magazine review research

i have been looking at some film magazine reviews online, particularly Total film magazine. i have picked up on some different designs used.
have a look and see what you think:

Review Research

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poster research

i thought it would be a good idea to research into some film poster's for Warp Films, i found that when looking at these few that the layouts are mostly non naturalistic, with the protagonist being the main focus of the poster, a feature i would like to experiment with on our own poster. there is also a repetition of star ratings for the film, which i think would be another key element we would try and input on our own work.

there has been a number of different edits to the photos on the poster, i think altering our images and adding effects on photoshop would look effective on our poster, maybe to make a black and white layout or saturise the photo like in the 'scummy man' poster(see above). having a more empty poster with no busy background, and a photo of the protagonist face on like the 'scummy man' poster and the 'Dog altogether' screen shot would be a good layout for our own poster.

however we do have some effective photos of the graveyard too which could also be good if we were thinking of using a background or setting shot for our poster.

next step is to experiment with these ideas, collecting photos of Amy face on and in an empty shot and then effective photos of the graveyard with and without amy in them. taking these photos and adding different effects to the photos to see what fits best.

:)

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.

time lapse

okay so to create a time lapse, technically you are suppose to use a series of still shots and create the film, but me and Amy want to try and cheat this and just film and then speed up the footage. we have experimented with this and you shall be seeing it shortly on the blog but for now i found some sand sculpting time lapse on YouTube which is using the same technique that we want to use. see what you think :)

our pitch

Our Short Film Pitch 1

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Inspiration from a music video

I watched the music video to Beyonce's song 'Broken hearted girl', i thought the song would be the kind of song we would use in our short film because it is about a girl who goes through a tough time in love and life, as the video shows, the music uses a slow beat and a piano in the background which also sets the sad mood of the video whic we are thinking of using in our short film.

The video is set on a beach which would be a nice setting for our short film because it uses waves of the sea to represent sadness and the waves could be her tears, however, we cant get to a beach to film it so we will use other places which are relaxing and maybe rain to represent tears and how the girl is feeling and how she feels alone in our short film.

The video is also filmed mainly in black and white but the symbolic things in the video are in colour to show they are important and stand out. I also like how the different shots fade in and out of eachother to create a slow sad feeling.

A particular part of the music video where beyonce is putting pettles back on a rose i really liked because it is quite symbolic to how she is feeling, i thought that it represented her getting her happiness back or something to do with love because it was a rose. and it gives the audience time to think and again and they could make their own ideas up about what this shows. I also liked this because of the way this scene is filmed.

This is England

Last night i watched 'This is England' on Film Four, and as i watched it i jotted down some ideas that i felt would work great in our own short film. Near the beginning of the film Shaun's mum reminds him of how his dad has gone now, the line being "dad's gone" this was then followed by the start of a slow piano tune that played for a series of time and made me empathise greatly with Shaun, i felt that the music was a big influence on this.

secondly whilst the piano music was played, shots of trees in the sun and different buildings were shown, with noone else in the shots. i felt that this was setting the scene of the film and also the piano gave the sense of loneliness, the different surroundings were reflecting Shaun's feelings.

Thirdly, the slow piano music, Fuori Dal Mundo, was signature to the film, and in several parts was reoccuring. i feel that this will be a good thing to do in our film as it will bring back the sad feeling to the film and connect all the shots, giving the film a nice smooth flow.



there is also an effective use of a photograph os Shaun's father who died in the faulklands war, this photo is looked at by shaun through the film several times, this is showing that shaun is sad about the death and shows his loneliness, and in the film actual words about his fathers death are not used frequently and so this photo helps the audience work out for themselves.

i managed to find a short trailer of the channel four film i watched 'the unloved', i spoke about it in an earlier post and now i have watched the trailer again i noticed that the camers work used is very naturalistic and gives it that feel of being seen through the child's eyes. the camera shots in this other clip are very invasive but she does not once look at the camera. the camera is seen as being hand held...a technique used frequently in the battle scene of 'saving private ryan' and something that in GCSE english i had to study quite religously. the effect of this 'hand held camera' really allows the audience to be in with the film and looks as if we a looking through a character's eyes.

unfortunately i could not embed the clip but if you follow this link you can see the invasove shots of 'the unloved' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyLbGIieA-E


here is a clip of the hand held camera footage in 'saving private ryan'

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.

