Short Film

Evaluation - Question 2

Evaluation - Question 4

Evaluation - Question 3

Orignal Poster

I consulted my target audience about which poster in their opinion is the most effective in a form of a poll on my blog and I decided to go with their answer that original black & white poster should be my final product.

The Brief

A short film in its entirety, lasting approximately five minutes, which may be live action or animated or a combination of both, together with two of the following options:
-a poster for the film
-a film magazine review page featuring the film.

Inspiration

For a long time I and my partner were unable to come up with a viable idea, we would jump from one genre to another, never agreeing on what it should be about. Our deadline for deciding the main storyline was near and so were close to giving up on creating a short film and maybe changing to print based task instead. That was until I went home the same day and thought about what was Kent, where we live known for. All I could think about was the beach, so I looked out the window to the beach and it hit me how many amusement arcades there are around on the main road out of Margate. I wrote to Sammy telling her of the whole idea and she was so taken back with how obvious our solution was that we begin research deeper into our theme. Hangover was one of the films which popped up on the radar as well as Ocean's Eleven, both comedies which were made into trilogies. I never thought Hangover will be the basis of our short film but after thinking about it and discussing it with my partner we were set to take inspiration from it. We decided to watch it and see how it could be made on a minimal budget. From that point on we started our hunt for location.

The Idea

The story line follows a thirty-something year old man on his quest to achieve his childhood dream of winning enough tickets at different machines at a arcade to be able to win a model car to complete his vintage toy car collection. On his way to fulfill his desire he meets the arcade employee Antonio and a young boy Leo who teach him a life lesson he will never forget.

Behind The Blog

This Media Studies A2 blog is an individual creation of myself, Adrianna Paniak however on this short film I am working in a group of two with Sammy Ali who is the owner of another blog updating on the progress of film making. Aside from the contributing posts  about the progress of producing a short film I will present individuals pieces of research for the ancillary tasks.

Slideshare

They way you present your work such as the codes and conventions is as important as the information you put in which is why I've been exploring Slideshare which is a slide hosting service where you upload files to be shown privately or publicly. They offer a range of formats to use from starting with PowerPoint presentations and ending on PDF documents.To be honest I didn't have a Slideshare account until now however I have been known to follow a few of the presentations set up by AS Media Studies students which I found very clear and great examples of what Slideshare allows you to do. Needing help to set everything out and learn about all the options and tools available to a standard user I watched a well made Slideshare tutorial which taught me about syncing my account with Facebook and using the privileges of being able to to contact your Facebook friends directly about new Slideshare presentations and vice-versa being alerted about your friends' activity on Slideshare.

Prezi

Another medium I am going to use to present our codes and conventions in an interactive and appealing way is Prezi  a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas.The product allows users to zoom in and out of their presentation media, and allows users to display and navigate through information within a 3D space on the Z-axis.
I personally never heard of Prezi before which is why I was quick to learn more about it through a very detailed 2013 Prezi tutorial which takes you step by step from creating your Prezi account to creating a detailed presentation.

Short Films Research

To gather the codes and conventions of short films I have watched a range of short films among which were the comedy called Late Bloomer which was shown at the Sundance Film festival, a fantasy/romance called Inbox and a 2010 Oscar nominated short film called The Crush. To allow you to see the films without the worry of them expiring I will create my own YouTube channel called Short Films Research where you will be able to look through the playlist of the films that inspired our own production and read about the similarities and the differences of the two. At the moment the channel it's filling up but soon it will have a range of my favourite short films on which I laughed, cried or felt creatively stimulated by.



