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.

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

View more presentations from lauraandamy.

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.

Pitch

We showed our pitch to the class and i feel that it went quite well because the powerpoint explained clearly our ideas, whilst reading it we expanded on what the slides said to get into more depth of our initial ides of our short film.

From showing and talking to the class about our ideas we gained afew more, we have decided to look closer at some more of shane meadows work because he has made short films as we are hoping to make them, also we have thought that we can base our main character on the main character in ' this is england' because this is the kind of character we were hoping to use.

We also have gained a better grasp on our idea because being put on the spot made us decide what we were doing and by explaining it to others it helped us understand it better ourselves.

semantic and cultural code

In todays lesson with Mr Smith we extended our knowledge of Narrative codes further. we watched the opening of the Royal Tenenbaums again. but this time to looking at how they use cultural and semantic codes to represent . We were asked to focus on one of the three children and pick out all of the things we could think of that would come under the two codes.


I decided to look at Chas.

• He is always seen wearing a suit, this could suggest that he is into business and shall go into business as a career. He shall become wealthy and money will matter.


• when situated with his siblings he is always central, he sits upright with his arms folded and always speaks with a high vocabulary and confidence in his tone. This shows that he is of high status in the family and shall go on to be in high power.


• his bedroom is set up like an office, with a computer, volumes of books and a money deposit safe. These all reflect an organised, work orientated character. Not the usual behaviour seen by a boy his age.


• he asks his mother for money, and already has the cheque written. This shows he's ahead of the game, but could it also present him as being spoilt?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Today we watched a film called The Royal Tenenbaums, the film has used the cultural and semantic codes to represent the characters, we have been asked to look closer at one of the characters and work out the semantic and cultural codes used to represent a particular character.


Richie is one of the main characters in the film, he wears quite sporty clothes and is a good tennis player, he has a brother and a sister who are both older than him, he sticks to his role and acts like the youngest too, there is a shot of him sat on his mothers knee drawing a picture whilst his brother is asking for money towards his business, by having a shot like this shows that he is quite needy of his mother.


After watching this film I have been inspired to add elements like this into our short film e.g. what the character is wearing are important to help the audience understand the character and the semantic codes that go with that character and keep the audience interested.

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.

Hi, yes that sounds like a good idea shall we meet up in our free today in the library to get it done? I have some ideas on the institution we could use because i have been watching some short films on channel four and they are quite similar to our idea. wb

Amy xx

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. :)

hey amy

we need to make sure our presentation for our film is ready to show in class, i have began doing a few slide but if we could me up in our free to finish it off that would be great :)
let me know asap so we can get sorted

laura
x x

Narrative Theory

today i learnt about the narrative theory. A narrative being the way in which a story is told in both fictional and non fictional media texts. there are only seven stories in the world.

Vladimir Propp is a russian critic and literary theorist who spent his life analysising stories. he analysed 100 russian fairytales in the 1920s, he also proposed that it was possible to classify the characters:

hero (seeks something)

Villian (opposes the hero)

donor (helps hero by providing hero)

dispatcher (sends the hero on his quest)

False hero (falsely assuming role of hero)

princess (rewards hero, needs protection from hero)

her father

we also learnt about Tzvetan Todorov, he was a bulgarian literacy theorist, he suggested that ,most narrative start with a state of equilibrium in which life is 'normal' and protagonists are happy. this state of happiness is interrupted by and outside force.

in the class we watched a disney pixar short film called 'Boundin', we then had the task of identifying which character in the film was the character outlined by vladimir.

we have now started to think of who in our own short film will fit the role of the Vladimir characters, but before we can do this properly we have been trying to think of a structure for our film.

we would like to use the idea of mixing up the narrative, having the conclusion shown at the beginnning and then the film leading up to this conclusion just like the film 'Pulp Fiction'.

we also discussed how would we show the protagonist is leading a lonely life, i was inspired by a shot in 'hollyoaks' which showed the girl dressed up glamorously and then when she turns to look in the mirror, in reality she looks a complete mess, we could interpret this shot in our own film showing the protagonist how she dreams of being but how she sees herself in reality.