Q1- In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms of real media products?
SOUP A2 SHORT FILM
Little White Lies review
FILM
Genre
When planning and researching our film, we discovered many films are in what is called a called a hybrid genre meaning that they don't belong in a specific category. This is a new development in film, with things such as 'Rom-Com' or comedy horrors, and for films such as 'One Man's Loss' which I analysed for research, I discovered some films follow a realistic approach, in no specific genre at all.
This is something we used in our film, we tried to use the idea of a hybrid in our film, following a 'thriller' however our film was not purely this, it held elements of gore from horror. We wanted to make clear our film was more thriller, and we ensured this by our use of low key lighting our themes of our film (childhood innocence being corrupted, and the ideas of murder and dead bodies) and our use of editing, which was ideally used to create enigma and tension. This idea of thriller or an uneasy tone is used in the short film 'Table 7' which uses parallel editing to create tension in the audience as the camera cuts between a voyeuristic view we see of a couple, and a male listening in to their conversation.
We used Rick Altman's theory of genre conventions, being semantic and syntactic codes, We used the semantic codes which are visual conventions which are culturally taught to us so we know what genre to expect when watching a film. We used these visual codes such as the graphic image of the heart being cut up and things such as low key lighting and dull blue colouring hue on our piece to show the genre of a thriller/horror.
Syntactic codes are also used in our film, genre conventions usually have a typical narrative structure or theme. this can include things such as 'typical binary oppositions' in which thriller movies usually have ideas of Good Vs Evil, which we explicitly show by contrasting the scenes between the innocent child, and the woman in the kitchen. This also explores the binary opposites of innocence and corruption.
The use of semantic and syntactic codes are also used in the short film 'Joyride' in which the sparks of electricity are used to signify danger, and ultimately end up killing the man. Binary oppositions of Good Vs Evil is also visually shown between the police and the criminals.
Narrative
We used parallel editing in our film to create tension, following the story of a child trick or treating, and a woman at home preparing something rather gory, shown in various lights and angles, and to somehow link these characters without the audience knowing what, creating an uneasy atmosphere. We used restricted narration which is where the audience know less or the same as the characters on screen. This is commonly used in films to create suspense or enigma as the theory is put forward by Roland Barthes who talked about action and enigma codes which we have used in our film, an enigma code is put forward as the audience try to work out why the characters are linked, the parallel editing creating tension as the enigma code raises questions and leads the audience to actively engage with the narrative. Restricted narration is used in the short film 'Never Forget' which we watched at the beginning of the year, it shows the story between two characters as they have a phone call, and the man ends the phone call by jumping to his death in front of her. This use of restricted narration was used to shock the audience, and we liked the idea of creating a 'shock moment', which is why we used the reveal of the eyeball at the end of the film. Our audience follow the plot in chronological order as we use complex editing techniques to link the characters individual stories so we wanted to create as little confusion as possible.
Characterisation
We felt that naming our characters would be futile, as we were exploring the binary oppositions, we wanted to almost create a universal character, within the idea of children being exposed and corrupted to the extremity of what our character did. We kept the relationship of the characters back from the audience to create further enigma. The idea of binary oppositions was a theory Claude Levi-Strauss put forward in that 'all narratives are organised around the conflict between binary oppositions.'
Representation and Mise en Scene
We wanted our characters to be as unrestricted, as though a basis of the character can be taken and applied within a universal situation. As we were using the binary opposites of Good Vs Evil and the idea of innocence and corruption shown, we tried to represent our characters as simple to the form as possible. Our character of the little girl, was dressed in a witch's outfit, as the film was set at the time of Halloween we looked into the most popular and stereotypical costume, this being a witch. We decided the costume despite its colouring gave off a sense of innocence, the stereotype of a guiltless character filled with naivety. However our other character of the woman in the kitchen despite her clothing we wanted to make her as deranged as possible, showing the corrupted side of the oppositions.
Mise en Scene was very important for us as our film relied on context, and as we filmed over two days we needed continuity throughout our filming. This consisted as well for things like costume, hair, makeup and our props.
The prop of our eyeball was a big issue for us. As this film had no funding and we would have to fund everything ourselves, we came up with multiple options to create a realistic looking prop. This consisted of ideas of getting an eyeball from an animal at a butchers, buying a glass eye, painting a ping pong ball, but we realised at the last minute we didn't have an eyeball the day before the last day of filming, so we watched many tutorials on YouTube, and we ended up constructing the eyeball out of clay and paint.
This worked successfully as in low lighting and different camera angles it looked realistic. However we then had the issue with our placement of the eyeball in the bowl of soup. When planning we had imagined the eyeball to float up from the soup. However as the eyeball was made out of clay, it sunk when put in the liquid, so a compromise was needed. We then had to put the eyeball inside the soup and try and pull it out on the spoon. We tested this shot many times, as shown in this video.
An importance of props is necessary when being used to create effect to the audience. This is shown also in the short film 'The Fly' where the man is aiding a bank robbery in the getaway car and is constantly 'bugged' by a fly. This fly was constructed through CGI and depended on the actor's reaction, the importance of the CGI was so the film looked realistic. Our film used the idea of an important prop to aid the plot.