Target Audience

To target an audience for our short film we used a social networking site called Facebook which allowed us to create a group chat and ask questions to a closed amount of people which we selected on the basis that they were either Media Studies students and/or film buffs known to us. The group is called ''Sammy and Adrianna's Media Target Audience'' and the first question we asked was ''What film genre do you watch most often in cinema, television or on other available platforms?''and we uploaded a list of a 13 genres to choose from: action; adventure; comedy; crime; fantasy; historical; horror; mystery; romance; science fiction; thriller; urban and other where they could specify.Some of the responses were:

Adventure/fantasy – anything that transports me to another world

Thriller/comedy/fantasy for moi

Action, crime, urban

This helped us a lot as to narrow down the most commonly answered genres, and according to preference they were: adventure, comedy and action which we will combine into one hybrid short film.

One of the people taking part in the questionnaire told us of Facebook pages as a tool to help us gather a larger audience of people interested in helping us shape the final product and we decided to try it out. We didn't know much about this aspect of Facebook and so following the steps of a usual tutorial we set ourselves up under Sammy and Adrianna's Movie. There are many useful tools to help you manage and promote your page such as Poll on Facebook where you can create polls and Facebook will count the votes for you making the job easier. The first poll that we took had a headline of ''How often do you watch short films?''and the answers were: never; daily; weekly; monthly or annually. The votes of our audience generally consisted on never with 40% followed by monthly with 30% and the daily, weekly and annually had 10% each. This helped us to find out what our audience thinks and wants to see on screen and also we could target even a larger audience by sending requests to people to Like the page or Share it on their profiles.

Codes and Conventions of Short Films

Finally getting the hang of Prezi I created my own interactive presentation to illustrate the codes and conventions of short films. I don't think there is much to say but to let you view it for yourself by clicking on the link below where you will be able to see my handy work. It is still  a work in progress and I will be updating it as I go along improving the section of narrative theory and adding pictures, videos to make it more interesting and lively.

Short Films Research II

So far I have uploaded most of the short films we have considered into our short films research onto the YouTube channel and you can display them on the blog as well conveniently with one or two more coming right up, straight after I analyse it.

The Crush



The Desk



Late Bloomer



Memorize



The Ventriloquist



Inbox



When You Love Someone

Target Audience II

The short film industry’s audience is quite specific compared that of the mainstream audience of larger full length films. There are two main groups of people who will be familiar with short films; unemployed students seeking a future in the film industry and people who are already successful in the industry.

Our short film will attract males and females over 16 as our short film will include themes like gambling and moderately strong language. Majority of the short films can be found on the internet on websites such as YouTube and short film festivals which limit their availability to children. Also local residents of Thanet will be attracted by sighting familiar locations and seeing local actors, supporting the local talent base.

Script

Writing the script can be anything from the thing you enjoy the most to the things that is always on you mind but in no way you can find inspiration for it. During the summer I had a lot of time to nurture and improve on the Idea and some characters became the supporting cast while some grew to be keeping the storyline together. Following the film genre (hybrid) that is so flexible our film has changed from a drama, to a family film with comedy conventions to totally out of control Hangover 4 however never throughout its evolution it wavered from its identity as a local film with local cast, made with a local setting in mind.

In the Arcade (First Draft)



The Arcade Story (Second Draft)



Third and maybe final draft will be posted soon... What the title of the production will be, no one yet knows except maybe I and Sammy, but we are still undecided. Oops.

Location Scouting

I and Sammy decided that this weekend we will go out on location and do some test shooting to see if we might have any problems on the actual filming days which we can take care of now. Our main shooting location is the interiors of Fun Shine Amusements, which is a family arcade in Margate.

View Larger Map

Sketches

Before we got to do our storyboards for the finalized version of our script I and Sammy decided that we will create some sketches to represent our ideas on location, props and actors. They might be rough and hard to decipher but they show that we have a clear idea of what we want to do.



