Task 1: Research
As I will be making a short film, I first need to research the codes and conventions of short film and also analyse an existing short film to learn what makes a short film, a short film.
Before I make my short film I must make sure that I understand and include the codes and conventions of short films in my short film so that an audience can recognize the final product as a short film. One of the main codes and conventions of short film is obviously the length, a short film is short, usually being around 10 minutes long they cant be longer than around 50 minutes because they will then be classed as a 'feature' length film. I have took this into consideration for my film as it is going to be around 8 minutes in length. Another code and convention of a short film is the characters, in short films they usually stick to around 2-3 characters, in mine there will be 3 main characters, Chloe, Amy and Eve. Because of the lack of time, short films don't have enough time to create deep background stories or history for the characters so short films keep the amount of characters low in order for the audience to be able to relate to the characters in a small amount of time.
Short films also nearly always include a twist in the story line, the reason for this is to make the film interesting as it is so short because without a twist the film would be boring as it would be to short and have no action in it. This relates to my film as the big twist is that the stalker has been watching Chloe the whole time while she has been posting online and then he suddenly strikes at the very last minute bringing a big sense of shock to the audience.
https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2019/05/09/two-sisters-2/
To see the codes and conventions in action I decided to watch the short film 'Two Sisters' by Keola Racela, this is a short film about two sisters who plan to escape from their home country of North Korea. In the end, they don't make it across the river and the older sister forces the younger sister to drink the 'magic water' which is actually poison as she would rather her be dead than be taken by the soldiers. I think this is a great short film as it has such a deep storyline shown in just 16 minutes, which is a code and convention of short film. The film has some beautiful shots in it which make the audience feel like they are really part of the story. The deep, dramatic and all too real storyline of the film really engages the audience into the film. The code and convention of characters in shot film are also used, there is only too main characters who are the main two girls who are trying to escape. I believe the writer of this film has chosen to do this as it would be too confusing to have more than two main characters in a 16 minute film. By watching this short film you can see that the codes and conventions of short film were taken into consideration when creating it.
I hope for my short film to have the same effect.
Another thing that I needed to research in order to create my short film was social media and its effects. To do this I watched videos on what it's like to be a social media influencer.
I learned that there is this underlying huge pressure to constantly be interacting with fans and showing what you're doing. I am going to portray this in my short film by having my main girl character Chloe be constantly obsessed with updating her social media and posting online. I also learnt when researching how easy it is for people to see what your up to online, this is the underlying message throughout my short film which is 'you never really know who's watching'.
This chosen media product has inspired me to make sure to use the codes and conventions of short film in my own short film so that I can create the dramatic effect that I want the film to give the audience.
I will need to use and develop my skills when making this film as it is so different to anything I have ever made before, I will need to make sure that I follow the codes and conventions in order for my film to recognized as a short film.
Task 6: Evaluation
Now with the main stages of the production of my film done, I can now look back and evaluate what went well and what I would improve about the whole project.
The aim of this assignment was to create a short film. I have done this in the form of my short film 'UNFOLLOWED',
Overall, I am very happy with the final product and how it turned out. I am also happy with how I performed my role as director and how my crew worked with me. From starting out as just an idea in my head, I have planned out and produced this 8-minute short film.
One of the first things I had to do was pitch my idea to an audience to see if my idea would be picked, this went better than I thought it was going too and I believe that I clearly spoke about my idea and what I wanted to do with it. I had a detailed powerpoint that I went through for the audience so that they could find out what it was going to take to make my idea a reality, for example; makeup requirements, locations, and actors.
It was now time for the production of the film. Everything went quite smoothly throughout the production, from pre-production planning to shooting on location. This was something that I wasn't expecting as things that you can just never predict can go wrong when filming. We shot everything that we planned to on all scheduled shooting days and never missed scenes. We stuck to the plan of 4 filming days too. We didn't have to deal with any major issues while filming this time around compared to previous projects. I think that my planning was a factor in this. I liked to have everything fully planned out before we did it. This was done by doing things like research to find out what places looked the best on camera, how we would get there and how long it would take to film. I also checked with actors their availability and transport means before I casted them in the film. This was a better decision than in previous projects as I knew what days actors would be free to film and how they would get to set before creating my shooting schedule, this created a much easier schedule to follow as we knew people would be free. Another example of my planning is shown in our location shoot in Newcastle, I made sure to plan everything from travel to what type of shots I wanted to get while we were there. This made for a much easier shoot every time as me and the crew knew where, when and how we were going to film the shots we needed for each scene.
My experience from working on previous projects such as Christmas ad and sit-com production before my final major project has really helped me when creating my short film. It has made me a lot more confident with the whole production of creating a film. From filling in paperwork to being on set with actors making them reshoot scene after scene to get the perfect take.
I have learnt lots of new skills while working on this project and have developed my existing skills such as directing. I have learned many things from the master and coverage filming technique, using unique shot styles such as screen recordings, to new editing techniques which I had never used before. Because of this I now feel much more confident at making films compared to what I did at the start of the project. This was one of the most fun productions to work on with my crew yet because of all of the new things we did, things like flying the drone to get a nice high shot to going to a location a lot further away than we had ever been before to make the feel of the film more realistic to the audience. All of these things give us more experience for our next project.
There is areas of this project that I would improve on for next time, this would be things like having a finished script ready for the auditions so that they could read more than just one of the scenes.