Costume was another important feature in our film for continuity purposes as we filmed over the two days. We made sure to document what our characters were wearing. Kierah, who played our female villain was dressed in a red flannel for the setting was in a home, we wanted to make it appear as realistic as possible, so dressing her in comfortable clothing which could also carry connotations through colour, such as blood or murder would come across to the audience. This was also a piece of clothing that Kierah did not own, which we used to separate the actor from her character she was playing. As we had created a female villain, we decided we would do this to challenge the conventions of thriller or horror genres, which more commonly feature male villains. For example in more mainstream films, such as 'Silence of the Lambs' which we studied last year for it's opening, or the short film 'Joyride' which also feature male antagonists. However female villains are slowly becoming more common in the film world, witch movies such as 'Gone Girl', which was extremely popular. The adaptation of the characters to challenge conventions is from Steve Neale's theory of repetition and variation of genre. David Buckingham's theory of negotiation and change, through the cultural change of attitude and ideology, we can now use female characters as villains more freely as this is now socially accepted.
Lighting
We used a low of low key lighting and changed the colouring in our post production editing stage, where we used a blue hue, which is commonly used in thriller, or movies with 'realism' as they usually give it a cold harsh feel.
Alex and I constructed our own lighting experiment before we began filming to test out how the camera angles and placement of lighting could affect the way a character is seen. We have used the following shots in our film:
This shot uses 2 lights, one at the side of the character, and the other facing the character.
This shot comes across as very emotive as it highlights the character's facial expressions.
The background is also lit, only casting a minor shadow to the right of the actor.
As we were outside we used brighter lighting in order for the characters to be seen, as we were at a high camera angle the lighting we used was to capture the 'innocent' look on the characters face, as the shot above is linked we wanted to create tension, so highlighting the facial expression would help us do this.
We only used one light here to light up our characters, due to shortage of people it was only possible to do one light, the scene was very dark due to this and although it lit the actors up we had to change the colouring and brightness in our post production stage.
Lighting was very important to us, as usually in thriller genres lighting is used to create effect or cause the audience to feel something. However within some of the scenes within the house we challenged the conventions of thriller by using high key lighting, with vibrant colours which is usually used to disorientate or give a realistic effect to audiences.
Lighting is very important also in real life films as it usually is used to convey emotion or set the scene. This is done in the short film 'Table 7' where lighting is used to create tension or unease in the audience for the man sitting in the unknown location. Lighting is used to highlight the side of his face, the darkened location is made apparent and the audience is left intrigued as to where the man is and why he is listening to the conversation.
Editing
Thriller films hold conventions in their editing technique, short sharp cuts into fade to black is a common feature used. We decided to use this technique a lot in our film, the short sharp cuts to black giving the film a jumpy tense atmosphere. As we were trying to portray the two characters sides, the parallel editing we used in conjunction with the short sharp shots cutting to black were used to create as little confusion as possible. We also felt our editing challenged real media products as films usually use straight cuts into different scenes. We used our technique to create as much tension or anticipation as possible, for example after the reveal of the eyeball in our film we cut to black to create a cliffhanger or suspense as it went into our end credits. The use of cut to black at the ending is also used in the short film 'Joyride' as the audible sound effect of electricity sparks and then a cut to black the foley of a fire lighting up, the audience are left to assume the worst, leaving the film on a cliff hanger as we are then unaware of the ending.
. Sound
In our first coursework task, we learnt quickly that sound would be our biggest issue. We took this in mind when beginning to film. As our film 'Elijah' required a lot of dialogue and we struggled when filming this, we decided that our film should have as little dialogue as possible and we would focus on our camera work and editing techniques to try and create a good film. This meant we would use the sound effects or foleys for a majority of our film. We got this idea from the short 'The Fly' which has little to no dialogue and the film was very successful. We then were relying on our soundtrack to create the tension we required to build in our film. Alex looked into the music website 'Incompetch' where we obtained three music tracks to use.
We experimented with our camera work all the while regarding the 180 degree rule. As we were trying to fit the conventions of a thriller we kept the camera work to be filling the frame, mostly using close up camera shots and high and low angles to capture facial expressions or features. Our medium shots are mostly used to establish a setting or a characters position. The close up shots were used to create effect such as this extreme close up shot of Kierah's eyes, to portray a sense of madness as we built up the tension in the sequence.
I think we conformed to the genre conventions of thriller through the camera work. In the short film 'Lovefield' it also experiments with different varieties of camera angles and shot sizes to create tension such as in this shot, the extreme close up and canted shot is used to create enigma as the distorted view leave the audience asking questions as to what is going on.
We also concentrated on the eyeline matches in our piece, as it is very important for the continuity of a film. Eyeline matches can also be used to show a difference in status or power which we used in our film, as shown in the screenshots below:
This shot was very good for continuity as in the prior shot the woman places the soup in front of the child, then stands to watch her eat it. We kept the OTS shot of Isobel looking up into the camera as if she was looking up at Kierah, so we kept the eyeline match in the same direction for continuity purposes. This also showed the difference in power between the two as it looked as if she was asking permission to eat the soup.
Themes
FILM POSTER
In the creation of our film poster we had to research four short film posters in order to learnt the conventions and typical aspects used to create a poster. I researched the four short film posters 'Amari's Secret', 'World War Z' 'What If' and 'Splitting Lanes'
For the poster 'Amari's Secret' it uses minimalistic design to portray the film, which is something I would like to use for our poster, drawing attention to minimal details.
The narrative from this poster leaves a question to the audience as to who is 'Amari' and what is their secret? The CU side profile of a cat is used to advertise in which the focus is pulled towards the cat's eye, which could suggest the cat is Amari, or in which the cat is witnessing something. The phrase 'curiosity killed the cat' comes to mind when I see this poster, and could suggest the secret is potentially dangerous.