Narrative Codes

We have recently been learning about Roland Barthes, a semiologist who created the narrative codes. There Are five codes altogether:

1. Action Code- applies to any action that implies a further narrative action. e.g. character picks up a pint, he then drinks it.

2. Enigma Code- refers to any element in a story that is not explained and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the audience. e.g a murder in CSI

3. Semantic Code- any element in a text that suggests a particular, often additional meaning by way of connotation. e.g. if a character is wearing a suit, he may be seen as dull, boring, smart or a business man.

4. Cultural Code - tends to point to our shared knowledge about the way the world works.

5. Symbolic Code - when the audience are given the black and white, then fill in their own grey.



We then learnt about 'Binary Opposites' e.g. black and white, fat and thin, old and young. Levi Straus believed that the world was split into a series of 'binary opposites'. Essentially one thing can only be defined in relation to something it isn't. e.g. A hero is only a hero if there is a cowardly option.

Today we spoke to Mr Ford and ask him for advice on our film, as we lost a member of our group and so got a little worried about how much work we were going to have to accomplish. He assured us that as long as our preparation and planning was really up to date and organised, then the filming could be simple to tackle later on. We have set to work on really knuckling down and getting some great ideas together for our film. Mr ford reccommended we watch some short films on the internet, particularly ones made by channel four, he also told us about a short film called 'Laid Off'.

We watched the film on Youtube.com and found some inspiration that we felt could be used in our own film, the whole feel of the film was rather depressing as it revolved around death, this is exactly the feel we want to accomplish in our film. :)

99 problems

in todays lesson me and my group watch a series of music videos and clips from films, e.g. rushmore, Jay Z 99 problems, Battle Rouge and The Royal Tenebaums. from watching the variations in each film clip i was inpired in many ways e.g. the ba;ck and white used in the Jay Z video i found was effective in helping to portray the message given in the video and i found it was very similar in the ways we want our film to be shown

the different shots used and quick edits of The Royal Tenebaums kept the film, quick paced and allowed me and the rest of the audience to keep engaged in the action, i think that this needs to be reflected in our own film and with it having such a serious drama appeal, quick edits will be essential to ensure that the film does ot become boring and uniteresting.

the use of introduction and titles int The Royal Tenebaums was also effective and an unusual element, i founf, to use in film. it gave the film a more unnaturalistic approach awhich i believe could be something that we could explore with our own film. the titles allowed the characters to be introduced in a unique way.

Initial Ideas

in our group we have decided to do the short film task

we all agreed that this would be the best one for us to do as it is quite challenging and if done successfully, will be an impressive thing to show in an university interview. The task is very open and does not limit us with our ideas, but essentially we had to narrow down our ideas and come up with something specific.

our first ideas were to use animation and real life film mixed together, as inspired from the Daft Punk music video. we soon began to realise that this would have been too hard to achieve as we are limited with and equipment.

we then searched on the internet for 'Best short Films' and found a website that had award winnning short films, one in particular interested us most and inspired us for our new idea.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/insideindies/shortsfest/player.html?chosen=bulletproof

this link shows the film we watched, it was called 'Bullet proof Vest' and it followed the lives of american twins living in a city where gun crime is at its highest. we liked the shots used, e.g. the camera looking out of a car window and streets passing by and the use of timelapse.we searched several different videos on youtube of examples and liked the idea of a city scene. after searching for images were inspired by this and would like to have a blur of people passing by our protagonist.

we also liked the idea of following somebody's life and reporting there misfortunes. it was directed by Samantha Mortan and portrayed a powerful drama from a childs eyes. samantha used her hometown to film in, which inspires me to use rundown middle class areas from local hometowns of my own.

after discussion, we have decided to make a film that follws a child who is neglected at home and at school and feels alone. we have said that we must be careful that we do not turn our film into a documentary and so will come up with a story in our film that will have a start, middle and ending.

as the discussions went on i remembered seeing a film on channel 4 called 'The Unloved', following the story of a child brought up in an unhappy life and having to be put into care.

some ideas we have thought up of shots are using a grey tint on the camera to show flashbacks, have people in the streets walking past her in fast motion. we will show her struggling in school with her work and having to handle abuse at home from her mum. we began to think of an ending, and started of thinking of something happy and uplifting...her finding help from an outsider however after further discussion we have thought of the idea of focusing on two portaginists both having troubnles in ther lives and shots switching between the tow throughout the film, leading up to the audience assuming that the protagonists will meet and help eachother, but in the unexpected they pass in the street and that is all. all our ideas have been written on a wisemap.