspirations and ideas being created. we told the class of how we have looked into shane meadow's work and in particular 'this is England'. as i spoke about the film i realised that in actual fact the protagonist of our film was starting look very similar to Shaun, the protagonist of 'this is England'. Shaun is also suffering from the loss of his father and having to tackle day to day problems including bullying at school. the film is shown through shaun's eyes, which is a convention we want to use in our film having issues seen through our girl's eyes.
i shall continue to research further into some of shane meadows work as he had been a successful director and made several short films also.





the way in which in the film the loss of shaun's dad is portrayed through the photo is effective and something we have considered to use in our own film. we were asked whether we would have a flashback of how the dad dies but i think that this could be difficult to achieve without looking corny and would make us lose the feel of our film. showing small clips throughout of the girl looking at the photo and visiting the grave will be a better way of expressing her grief and letting the audience know that she is grieving for her father.