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.

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.



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

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.

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

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.

 

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.

 

Codes and Conventions of Short Films