The poster uses bright colours which draws attention to the main features, being the cat's eye, once again suggesting the cat is witnessing something. The genre of the film is unclear, but through the title you could suggest it is a thriller, the bright vibrant colours could be used to disorientate the audience.
The font is small and spacious, the white standing out against the background , the size of the font could give a direct link to a 'secret', being conspicuous.
Actors names are not featured on the poster, the length of the film could be reflective of this, as feature length movies usually have named actors to generate more of an audience. However this film has a 'From the studio that bought you:' which relates a direct link to the audience who watched the film before, giving the film a demographic and an audience.
I like the focus pull and the minimalism of the poster, which is something I want to use for our final product as it gives an effect to the audience to pull the attention to a specific part, an enigma is produced within the title, as the audience questions what the secret is, which the short title of our film 'Soup' would hopefully create intrigue to the audience.
SOUP A2 SHORT FILM
FILM
Genre
When planning and researching our film, we discovered many films are in what is called a called a hybrid genre meaning that they don't belong in a specific category. This is a new development in film, with things such as 'Rom-Com' or comedy horrors, and for films such as 'One Man's Loss' which I analysed for research, I discovered some films follow a realistic approach, in no specific genre at all.
This is something we used in our film, we tried to use the idea of a hybrid in our film, following a 'thriller' however our film was not purely this, it held elements of gore from horror. We wanted to make clear our film was more thriller, and we ensured this by our use of low key lighting our themes of our film (childhood innocence being corrupted, and the ideas of murder and dead bodies) and our use of editing, which was ideally used to create enigma and tension. This idea of thriller or an uneasy tone is used in the short film 'Table 7' which uses parallel editing to create tension in the audience as the camera cuts between a voyeuristic view we see of a couple, and a male listening in to their conversation.
We used Rick Altman's theory of genre conventions, being semantic and syntactic codes, We used the semantic codes which are visual conventions which are culturally taught to us so we know what genre to expect when watching a film. We used these visual codes such as the graphic image of the heart being cut up and things such as low key lighting and dull blue colouring hue on our piece to show the genre of a thriller/horror. Syntactic codes are also used in our film, genre conventions usually have a typical narrative structure or theme. this can include things such as 'typical binary oppositions' in which thriller movies usually have ideas of Good Vs Evil, which we explicitly show by contrasting the scenes between the innocent child, and the woman in the kitchen. This also explores the binary opposites of innocence and corruption.
The use of semantic and syntactic codes are also used in the short film 'Joyride' in which the sparks of electricity are used to signify danger, and ultimately end up killing the man. Binary oppositions of Good Vs Evil is also visually shown between the police and the criminals.
Narrative
We used parallel editing in our film to create tension, following the story of a child trick or treating, and a woman at home preparing something rather gory, shown in various lights and angles, and to somehow link these characters without the audience knowing what, creating an uneasy atmosphere. We used restricted narration which is where the audience know less or the same as the characters on screen. This is commonly used in films to create suspense or enigma as the theory is put forward by Roland Barthes who talked about action and enigma codes which we have used in our film, an enigma code is put forward as the audience try to work out why the characters are linked, the parallel editing creating tension as the enigma code raises questions and leads the audience to actively engage with the narrative. Restricted narration is used in the short film 'Never Forget' which we watched at the beginning of the year, it shows the story between two characters as they have a phone call, and the man ends the phone call by jumping to his death in front of her. This use of restricted narration was used to shock the audience, and we liked the idea of creating a 'shock moment', which is why we used the reveal of the eyeball at the end of the film. Our audience follow the plot in chronological order as we use complex editing techniques to link the characters individual stories so we wanted to create as little confusion as possible.
Characterisation
We felt that naming our characters would be futile, as we were exploring the binary oppositions, we wanted to almost create a universal character, within the idea of children being exposed and corrupted to the extremity of what our character did. We kept the relationship of the characters back from the audience to create further enigma. The idea of binary oppositions was a theory Claude Levi-Strauss put forward in that 'all narratives are organised around the conflict between binary oppositions.'
Representation and Mise en Scene
We wanted our characters to be as unrestricted, as though a basis of the character can be taken and applied within a universal situation. As we were using the binary opposites of Good Vs Evil and the idea of innocence and corruption shown, we tried to represent our characters as simple to the form as possible. Our character of the little girl, was dressed in a witch's outfit, as the film was set at the time of Halloween we looked into the most popular and stereotypical costume, this being a witch. We decided the costume despite its colouring gave off a sense of innocence, the stereotype of a guiltless character filled with naivety. However our other character of the woman in the kitchen despite her clothing we wanted to make her as deranged as possible, showing the corrupted side of the oppositions.Mise en Scene was very important for us as our film relied on context, and as we filmed over two days we needed continuity throughout our filming. This consisted as well for things like costume, hair, makeup and our props.
The prop of our eyeball was a big issue for us. As this film had no funding and we would have to fund everything ourselves, we came up with multiple options to create a realistic looking prop. This consisted of ideas of getting an eyeball from an animal at a butchers, buying a glass eye, painting a ping pong ball, but we realised at the last minute we didn't have an eyeball the day before the last day of filming, so we watched many tutorials on YouTube, and we ended up constructing the eyeball out of clay and paint.
This worked successfully as in low lighting and different camera angles it looked realistic. However we then had the issue with our placement of the eyeball in the bowl of soup. When planning we had imagined the eyeball to float up from the soup. However as the eyeball was made out of clay, it sunk when put in the liquid, so a compromise was needed. We then had to put the eyeball inside the soup and try and pull it out on the spoon. We tested this shot many times, as shown in this video.
