Short film 3- Chicken a la Carte

Chicken a la Carte is the final short film that I researched and analysed. The subject of the short film is ‘poverty’. At the beginning of the film you observe people eating in a fast food restaurant in China. During their meal, they leave their chicken leftovers on their plates. The camera then focuses on the chicken bones throughout the film as you follow their journey which starts off with a man putting them in his bag from the rubbish bins with various other leftovers. The film then concludes with the man coming home to his family in which you can obviously see that they all live in poverty and he then feeds his family with all the leftovers he has collected. I believe that the intention of Chicken a la Carte is to show us as an audience that in this decade there are still people around the world who live in poverty and have to find food from bins just to survive. The contrasted settings of the short film, from the fast food restaurant to the run down village is the relevant aspect of the film as you see how wasteful the people are in the fast food restaurant, yet you see how happy the family is when the father brings back the leftovers. The soundtrack in the short film is quite sad so it creates sympathy towards the less fortunate who are viewed in the film. Poverty is a cause that needs to be addressed by everyone which means the implied target audience is for anyone who watches it.
Overall, I believe that Chicken a la Carte is a very effective way of showing the realism of people’s lives around the world that live below the poverty line. This is definitely one of my favourite short films that I have watched.

Short film 2- Signs

Another one of my favourite films which I found whilst researching is the short film ‘Signs’. Signs is about a man and a woman who communicate across the street with the use of written signs. You immediately know that the main subject of the film is about communication, with the intention being the importance of falling in love through communication.
Signs has two main actors, who both play the roles of office workers. They notice each other across the road through the windows of their parallel office blocks and throughout the film you see them begin to fall in love. The setting of the two office blocks, with windows that look upon each other is crucial to the narrative as it allows the possibility that two people can form a relationship with the communication of signs. This film was distributed at various film festivals and was awarded first place at the Cannes film festival. In conclusion, the main aspect which I like about this film is the soundtrack. This is because the film does not have any speech in it. I believe that this is because it emphasises the fact that they can only communicate with the signs and not through speech. However, throughout the film, composed music can be heard which imitates the emotions of the characters, changing tempo to represent them being bored, happy and sad. Overall, I definitely feel that Signs was very effective in delivering the theme of communication to the audience.    

Short film 1- Lovefield

Lovefield is a very clever short film and was very well executed. The opening of Lovefield is very puzzling, as you are not sure as an audience where the location is, the background music sounds like a soundtrack from a thriller film and the colours are very monotonous. For example, instead of the sky being blue, it is a deep grey colour. Also, you continuously see a crow, which represents death. This factor makes you feel like something bad is about to take place.
In the first three minutes of the film, the audience is lead to believe that a woman could be being raped and about to be murdered. However, this is not the case. The main way that you are influenced to believe that this is happening is the camera movement. The camera helped to create this misinterpretation as it slowly revealed significant objects throughout the short film, such as blood on a towel and most memorable, a knife being forced into the ground by a man’s hand. You also see some of the woman’s body shaking and covered with blood. Another way that you are lead to believe that something horrific is taken place is the location of the short film. It is set in the in a corn field out in the middle of nowhere.
The actual plot of the short film is then revealed. The woman who you believed was allegedly being raped and killed was in fact giving birth with the help of the man, who soon reveals himself as a farmer type character. The audience then discovers that the theme of Lovefield is prejudice. In conclusion, the camera work in the short film was very effective as it did not show the audience much of the setting. You just see specific objects which you would associate with a horrific crime. It is not until the end, in which the camera shots get much wider where you can see what is actually occurring. More so, the location and weather turns very bright and sunny, this reflects the happy atmosphere and signifies the birth of life. Overall, I very much liked the idea of Lovefield and believed that is was executed extremely well. It made me think that you should never judge a book by its cover which is the main purpose of the film.   

Creativity

The independant process of creativity is filled with complex aspects which is limited by some factors. I must take these factors into consideration during the creative process of my A2 short film project. The audience as a whole has bearing, which includes trying to meet or even beat thier expectations, suitably for the intended age group and intruging for gender, sexuality, class and race. Having considered this, my media group can also limit creativity with a clash of ideas leading to the project being a collective creative process. Time is also a major part of the project, in order to make our film on time for the deadline we need to plan out the actions that we are going to take. Motivation is another important factor throughout the production of our project; to be able to successfully produce our short film to a high standard we will need lots of motivation within our age group, which also affects the creativity we have. The final factor that I will be concentrating on throughout my project is experience. After producing an opening of a film last year, I believe that the experience and creative thoughts I went through then will help me with my creativity this year.

My personal short film idea.

The form of my short film is a comedy documentary which is set in a failing high school in England with a bad reputation. There is no specific subject of the short film as it covers all issues that you would associate with in a working class high school.
The basic plot of the 'mockumentary' is that a camera crew and an unseen (female) narrator film various events around the high school and interview key characters. The characters in the short film are two rival teachers, a troubled student with ADHD and a group of popular, bad mannered, out of control girls. The rest of the school are infact a completely real high school who are asked to play along with the actors when they inflict different events on various students/ staff members. The intention of the narrator is to make the audience believe that the short film and the events that are filmed are in fact real.
The narrative point of view is the interviewer who speaks to different people/ characters as she follows wherever the camera crew go. My film will be distributed in cinemas during the advertisements in a certificate fifteen film. The certificate of my film will be fifteen years as it contains adult humour and strong language throughout. I believe that the high school has characters which most people can relate to, which is why the target audience is for anyone who watches films that are certificate fifteen.

Group Brief

I am part of a 3 person group, working alongside my fellow media students Oliver and Adam, to plan and produce a short film which will last approximately 5 minutes. After discussing and researching short film ideas, we have decided to produce a short film about 'Obsession'. This idea will consist of a man's obsession with his ex partner and how his need to be with her again soon takes hold of him and controls his life. Our film will be in form of 9 scenes, all of which will show him trying to get back in contact with her by any means necessary. As each scene progresses you see him physiologically breakdown as his desperation increases, soon climaxing to a horrific conclusion.
We are currently discussing the script of the film and producing the story board for each scene. We have also made the decision that each of us will take responsibility for 3 different scenes of the film. This duty will include being the director, writing the dialogue, producing the storyboard and finally editing each scene that we have been set. I believe that this is a good idea as we will all be able to take charge of each aspect that creates and produces the film. The target audience is also a key factor we have been discussing. However, we have yet to identify the target audience our film should be aimed at. We believe we should come up with an agreement very soon so we can make use of appropriate actors and designs which will address the target audience. We will continue discussing this and other areas that need to be decided before producing our film.

Introduction

My name is Harry and I am currently studying A Level Media studies. We have been asked to produce a short film in its entirety, lasting approximately 5 minutes long which may be live action or animated. Aswell as producing a short film, we also have to choose two of the three options to go with it. These are:

- A film poster
- A radio trailer
- A film magazine review page (featuring the film)

Last year for AS Media studies, we had to produce the opening two minutes of a film. My group and I decided to produce an opening for the genre 'high school musical'. We had to produce a film that challenged stereotypes of typical high school musicals and tried to use/ develop the forms and conventions of real media products. I believe we succeeded whilst producing the film as we all worked exceptionally hard when it came to editing and producing the final product. However, we could have improved our final result by spending more time planning what we were going to do. I got an A grade for my film last year and I hope this year will be just as successful.