Question 1)
- In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
I had a lot of inspiration from
the short film I studied ‘RED’. In RED the main character is constantly seen
with a camera, you know very early on that he is a photographer as his
profession, you see the camera consecutively throughout the short film as a key
prop. It links in as a significant part of the storytelling of the short film. I
liked the idea of having a prop that would connect your audience into the film,
something that wouldn’t perhaps make sense at the beginning but it does help
connect the story together and give the storyline some clarity through the
film, so I suggested to my group we use an hourglass in our short film to show
how the main characters time is running out, to represent her memories as each
grain of sand falling through the hourglass and her final moments when
reminiscing to death being passed from one person to another like an hour glass
passes sand from the top half to the bottom. Just like in RED when they flash
towards the camera we also did the same in our short film and showed the
hourglass with less and less sand in it through each short, we also changed the
sizings of the shot frames so it was getting closer to the hourglass with every
shot. I also really liked that the ending shot from RED is of the camera, which
inspired me to make the last shot in The Man in the Suit of the hourglass, but
as the last grains of sand are leaving the hour glass and fading to black as RED
does. This was because I found it gave a bigger power and emphasised the hour
glass as a key prop, giving it a bigger part of the clarity of the story, along with the representations it held.
RED also used pictures throughout
the short film, I like this technique because seeing pictures through a film
can help give you more of an insight into their life, as you can see from the
first set of pictures we see in RED he was photographing the murder you see at
the start, which tells you he’s a photographer as well as the fact he carries
around his camera all the time, we stole this technique by having our elderly
actor show death pictures of the children, husband and her life as she grew up
to give an insight into her life. We felt like it would be good to have a
visual to go along with her story. There is also a part in RED near the end
where you see a picture of the main character and his Wife/Girlfriend, they’ve
used a pan over the picture, we decided to use this technique as well but
throughout the piece a bit more, so we have a pan of her husband near the
beginning, then as she’s ‘dying’ you can see pans of her and her grandchildren,
her and her husband, which shows you the memories of her life.
For their costume, I liked how the
main character was wearing a suit in RED, it kept his personality more of a
mystery, because you see him going off to photograph a crime scene in the
beginning so it makes you questions whether that’s just his work attire or if
that’s his preference, which creates enigma for the audience. We decided
instead of the traditional hooded robe, we dressed our death in a suit to keep
the enigma built and add mystery to our character as we didn’t want his face to
be seen which also adds the enigmatic build up throughout the piece to when you
find out who he actually is. For our elderly actor we used a modern day
inspiration, gave her a colourful top with a cardigan as it’s a stereo type for
elderly ladies to wear slightly colourful clothing, cardigans have also become
something associated with elderly ladies as it’s not often to see one without a
cardigan.
We also stole the lighting
technique from RED, they keep the majority of every shot very dark and dull
with little over exposed parts through key features, such as windows, lights,
his glasses lenses, the backs of walls, so only parts of every character are
lit up but they’re over exposed. We liked this idea but decided to do it the
opposite way and not as over the top and make it subtler, we had our elderly
actor in a brighter light than death, to show death’s darkness and keep him
more of a shadow figure. We also wanted to show the classic ‘white light’ in
the tunnel you’re suppose to see as you’re dying as they do something similar
in RED but they use it as a flash back and it comes from behind him and the on
through the lenses of his glasses. We thought it would represent her death and
add clarity to the scene, however we struggled to make it look like the classic
‘white light’ and add the tunnel effect without cutting our actors face out
completely. We wanted the ‘white light’ to go over the top and becoming from
her eyes/face so the fact it was cutting her face out made the idea pointless
so we scraped the idea. However as RED is an animation I think it was easier
for them to manipulate their footage. It is something we’d all like to try
again in the future and learn from where we went wrong.
In addition to, you can clearly
grasp the genre as thriller/horror for RED, however our short film didn’t have
a genre as it didn’t fit any of the conventional codes for any specific film
genre’s, which made our short film different, it also meant we had to work
slightly harder to portray our final outcome with building enigma, to create a
solid tension rise to complete the final climax effectively. However the
majority of short films don’t have a genre as it’s hard to show a full genre in
such a short amount of time, the most commonly used genres for short films are
Horror/Thriller and Love/Romance as they’re the easiest to portray.
It’s not unusual to find a short
film with no dialogue, or a very little amount. You will commonly find they all
use a non-diegetic soundtrack played over the top of the film. We decided to
have diegetic dialogue and a non-diegetic soundtrack over our short film, the
sound track was to set the mood and it helped make our film look like less of a
documentary, we have a fair bit of dialogue throughout our film as well, which
we needed for when our elderly actor reminisces about her life with death. We
chose to have her talk about her life instead of showing it because we felt
like it was more personal. However in RED they don’t have any dialogue, they
have a few huffs, sighs and groans but no language, which is diegetic sound. It
also has a variety of non-diegetic soundtracks which create enigma with the
tension in the tracks; it sets the atmosphere in their film, which is what
inspired us to have a soundtrack that created the right atmosphere in our film,
as we don’t have a genre we needed to make a clear atmosphere.
The main character in RED is very
mysterious, you find out more about him as the short film goes on, I like the
idea that the character is revealed more and more as the story goes on so I
decided to try this in my short film, which is why we only reveal deaths face
at the end of the piece when you find out who he is and once the story is
starting to make more sense. I liked this technique to grab the audience’s
attention and keep them intrigued throughout the piece. The main attraction in
the majority of short films is the mystery of characters and genre/storyline,
it’s what entices the audience into watching the full short film and gives them
the same effect as watching a feature length film. Additionally, a short film mainly follows one
characters life, or journey in the short film, in RED you follow the
photographer’s life and his journey to find out that he’s the one killing the
ladies in red dresses. We focused on one person in our film also; we focused on
our elderly characters (Elsa) life and what she’s done with her with it.
Upon choosing a name for our short
film we struggles with finding something that would fit our film, we looked at
many short films to see if we could find a link to their film and name of
choice. Red links into its film as the only colour you predominately see is
red, the ladies killed are wearing red, the blood is shown in red and when you
see the picture of the photographer and his wife, she is wearing a red dress,
through watching the short film you can see red is a trigger colour to him and
brings back memories he doesn’t want to think of. In Insomnia you can quickly
tell it’s about a boy at university who can’t sleep and his mind is playing
tricks on him. In INSiDE, you see various characters come out but you can
clearly see these characters are ‘inside’ his head, which is shown by having
both actors mouthing the words at the same time on screen and the doctor only
responding to the patient. This inspired us to come up with a name that would
directly link into our short film but still create enigma and keep the audience
guessing, we came up with a few names, but The Man in the Suit stuck with us
most as one of our main characters (Death) wears a suit so the title will
create enigma with him throughout the film till it is revealed who he is.
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