An importance of props is necessary when being used to create effect to the audience. This is shown also in the short film 'The Fly' where the man is aiding a bank robbery in the getaway car and is constantly 'bugged' by a fly. This fly was constructed through CGI and depended on the actor's reaction, the importance of the CGI was so the film looked realistic. Our film used the idea of an important prop to aid the plot.
Costume was another important feature in our film for continuity purposes as we filmed over the two days. We made sure to document what our characters were wearing. Kierah, who played our female villain was dressed in a red flannel for the setting was in a home, we wanted to make it appear as realistic as possible, so dressing her in comfortable clothing which could also carry connotations through colour, such as blood or murder would come across to the audience. This was also a piece of clothing that Kierah did not own, which we used to separate the actor from her character she was playing. As we had created a female villain, we decided we would do this to challenge the conventions of thriller or horror genres, which more commonly feature male villains. For example in more mainstream films, such as 'Silence of the Lambs' which we studied last year for it's opening, or the short film 'Joyride' which also feature male antagonists. However female villains are slowly becoming more common in the film world, witch movies such as 'Gone Girl', which was extremely popular. The adaptation of the characters to challenge conventions is from Steve Neale's theory of repetition and variation of genre. David Buckingham's theory of negotiation and change, through the cultural change of attitude and ideology, we can now use female characters as villains more freely as this is now socially accepted.
Lighting
We used a low of low key lighting and changed the colouring in our post production editing stage, where we used a blue hue, which is commonly used in thriller, or movies with 'realism' as they usually give it a cold harsh feel.
Alex and I constructed our own lighting experiment before we began filming to test out how the camera angles and placement of lighting could affect the way a character is seen. We have used the following shots in our film:
This shot uses 2 lights, one at the side of the character, and the other facing the character.
This shot comes across as very emotive as it highlights the character's facial expressions.
The background is also lit, only casting a minor shadow to the right of the actor.
As we were outside we used brighter lighting in order for the characters to be seen, as we were at a high camera angle the lighting we used was to capture the 'innocent' look on the characters face, as the shot above is linked we wanted to create tension, so highlighting the facial expression would help us do this.
We only used one light here to light up our characters, due to shortage of people it was only possible to do one light, the scene was very dark due to this and although it lit the actors up we had to change the colouring and brightness in our post production stage.
Lighting was very important to us, as usually in thriller genres lighting is used to create effect or cause the audience to feel something. However within some of the scenes within the house we challenged the conventions of thriller by using high key lighting, with vibrant colours which is usually used to disorientate or give a realistic effect to audiences.
Lighting is very important also in real life films as it usually is used to convey emotion or set the scene. This is done in the short film 'Table 7' where lighting is used to create tension or unease in the audience for the man sitting in the unknown location. Lighting is used to highlight the side of his face, the darkened location is made apparent and the audience is left intrigued as to where the man is and why he is listening to the conversation.
Editing
Thriller films hold conventions in their editing technique, short sharp cuts into fade to black is a common feature used. We decided to use this technique a lot in our film, the short sharp cuts to black giving the film a jumpy tense atmosphere. As we were trying to portray the two characters sides, the parallel editing we used in conjunction with the short sharp shots cutting to black were used to create as little confusion as possible. We also felt our editing challenged real media products as films usually use straight cuts into different scenes. We used our technique to create as much tension or anticipation as possible, for example after the reveal of the eyeball in our film we cut to black to create a cliffhanger or suspense as it went into our end credits. The use of cut to black at the ending is also used in the short film 'Joyride' as the audible sound effect of electricity sparks and then a cut to black the foley of a fire lighting up, the audience are left to assume the worst, leaving the film on a cliff hanger as we are then unaware of the ending.
. Sound
In our first coursework task, we learnt quickly that sound would be our biggest issue. We took this in mind when beginning to film. As our film 'Elijah' required a lot of dialogue and we struggled when filming this, we decided that our film should have as little dialogue as possible and we would focus on our camera work and editing techniques to try and create a good film. This meant we would use the sound effects or foleys for a majority of our film. We got this idea from the short 'The Fly' which has little to no dialogue and the film was very successful. We then were relying on our soundtrack to create the tension we required to build in our film. Alex looked into the music website 'Incompetch' where we obtained three music tracks to use.
'Dreams Become Real'
"Dreams Become Real" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
"Dreams Become Real" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
'Disaffected'
"Piece for Disaffected Piano Two" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
"Unanswered Questions"
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
We used these soundtracks to create atmosphere and unease in our film. We had to make sure as our genre was slightly misleading our sound wasn't contrapuntal to the image on screen. I feel we followed typical conventions of movies. However in the short film 'The Fly' the film uses contrapuntal non diegetic soundtrack with volume increased music to shock the audience and warn of something happening. Our sound effects were very important for the authenticity of the film as we didn't use much dialogue which is typical of a thriller movie, so I feel we used the conventions of media products.
Camerawork
We tried to be inventive with our camera work as we were not relying on dialogue, so we had to inform our audience of what was going on all the while we experimented with different angles and shot sizes.
MEDIUM CLOSE UP
HIGH ANGLE MEDIUM SHOT
EYELINE MEDIUM SHOT
VERY HIGH ANGLE CLOSE UP SHOT
We experimented with our camera work all the while regarding the 180 degree rule. As we were trying to fit the conventions of a thriller we kept the camera work to be filling the frame, mostly using close up camera shots and high and low angles to capture facial expressions or features. Our medium shots are mostly used to establish a setting or a characters position. The close up shots were used to create effect such as this extreme close up shot of Kierah's eyes, to portray a sense of madness as we built up the tension in the sequence.
