1- In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
A. For our main media product we were instructed to make a five minute film of any genre we choose. Our group chose to work on a comedy thriller. This is what we came up with...
From what we have seen over the past 2 years we decided we were more comfortable with the thriller genre, partly because we had done so much work on it in the first year.
Narrative
the film narrative is very straight forward and follows a daily structure which we signified through the use of titles throughout the film. This narrative type is called linear. we decided to do this to show the routine-ness of her life. Rather than having a circular narrative where you would see the character dead at the start and then switch to Monday and continue the cycle until she died again.
- For a most of the scenes we used the the technique of the shit reverse shot, you can see this in frames 1-3 and frames 8 & 9. for this method of filming we filmed the whole scene from one perspective, once cut was called we moved the camera and redid the scene again, this could often take some time but we felt it gave the most realistic feel to the scene.
- The films narrative is restricted, you know as much as the woman who its happening to. we did this so the audience would not know what is coming next. although as the week goes on some people did work out that something would happen to her everyday as she took her pills.
- This makes our film easy to follow so the audience can concentrate on the story rather than getting confused by complicated narrative and structures.
Themes And Issues
- We addressed the issue of drugs in this film, but not the recreational type prescription drugs and the effect they can have on people. which we have never really witnessed in a short film before, so we were rather on our own in terms of conventions. IN the filmed we aimed not to make fun of this issue whilst still trying to make it a comedy.
- We aimed to in keep with the main conventions of a thriller. Which i feel we followed rather well.
Mise En Scene
Mise en scene is key in a film to portray the story of the film and to evoke certain emotions you want audiences to have during certain parts of the film. The aspects of mise en scene are:
- Costume
- Make-up
- Facial Expressions & Body Language
- Props
- Lighting
Costume was a tricky one for us, because we were showing a weekly routine we had to shoot the same scenes a number of times but with different costume, this takes place in the morning routine shots.
Make up
Make up was important for us in the scenes where blood was used. rather than using the conventional fake blood recipes using corn syrup, we opted for the "home made" DIY type, or melted lipstick...
Facial expression and body language
Body language and facial expressions can say a lot in a film, A LOT! Which was essential for us because we had no talking in our film. we wanted to play with the audiences natural reaction and having the character react unusually to what is happening will enhance that.
The scene when the character has blood running out her eye is a good example, if this happened to me i know i would be running down to the hospital but she just looks at it, wipes it away and carries on. although she looks worried and shocked its no where relatable to the extreme reaction anyone else would have. this could suggest that this has happened before.
Another scene where this can come into focus is Tuesdays meal. It starts off as another routine set of shots but then it changes from beans on toast to brains on toast. Now a normal person would freak out at this sudden change in meal, and if unless I'm mistaken most people would be repulsed at the idea of brains on toast, but again she just shrugs it off, adds pepper and continues with her lunch.
This is the kind of thing we wanted to have fun with and play with because it really gets a reaction out of people whether they laugh or recoil in disgust its good to get a reaction.
2.
3. What Have You Learnt From Audience Feedback?
The target audience was in the range of 15- 35 as i thought that this film would appeal to this age more, with the fact that its in some cases quite repulsing at times i thought anyone younger than this might not be suitable to show it to. from all the people I've show it to i think this age range definitely had the best reaction to it in terms of appreciating the story, where as i showed it to my father (50) and....he didn't really understand it all...
From the audience feedback I've received I've learnt that whilst some people understand the story and narrative whilst others slightly misinterpret it a little.
As you can see Ben Judge pretty much got the jist of the film whilst a little off key, and Kristian pretty much got it spot on.
But from the answers i did get... One thing was clear. No one at all picked up on why Friday was important. Friday was the day that she broke her routine and didn't take her pills therefore something bad happened to her for real. In hind sight i think i would have made a bigger deal about the fact that she didn't take her pills, or show the fact that she had ran out of pills would be more impacting.
Poster.
The main thing with the poster was a sort of over arching thing that was a point to make about hte whole film. Vivid. No one understood why it was called vivid. people appreciated the fact that it was an original name but couldn't really tell me why it should be called that.
I talked to my teacher and he suggested i change it to side effects (seeing as it was used in the tag line) which i agreed with, and so did everyone else. When i asked people if i should rename it to Side Effects most people lent back and had a moment of realization of what the film was actually about.
so in after thought the two things i would change would be 1. To make more of a statement about the lack of taking pills on Friday. And 2. Change the name from Vivid to Side Effects.