CHARACTER: LEO SKETCH

CHARACTER: DENNIS SKETCH

CHARACTER: ANTONIO SKETCH

LOCATION: MARAGTE BEACH MAIN SANDS

LOCATION: EXTERIOR TURNER CONTEMPORARY

LOCATION: INTERIOR FUN SHINE AMUSEMENTS

PROP: ANTIQUE CAR

Test Shoot

This weekend I and Sammy went to the beach to polish our filming skills but because of unfortunate circumstances our day turned to a little nightmare when we found out that we will be unable to film at the place we wanted to because the arcade had some hard experiences with film crews recently, not being able to control their image but we used our brain cells effectively and in the next 30 minutes can with a solution to all our problems. All we were left to do is to talk to our focus group and see if they can be persuaded to accept the new and improved short film idea.

Watch our personal revelations from day on the beach.

Group photo

Sammy documenting our work on her phone

Me, myself and I rewriting the script

Long shot of the upcoming tide

Practicing blured focus of the harbour

Extreme wide shot of the Turner Contemporary Gallery

Sharper focus of the high street

Mood Board

Pictures that inspired the idea for the short film. My mood board shows the variety of images and scenes from films, television shows and books that express my ideas and what I personally enjoy as we are considering a genre for our short film.

Theme

When researching Codes and Conventions of short films we came upon the importance of theme which is crucial to the development of the short film. It needs to be something you are concerned about but also something that everyone can relate to. Through our research we discovered that there are 10 central themes in film and we decided to pick the 2nd most common theme which is Love Conquers All for the basis of our project.

The New and Improved Idea

Things happen which you can't predict and help in pre-production but when you do you can only make the best of them which is why our new short film will revolve around speed dating service. The main character Harry will be supposedly invited by his best friend Matthew to a party when in reality he will be dragged to his school's annual speed dating service for unlucky singles. The night will turn unexpectedly for the pessimist and he might make some friendship which will last him more than one night.

Our focus group seems to like the new idea even more than the old one and with their approval we will continue in this direction:

I prefer the idea for Dating 101 because I feel that you can expand on this story and make it more interesting compared to the Arcade Story. - Lucy 

Inspiration Behind the New and Improved Idea

In June Channel 4 started its ''Mating Season'' programming which included Dates, a romantic drama series illustrating a series of first dates between on-line dating service users. Set in London, each episode focused on a first date between two people, with the series exploring the issues and intricacies of modern relationships.

I was one of the people watching the series and it was fascinating to see so many believable and recognisable characters who represent different classes, sexuality and ethnicity. Also the format is really appealing because of the seemingly real interactions between the dating participants, portraying the ''thrills and calamities'' of first dates. 

It motivated me to look into the colloquial language used in normal conversations, the meaningless of the spoken word and how often we hide between matter of speech not to protect someones feelings. The normal running time of Dates is 25 minutes without adverts and so we would have to condense the story's development into 5 minutes which is why we chose speed-dating to have more flexibility in portraying a rage of characters while still maintaining a linear narrative.

Watch a snippet of the first episode Dates A Good Start - Ep. 1 Channel 4

Casting

Writing the script we had in mind the outline of the different characters we wanted to have at the speed-dating. The different personalities with the peculiar quirks. Though the characters are imaginary we wrote some qualities around them and so Julia's hobby is inspired by the actress's passion for writing. The number of main male characters developed over the drafting process and the availability of actors informed our character choices and so from one main character we progressed to his sidekicks. We picked Josh to play Harry because he is a very talented actor and we have a past working relationship with him which established us in our opinion that he is suited and available to play the character. We wanted to have a friendly atmosphere on set which is most of our cast know each other and are friends in real life.

Cast Contact List

A cast contact list is the organised way of keeping details of all your actors in one place.