I think we conformed to the genre conventions of thriller through the camera work. In the short film 'Lovefield' it also experiments with different varieties of camera angles and shot sizes to create tension such as in this shot, the extreme close up and canted shot is used to create enigma as the distorted view leave the audience asking questions as to what is going on.
We also concentrated on the eyeline matches in our piece, as it is very important for the continuity of a film. Eyeline matches can also be used to show a difference in status or power which we used in our film, as shown in the screenshots below:
This shot was very good for continuity as in the prior shot the woman places the soup in front of the child, then stands to watch her eat it. We kept the OTS shot of Isobel looking up into the camera as if she was looking up at Kierah, so we kept the eyeline match in the same direction for continuity purposes. This also showed the difference in power between the two as it looked as if she was asking permission to eat the soup.
Themes
- Loss of innocence
- Good Vs Evil
- Childhood corruption
- Children/Adults
We wanted to explore controversial films and films with shocking endings. We used Levi-Strauss' binary oppositions to show a contrast in characters which is something most media products use to fuel their plotlines, For example in 'Joyride' there is a distinct contrast between the Good Vs Evil.
I would say we didn't challenge the normal conventions of a thriller and more used them to create a plot with a realistic structure as close as possible to a real media product's plot.
FILM POSTER
In the creation of our film poster we had to research four short film posters in order to learnt the conventions and typical aspects used to create a poster. I researched the four short film posters 'Amari's Secret', 'World War Z' 'What If' and 'Splitting Lanes'
The narrative from this poster leaves a question to the audience as to who is 'Amari' and what is their secret? The CU side profile of a cat is used to advertise in which the focus is pulled towards the cat's eye, which could suggest the cat is Amari, or in which the cat is witnessing something. The phrase 'curiosity killed the cat' comes to mind when I see this poster, and could suggest the secret is potentially dangerous.
The poster uses bright colours which draws attention to the main features, being the cat's eye, once again suggesting the cat is witnessing something. The genre of the film is unclear, but through the title you could suggest it is a thriller, the bright vibrant colours could be used to disorientate the audience.
The font is small and spacious, the white standing out against the background , the size of the font could give a direct link to a 'secret', being conspicuous.
Actors names are not featured on the poster, the length of the film could be reflective of this, as feature length movies usually have named actors to generate more of an audience. However this film has a 'From the studio that bought you:' which relates a direct link to the audience who watched the film before, giving the film a demographic and an audience.
I like the focus pull and the minimalism of the poster, which is something I want to use for our final product as it gives an effect to the audience to pull the attention to a specific part, an enigma is produced within the title, as the audience questions what the secret is, which the short title of our film 'Soup' would hopefully create intrigue to the audience.
For our drafting of our poster we played around a lot with minimalistic design, something which 'Amari's Secret' uses. We decided the first film was too misleading about the genre as it looked like the film would be a horror due to the connotations the blood gives. We also decided the titling was too big on the main part of the title and other information on the poster would not be taken in.
We then came up with this poster, to try and relate more to the genre. However we felt this was too unspecific still towards the genre, and the only inclination of genre (the blood on the spoon) could be misinterpreted to horror.
This poster was more appropriate to our genre, however we felt the eyeball was too obvious and would give away the ending of the film. The titles were also too small, and actors names were placed sporadically.
We then focused on using the letters from alphabet soup, to give a direct link to our film. This poster was not used in the end as we thought it was too unspecific to the genre, but we wanted to continue with the titling theme.
Our final product explored some of the conventions 'Amari's Secret' uses such as a focus pull. We also decided to put the eyeball below the spoon, which was not so obvious as one of our first drafts. We felt this would give an idea of the thriller genre, and the minimalistic poster would create intrigue.
Titling
When researching posters, we mostly focused on the titling as it usually gave a direct link to the film. Here is an example from the short film 'World War Z' and 'Splitting Lanes'
Both film titles link directly to a subject in the film. In splitting lanes the font uses a direct link to the font used on roads, the yellow is used to draw attention to the title and lines running through.In the poster'World War Z' it directly links into subjects of the film, the Z, would usually refer to 'zombies', which shows the audience the genre as a zombie film. The use of colour of the white for the 'World War' could be used to show surrender or a neutral colour, despite the actual words. The Z however stands out and draws attention the colour red representing blood or war.
We decided to use alphabet spaghetti as our font with the rest of the poster font in white colouring to make it stand out.
All the posters I analysed were minimalist which we reflected in our final piece.
Billing Block/Actors Names and Reviews
All the posters I analysed had a billing block.This was new to me to create on posters, there was options of having long or short billing blocks, depending on the production team of the movie. As we didn't have a large team we decided on having a smaller billing block. We also felt it would crowd up the poster as we wanted to go for minimal design. We also went against typical billing blocks as they usually are white text on a black background. We used white text on top of an image to make it stand out.
We kept our actors names fairly small but easy to see to keep up with the minimal design. This is also commonly used on short film posters, However for mainstream films such as 'World War Z' Brad Pitt's name is featured at the top of the screen as an 'attention grabber' as he is a A-list actor.
We decided not to use reviews on our poster as many short films do not have them, as usually made by independent companies, the distribution means the film would not be seen by 'credible' people in order for people to watch it. We also wanted to keep it minimal to upkeep the intended design of the poster.
Little White Lies Review
As this was written in the style of a magazine, we did not break any conventions of the genre as we directly applied all the house style, language style along with fonts and the exact dimensions of the magazine.
