Coursework Blog

The task was to plan a lesson to deliver to my class. I had to plan the lesson with a peer on the topic of 'Sound in Singin' in the Rain' and The Gold Rush'. To do this, we made a PowerPoint presentation and asked them to also plan an answer to an exam-style question in this topic. When creating the PowerPoint, we researched various types of sound in films, such as diegetic, non-diegetic and foley. We then also applied these to SITR and TGR as a whole, and then to certain scenes. This helped with the planning task as it allows you to make refences to the film in specific detail. These are some examples of the slides from the PowerPoint:

The narrative of ‘Where have I Been All Your Life’ is driven by binary opposites to some extent. This is since the husband is seen to be unfaithful compared to the faithful wife, which is later shown to be inaccurate. Furthermore, Mulvey’s male and female gaze theory comes into context with this short film as a part of representation, because the husband is not frowned upon for having cheated, whereas the wife is. The male characters also dominate he female characters in tis short film which supports this theory. Jenkins’ theory involving genre also plays a part in this short film since it is a hybrid of various genres, such as drama and comedy. This highlights the theory as it is modern and has no fixed structure. Blumler and Katz’ theory that states that the audience can relate to a character or their situation can also be applied to ‘Where Have I Been All Your Life’ as an audience theory. Furthermore, some spectators may be in a similar situation to the main character, or the co...

Over the summer holidays, my task was to create a PowerPoint presentation of a range of macro elements theorists. I had to apply the films that I have studied to the theorists and explain reasons for this. Here are some examples of this:

This is the original short film that I chose to use as stimulus for my own 1 minute short film This is my own 1 minute short film that I have made in response to 'Trapped'. Mise-en-scene - how much attention did you pay to each of the elements of MES and why? How effective is it in your end product? The costume of the actor is accurate for the character they are playing as they are wearing smart office-style clothing which fits the idea that they are at work. This was not a conscious decision however the setting was chosen based on the costume. This is because the costume had to match the setting, because otherwise the mise-en-scene would not tell the spectator anything about the situation - this is vital for a 1 minute short film as there is not a lot of time to tell the narrative. Having aspects of mise-en-scene that work well together make it easier to tell the story since the spectator can deduct a lot from things like setting and lighting. The props...

I have yet to decide what genre I want my short film to be, however I know that I do not want it to conform to the following genres: Comedy Science fiction Action Romantic Teen Adventure Crime Fantasy Political I perhaps may decide the genre of my short film to be either horror, documentary, social realism or surrealism, although I am not sure this is definitely what I want to do as of now. Also, the idea of an animation is not ruled out. I do know that I want to have as little dialogue and characters as possible.

I watched this video to learn how to shrink a person as a special effect so I could make my own. In order to do this, I filmed the actor inside a rectangular cardboard box. I then filmed some footage of another cardboard box, wince was much smaller. In order to make this work, I the box had to also be rectangular so I could scale the size down. I then cropped the footage of the person in the larger box and layered it over the other footage of the smaller box.

As inspiration for my 'One Take' short film, I have watched various music videos and short films. These include lots of the music videos by the band 'OkGo', as well as the sort film 'Roadside'. This is my main source of inspiration because in order to keep the audiences attention for the duration (5 minutes), the genre and character expression/movement had to be interesting enough for them to be able to engage with the characters, creating some emotion.