Production Credits

Title: Dating 101

Directed by: Adrianna Paniak in collaboration with Sammy Ali

Written by: Adrianna Paniak in collaboration with Sammy Ali

Edit by: Adrianna Paniak in collaboration with Sammy Ali

Promotional material by: Adriannna Paniak and Sammy Ali

Location: Chatham and Clarendon School Federation

Actors:

Harry: Josh Smith
Matthew: Will Channing
Carlos: Cameron Cullen Smith
Zara: Sammy Ali
Sandy: Adrianna Paniak
Megan: Alice Mair
Morgan: Jenny Dening
Julia: Hannah Thomas
Poppy: Phoebe Sola
Extras: Natalia Renwick, Leena Magid, Alex White

Filming: November 2013

Release: March 2014

Genre

We have chosen comedy as our short film genre according to the poll on both Sammy and mine blog which clearly shows comedy as the most popular short film genre in our target audience. At the present moment

''75% of the voters chose comedy as their favourite genre and the second most picks was given to romance with 62%'' - mine blog

''70% picked comedy as the movie genre they would enjoy the most with romance second best with 60%'' - Sammy's blog

The sub-genre that interested us the most is romantic comedy where a humorous plotline is centered on romantic ideals, with the two leads having to overcome numerous obstacles to find their true love.

Codes and Conventions of Film Posters

Between writing our final version of the script I decided to do some research into the codes and conventions of film posters, one of my two ancillary tasks supporting the main production and so looking at some previously created A2 blogs, paying attention to the advertisements around me and researching particular films I have found out that film posters for short films are not so different from film posters for feature films. Previously the amount of budget would be a big decider in spending money on advertisements however now in the age of Photoshop even small production companies can compete with oligopolies for the most creative and griping posters on the market.

Codes and Conventions of Film Review Pages

As research for the codes and conventions of film review pages which is the second ancillary task I looked into three of the most popular, top selling British magazines Empire, Total Film and Sight & Sound. They might have different publishing house and cater for different audiences however they shows similarities in aesthetics, content and from that they all regulate.

Script II

This is the final version of our new and reloaded script called Dating 101. After timing it on our stopwatch we are sure it's definitely and above five minutes long.

 

Poster Inspiration

When researching film posters I came around the film posters for a film called Speed-Dating.

''Best friends Dog and Beaver  have difficulty ever meeting women. No matter what they do, nothing ever goes right for them. That all changes when the best friend Too Cool  invites them to try out a round of speed dating.'''

The film might not have been a commercial and financial success with reviews like

''A tired mash-up of every men-behaving-badly sitcom ever to grace a third-tier television network, Speed-Dating tries to coax laughs from characters so dated even Eddie Murphy would balk.''

Jeanette Catsoulis from The New York Times. 

However I liked their marketing campaign which took the idea of speed-dating and incorporated it in its tag lines.

Storyboards

Below are the handwritten storyboards designed by Sammy Ali and me.

Short Films Research

Notes on the 10 short films I and Sammy watched as the basis of out short film research, they very in genre, length and country of production however most of them portray the comedy conventions which we plan to apply to our film production.

Script for short film analysis

This is the unfinished script which we will use as narration for the analysis of the short films which inspired us to apply or contradict their codes and conventions.

 

Final Cut Pro

Though I have used Final Cut Pro, the non-linear video editing software to edit my film opening at OCR Media Studies AS I thought I need to get back into the habit of using it if I want to use it for editing the Codes and Conventions presentation and the short film. Its user base is  mainly made out of video hobbyists and independent filmmakers however it has continually been used as the main editing software on major films such as John Carter (2012), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (Academy Award winner for Best Editing - Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall) and True Grit (2010).

I watched the Final Cut Pro X Tutorial Part 1 : Basics & Color Correction which shows some basic features in Final Cut Pro like creating a project and adjusting colour of the video clips. It is Part 1 out of 28 which gradually advance in difficulty displaying all the available functions of the software for amateurs and professionals alike.

Worlde

While looking at a recommended A2 Media Studies blog E.T'S BLOG I learned about Wordle which is a toy for generating ''word clouds'', a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword tags on website or blogs just like this one. Tags are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color. 

Wordle states that ''you can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes. The images you crate with Wordle are your to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.''

Here's an example:

I will use Wordle to present the feedback from our target audience on our script. 