As you can see in the magazine there is a clear structure and style to the magazine with the fonts and layout. We learnt that:
'Little White Lies' is also an independently published film review magazine which is under a bi-monthly subscription, which features writing, illustration and photography all related to cinema. It is published by 'The Church of London' who also produce 'Huck' magazine.
The magazine gathered results from a reader survey they ran, which gave the magazine their demographic and psychographic audience traits.
The demographic of the magazine mostly consists of 63% male readers and 37% female, which is two thirds of the magazine as a male demographic. The large majority of the male readers are aged 25-35, which shows a target to audiences who earn their own leisure pound, and have more of a disposable income to be able to spend on things such as films or magazines. The magazine costs £6 per issue and subscription to the magazine is an option, which is how the magazine generates their revenue. This then leads on to the psychographic information , 72% of the audience visit the cinema 0-4 times per month, showing their interests and hobbies also relating to their disposable income as cinema costs are rising more and more.
The audience for 'Little White Lies' are mainly job based in the creative and visual arts, as graphics and aesthetic is an important feature in the magazine along with the content, relating to the various industries, leaves the magazine as valuable.
When writing our review we had to take in to account that the demographic for LWL was slightly older than our target audience, however as we were writing it in the style of the magazine we saw that students also in our target audience also read the magazine so some of our target audience would be interested in our magazine review.
We had taken into account the style conventions of the magazine, which were the following :
- The opening paragraph usually comments on the contexts for the film, whether historical, literary or directors previous works.
- A summary information of the protagonist or other main focuses of the movie, potentially commenting on their traits, their representation, key aspects and evaluation of the actors performance.
- Key themes, issues and a basic narrative of the plot.
- Narrative devices used.
- Use and adaptation of genre conventions (e.g. Steve Neale's theory of repetition and variation)
- Reviewers opinion on the film.
- Summary sentence which overall comments on the whole film.
The magazine uses language conventions such as :
- Puns are used to create humour
- Adjectives are often used to expand the language.
- Quotes are used sometimes to back up points or things directors have spoken, or iconic lines form the film.
- Restricted language is used which shows the target audience of the magazine, as it is directed for people based in the media industry.
- Nouns and complex nouns are also used
Here is an image of our final review. As you can see we used all the conventions of the house style. Our language was difficult to adapt to the form of the writing, so we had to draft a couple of times in order to get in the right style to be in the correct form of the Little White Lies magazine.
- We mentioned the plot line without giving away the whole film and the ending
- Commented an opinion and directors previous works.
- Actors abilities and performance.
- Used proper dimensions, picture was relevant and featured two main characters.
Overall we wrote our review in the correct style of the Little White Lies magazine intended for their demographic, so we did not challenge any media products.
Q2- How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
I feel that our portfolio, including the short film, poster and review would work well together in a real commercial context. The combination of our film poster and our film, along with our film review and our film, would have a successful marketing strategy to attract the demographic we intended.
Our intended age range was MALES AGED 15-25, as we had created a film in the genre of a thriller. We had set up the poster and the review to entice audiences through our two ancillary tasks, as our film did not have a trailer, which feature length films usually have.
We thought carefully about how we would construct our poster in order to give the audience a sense of what the film is about and make them want to watch it. Previously before creating our poster we had researched into the conventions of film posters.
We decided that in order to create a poster that would intrigue the audience we first researched into how film posters would be marketed. We did this through launchingfilms.com. The website told us that film posters would be :
Initially selling the genre of the movie, as it is the first look of the film. So it is very important to get across what the film is about. Static image has availability to hit as wider audience as possible.
This would begin to attract audiences. However this is for more mainstream films. We took into the consideration of how these posters were marketed, and as a low budget independent film company who would not have access to the large scale distribution as other mainstream feature length films would get, so we focused on marketing the poster towards our intended demographic using the representation of character, themes and issues, location, use of colour to attract our audience.
There was no image of characters on our poster, as we felt it would give too much away of our film, and we could not find any images we took to be in enough quality. So we decided that would use the images of Alphabet spaghetti. This is a main feature in our film and also brings a sense of nostalgia to our audience, as it carries connotations of childhood, which is a theme we explore, being the loss of childhood innocence.
This could make the audience assume our film is somehow centred around childhood, however the image of the eyeball, if noticed by the audience could potentially become a clue as to what genre the film is in. An eyeball suggests to the audience a death or a bloody murder, as it is unusually placed in a bowl of soup. This gives a graphic suggestion towards the genre of thriller. We used bright vibrant colours to make the poster stand out to audiences attention, and instead of using titling we used the image we took on a camera, which visually incorporated the title into the picture. We used inspiration from real life film posters such as the short film 'superhero' which Alex analysed.
This poster uses its minimalistic design and the colour association with the title and the colour of the cape, directly showing the man in the cape is seen as the 'superhero' We liked the idea of a minimal poster, which is why our poster is not crowded. We felt the use of our colours and insinuation of theme would attract audiences to watch our film.
OUR FILM REVIEW AND FILM
Our film review and film was completely different to the marketing to our poster, as in reality if Little White Lies had written a review about our film, we would have no control over what would be said. However we would hope the reviewer would like our film enough to give it good reviews and attract an audience from their magazine to watch our film.
As explained before Little White Lies has a demographic of film lovers, working in the media or creative industry, typically males aged 25-35, which is the end spectrum of our target audience. However we believe that our film could still be appealing to people over the age of 25, as thriller is a wide based genre which has many fans.
