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