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.

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.