Our review in the style of LWL would be very beneficial towards our film advertising and marketing as the film is described in an appealing way. As LWL is targeted for film lovers, short film enthusiasts could be reading the article and watch our film anyway. The film plot is described in a gripping way and the image used introduces the characters and as the review goes more into depth about the film, it would create intrigue as to the narrative of the film. As the image visually shows Isobel sitting with a bowl of soup it literally links into the title of the film. The ratings of the film could also attract audiences, as the film was rated a 3 , 4 and a 4. Little White Lies is distributed all around the UK, and is stocked in shops such as Urban Outfitters which is targeting males and females of our age range demographic we required (15-25) This means that people could pick up the magazine in the shop and read it, which could attract audiences to our film.
Other ways of distributing our film to audiences could be to places such as YouTube, where a profit would be made through advertising, in where you earn revenue in the placement of the advertisements during the film.
YouTube is the third most popular website in the world and is easily accessible to audiences. As many males from the age range we targeted use the website it could be a good platform to attract our audience. However the film would need initial publicity and promotion in order to get an audience to watch. this could be done through local screenings, DVD press and Social Media, which is the biggest tool in 'spreading the word' in today's evolving society.
Film festivals could be another way to attract our target audience.
Film festivals could be another way to attract our target audience.
Q3- What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
We used audience feedback to gain criticism for our film and
to help us with ideas for the film in the initial planning. We did this through
different methods of communication.
- Face-to-face communication was a big part in our audience feedback, we used this in our initial planning stages where we asked other classmates, our teachers and members of our target demographic in order to direct the movie in a way that would be more appealing for our audience. However although this was helpful, unless we had a camera, we were unable to capture proof of the feedback.
- Social Media such as Twitter or Facebook played a major role in us getting our feedback, as a large majority of our demographic use these applications regularly, and sending messages is simpler and response are usually quick, which made it faster to gain feedback. Through this we were able to message individual people to get feedback on our film, giving us more detailed responses, which has been helpful for criticism towards the film and the ratings for our film review. Twitter was very helpful in the initial planning stages as we used it to broadcast our survey for our initial film idea, which got us plenty of responses.
- Texting and messaging has been useful for our organisation as a group and for audience feedback as most people in our target audience will own a phone , once again making responses to our questions quicker.
- YouTube was another application we used to broadcast our film, the site giving us a link in which we were able to copy and send to people, which gained us more views and audience feedback.
- Blogger was another application we used to get feedback despite being from our teacher it gave constructive criticism and we were able to see what would alter and improve our film. It also let us document the process we went through to produce our film.
Feedback on film
In our post-production we asked for a lot of audience
feedback from certain areas in our film, and filming the answers we got. I feel
this helped us as although we asked females from our age group, as they were
media students also completing their films, this gave us an insight on what
looks good in our film. We learnt what would give a bigger impact on audiences
and cleared up loose ends from our film that we were unsure of. Here are links to both of the videos we filmed and put up on YouTube to visually show proof of us gaining our audience feedback. EYEBALL FEEDBACK
SOUND TESTING
When we completed our film, I sent round a Facebook message to our intended demographic to get feedback on our film. I asked the following questions:
1. Did you enjoy the film? If so why?
2. Was anything unclear to you? If so, what?
3. Did you experience any emotions during the film?
4. Were any themes made clear?
for question 1, I gathered up all the information and these were my results:
"1. I did enjoy the film, I was hooked from the start and thought some of the things you did were really interesting such as the scene where the two characters looked like they were going to meet. Overall I liked the emotions it brought."
"I think the film was interesting, I'm not a fan of the thriller genre so it became slightly boring for me, but the reveal of the eyeball at the end was quite shocking. I think it was filmed well."
"Some of the scenes were slightly confusing, however I enjoyed the trick or treating section, of the shot of the moon, the focused and unfocused view of it give it a realistic effect."
For Question 2 I received the following feedback:
"2. I understood the film perfectly! Nothing seemed unclear and it was all filmed well!"
"I didn't understand why the girl was in the house as her age for her role was not explained but she was known by the characters in the end, however she did not seem like a mother."
"The eyeball at the end confused me, I didn't understand why it was in the soup, I thought maybe it looked out of place, but it added nicely to the genre."
Question 3 feedback:
"3. The tension was built really well in the film, the uses of fade to black was good, the short sharp cuts make it seem more intense."
"I liked the Halloween section and the contrast it had with the girl in the kitchen, it built up well and I wanted to know how they knew each other."
"The tension was built well, the gory parts of the heart cutting made me cringe away, it was very creepy!"
Question 4 feedback:
"4. the themes of horror and gore came across well, and the use of contrast between the woman and the child showed a divide and the corruption, when they met at the end I was surprised by what the child got exposed to, the ideas of a child being shown this kind of twisted act by someone she appears to trust can be seen as recent and slightly scary. Really did enjoy the film though!"
When we completed our film, I sent round a Facebook message to our intended demographic to get feedback on our film. I asked the following questions:
1. Did you enjoy the film? If so why?
2. Was anything unclear to you? If so, what?
3. Did you experience any emotions during the film?
4. Were any themes made clear?
for question 1, I gathered up all the information and these were my results:
"1. I did enjoy the film, I was hooked from the start and thought some of the things you did were really interesting such as the scene where the two characters looked like they were going to meet. Overall I liked the emotions it brought."
"I think the film was interesting, I'm not a fan of the thriller genre so it became slightly boring for me, but the reveal of the eyeball at the end was quite shocking. I think it was filmed well."
"Some of the scenes were slightly confusing, however I enjoyed the trick or treating section, of the shot of the moon, the focused and unfocused view of it give it a realistic effect."