Institutions

Researching the institution which would be perfect to produce and distribute our film I decided to look through the short films which I used to for my film poster codes and conventions. Apart from the three films which I used for the analysis I had a storage of spare film posters which I didn't think used as many codes and conventions on the posters as the others.

Representation

The stereotypes my and Sammy's short film applies to are those on age, sexuality, class and ethnicity with the last one central for us as I'm Polish while Sammy is British Indian and it was important to us to try to challenge those stereotypes or at least try to portray them in a more real way within our society.

This website 55 National Stereotypes helped me to find well known national stereotypes in one place.

 

Layout Ideas for Review Pages

I've drawn up some possible ideas for my review page layout taking into account a combination of text, pictures and layout designs.

Review page layout ideas from Adrianna Paniak

Script Feedback

Asking our target audience their opinions on our script we received a few responses, but all positive with constructive feedback on what we could improve or develop. All liked the idea and thought the storyline was was funny but they had difficulty with imaging character as they wanted more detailed character descriptions and the use of parentheses so that they could understand the intention of the spoken word through they way the character spoke or looked when speaking. Another point was to add clear shot changes so that specific shots or camera movements are outlined.

Production House Logo

Trying to come up with a name for our production house and a logo we used the Logo Garden website which makes logo creation easy dividing your area of interest to ''Industry'', ''Symbol'' and ''Color & Type'' categories. It's a 3 step process which takes approximately 8 minutes and allows you to make a professional logo for free.

We wanted our production name to reflect us as a company and so we read this article on GQs website on How To Name Your Hollywood Production Company which talks about going neighbourly and using the street name where you're based making it easy to remember such as Cavendish Street Studio, or if you cater for specific genre then name your company appropriately like Fall In Love Productions which would symbolise romantic films.

But finally we decided to call ourselves Storybook Pictures because we simply want to tell stories and it made sense to follow DreamWorks, Image Entertainment and Relativity Media for a name which had an ominous tone that sound that if our company transcends the medium of film itself and seeks to pursue larger questions about culture and humanity.

Costume

Below is a list of preliminary costume ideas for the characters in our film.

Dating 101 Costume from Adrianna Paniak

Shooting Schedule

Next week we are going to shoot the exterior shots for our short film. Below is a write up of the schedule which is the chronological order in which we will film the scene. 

Poster Drawing

The design of the poster for Dating 101. The main image is of the main character Harry played by Josh Smith whose name is placed centrally at the top of the poster attracting our preliminary target audience. The title would be written in clear black font with the number ''101'' emphasised in a larger font in red to suggest the basic level of Harry's skills in dating. The tag line of ''Let the dating begin'' would give the hint into the speed-dating that Harry will get himself into where pressure to score a date will create comic situations.

Poster Mock Ups

Using images from the Internet I created mock ups of the film poster. The resolution might not be of the best quality however I will try to improve with each draft. The style is similar with a white background, main image, secondary images, title and a tagline in red and black. I was inspired by the posters for the film Speed-Dating using a coloured backround to match the colour of the title while the mid shot of the character is a black and white picture following the elegant and eye-popping design. Also the name tag idea stems from the posters for that film however insted of giving insight about the character I just wrote their name which lives an air of mystery about the man in the pictures because his face is kept out of the shot.

Adobe Photoshop

For the ancillary tasks, which are the film poster and magazine review page I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. This is the first time I am using this software which is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. To help me learnt basic tools such as Magic Wand Tool and how they can make my life easier I watched Photoshop Tutorials which explore different tips and tricks in an step by step accessible way.

Review Page Mock Ups

Using images from the Internet I created a mock up of the review page. The resolution of the images from the film 28 Dresses might not be of the best quality however I will be able to take pictures of the high quality for my actual review page. The style is similar to those of current film magazines such as Empire with the page being a double page spread including shots from the film, the review, quotes, ratings and production information.