For Question 2 I received the following feedback:
"2. I understood the film perfectly! Nothing seemed unclear and it was all filmed well!"
"I didn't understand why the girl was in the house as her age for her role was not explained but she was known by the characters in the end, however she did not seem like a mother."
"The eyeball at the end confused me, I didn't understand why it was in the soup, I thought maybe it looked out of place, but it added nicely to the genre."
Question 3 feedback:
"3. The tension was built really well in the film, the uses of fade to black was good, the short sharp cuts make it seem more intense."
"I liked the Halloween section and the contrast it had with the girl in the kitchen, it built up well and I wanted to know how they knew each other."
"The tension was built well, the gory parts of the heart cutting made me cringe away, it was very creepy!"
Question 4 feedback:
"4. the themes of horror and gore came across well, and the use of contrast between the woman and the child showed a divide and the corruption, when they met at the end I was surprised by what the child got exposed to, the ideas of a child being shown this kind of twisted act by someone she appears to trust can be seen as recent and slightly scary. Really did enjoy the film though!"
Poster feedback
When completing drafts of our poster, we used audience feedback to help with our final piece, as we completed many drafts and posted them to our blog. Our teachers feedback helped with things such as our technical conventions and what the poster portrayed. They also helped with ideas with the titling and so we would know what posters to take and develop further.
For our first draft which Alex completed we received the following comment from our teacher, which helped us critique and move forward with our poster, resulting in more drafts.
Meg also created a first draft of a poster, in which the comment above also helped with our design of the poster.
All these comments helped us with our construction of our poster, as we then decided to play with the idea of alphabet soup as titling more. We had taken pictures during our filming process for potential poster titles, which became useful when creating more drafts.
We then created drafts like this, using the idea of the alphabet soup, with bigger titling. I had decided that I felt the poster would make little sense towards suggesting a genre and would potentially need a visual link with a bowl with the spoon. However we then received feedback from our teacher that the "title is prominent. Its only problem is that the genre is very unclear and as its function is to promote and inform, this would be an issue." 
From this feedback we had decided then to use the photos we had filmed with. Alex created this draft, however we verbally communicated with our teacher and we decided that the poster was still unspecific with it's genre and we needed to insert something to visually clue in the audience that it would be the theme of a thriller.
We later edited in an image of an eyeball, to suggest a semantic code of a thriller/horror, as it is a prop featured in our film, it gives a more sinister feel to it.
We asked our friends and people in our media class and I took down notes of things people had said, to later use.
People had mixed ideas surrounding the poster.
"I really like the vivid colours, the darkened corners give it a sinister feel. I feel the eyeball gives a nice touch to the poster, as it is inconspicuous, you have to look twice to notice it. It gives a dark touch to the film as you usually associated alphabet spaghetti with children."
"I feel the eyeball is not clear enough, maybe a if it was brighter you would able to notice it at first glance, but as most audiences wouldn't analyse posters it would be difficult to see."
"I like the literal use of the spaghetti, gives an almost comic element. However as the title is so short it creates intrigue as to the genre, making it unclear to what the film will be about. The eyeball is a good idea as it pushes the genre more towards a thriller."
"The simplicity of the poster is very current, minimalist posters are really being used now in the current industry, they create enigma and intrigue in audiences. The use of the white against the orange is very vibrant, the darkened corners suggest something more ominous will happen, until you notice the eyeball it is unclear as to the film genre."
This feedback helped us greatly in developing our poster and shows the process we went through.
Review Feedback
When completing our review we collected audience feedback for what images to use for our top part of the poster, without 'giving away' too much.
We had the idea of using various screen grabs such as:
When we asked the audience for this as our film review image, most generally said that the image gave too much away, and would take away the tension built as the audience who read the film would be expecting that ending.
The audience then commented that this image would be too unspecific, although some said the eyes opened wide could suggest instability, which could attract an audience and give more insight to the genre.
This image was our second option as it visually shows a link to Halloween. However we decided it was unspecific also to our review and would potentially confuse readers as there is only one character who is unidentifiable.
In the end we opted for this image, which shows both characters and the intention, which would not give away anything in the film, and would potentially create intrigue in the audience.
For the content of the review we received plenty of feedback from our teacher to see if the content of our review was suitable and we managed to get our points across well. We had looked at the house style and conventions of the Little White Lies magazine already so we knew what to include.
We had to write post of our piece in one go due to time shortages but here is an image of us in process of writing.
Our final piece was difficult to write to get our point across in the right 'eloquent' words, so I kept writing notes of feedback our teacher gave us. He had commented that we needed to "explicitly say the devices we used to clearly state the film's structure, however do not give away anything major."
"also comment on the parallel editing to create tension, and the construction and little character development available due to the conventions of a short film. Commenting on the themes and deeper meanings inside the film will give a stylistic and expressive opinion in the style of Little White Lies.
We also used audience feedback for the rating of our film. We looked at the general ratings LWL ranks films, and it usually doesn't reach over a 4, we took this in mind when we got our feedback and calculated averages.
Here is the message I sent to various people in our target audience (Males aged 15-25) and here is a number of responses we received.
Overall this contributed towards our final rating, in which we awarded our film a 3 , 4 and a 4.
Audience feedback really helped us in the end with making critical changes to our film and making it more appealing to our intended demographic.
Q4- HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION, RESEARCH AND PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGE?
PREZI QUESTION 4
Well done Holly. Clearly complete and met deadline. Only looked at this superficially but does look to have the depth of analysis to be awarded a good mark. Well done.
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