My Partner Adam Harrison and I, have made a short film which we decided the genre would be drama and we
would aim it at a target audience of people aged 16-25 and try and get a
message across so that it is helpful to the market which we aim it at about a
specific issue within our nation and that age range. We decided to do the film
about a man who returns home from a stressful week at work which he wants to
unwind from, to do this he turns to alcohol, after this he also gets out some
drugs, cannabis to be precise. Within the film we have tried to show the dangers
of both drugs and alcohol as the man within our film who uses both of these to
relieve his stress, as both of these substances are seen as stress relievers to
the youth of today we thought it would be a good idea to show how if used this
way it could become dangerous to your own and other people’s lives.
During this project, my roles within the Film process were to be in charge of both Mise-en-scene and Editing.
During this project, my roles within the Film process were to be in charge of both Mise-en-scene and Editing.
When creating the plot to our film, we chose Syd Fields paradigm as our narrative theory, we used this as the structure basis of our film as we felt it would suit the theme and plot of our film best. Within this, we linked such aspects as including disruption in the narrative. The protagonist will be coming home from work after a busy week, the plot point 1 will
be the protagonist deciding to have a few beers, the pinch 1 will be finishing the beers and deciding to
do drugs, the midpoint would be actually doing the drugs, the pinch 2 would be
the friend coming round and disturbing the protagonist, plot point 2 would be
the protagonist actually killing his friend, and finally the climax would be
the protagonist waking up, seeing the blood soaked knife and deciding what he
should do.
When editing the film
we decided that because of the eerie nature of our films storyline it would be
best not to include any extra non-diegetic sound within the film as what we
were trying to get across to people was how real the danger is and therefore we
wanted to make the film look and sound as real to the actual experience as
possible, therefore we thought that non-diegetic sound would have made it less
real then we wanted it too. However when our protagonist smokes the drugs we
wanted there to be a change to show that he has lost consciousness a bit and
isn’t all there, to show this we changed the sound so that everything echoed,
this is to show that it is taking him longer to register what is being said and
he can’t understand it very well, the echoing is also very effective when the
protagonist pulls the knife out as it really makes the knife predominant as it
goes on for so long so you know that something bad will happen with that knife.
In the beginning shots were our protagonist is filming himself, we edited the
sound to make it sound more muffled so that it’s more believable that he is
actually filming himself.
We also edited the
colour of the film as it goes towards a sepia colour which is called dream, we
used this as we wanted the protagonist to be in a dreamlike state which is what
the “stress relievers” have done to him therefore he feels it’s not real and
that he is unaware of what is happening, this happens at the same time as the
sound turns to an echo, this is because that is the disruption of our film and
we wanted to make it significant, so by changing the colour and the sound we
were able to show the audience that this is the moment were everything has gone
wrong, this therefore helps show that drugs and alcohol can be bad as it is
after the protagonist has these that everything goes bad so therefore it helps
our main aim.
One of our key shots
which shows that our protagonist isn’t really himself anymore and that he is
losing his head is when he looks in the mirror and it looks like his face is
cracked rather than the mirror looking cracked, this particular shot was done
by using make up (eyeliner) on the protagonists face so that the mirror image
could look the way that it did otherwise it would have been difficult to get
the shot by actually cracking the mirror so that his reflection would look
smashed. It is a close up so that you can get a really good luck at the lines
on his face so you get as tormented as the actor by it, it also fits in with
our drama genre as a convention of dramas are close ups. The reaction to this
shot is one of anger as he smashes the mirror, this shows that later on in the
film he can become angry which as we do see later on in the film he does,
therefore this shot is like a warning to the audience as this was just a taste
of how angry and aggressive he actually is going to get. Another one of our key
shots is the one of the protagonist pulling the knife out of the block, it is
an extreme close ups which again fits in with the drama genre and allowed us to
stick to conventions. The shot is significant as it is the point where we
really feel like something bad is going to happen, this is because the knife is
brought up so slowly and the noise is so sharp and with the echo it really
emphasises the importance of the knife which is what we wanted to bring across
when filming this shot.
When filming the first
shot which shows our protagonist waking up we altered the focus, as during the
shot when the protagonist lifts his head up the focus blurs and then it does
the same again seconds later, this was to show that there is a blur/glitch in
the protagonists head as to what had happened the night before because he does
not remember what he had done, this is then confirmed during the monologue
after this shot.
The beer scene were we
have several beers put down onto the table in individual very short close up
shots was inspired by a previous students work, Riley Wong’s ’Avarice’ has a
scene in which money and parcels build up, and in this shot the camera stays
still and more money is accumulated and more parcels are posted through the
door. The inspiration we took from it was the build-up idea whilst the camera
stayed still, therefore we decided that we would keep the camera in an
individual spot and one bottle at a time we would accumulate them up, this way
it shows how much the protagonist is drinking and that time is moving forward.
There were a few
mistakes in our short film, one of which is that when we film the protagonist
in one of the shots in the kitchen, in the reflection of the microwave you can
actually see me in the background filming the shot. This was a mistake we could
not rectify as we didn’t have time to re-film due to myself, my partner of the
project and the actor all having other commitments; therefore we had to live
with this error.
Another mistake that was made is that the computer we were working on crashed during the editing of our footage and we lost some of our footage therefore we had to re-shoot some shots and it was whilst re-shooting that there was continuity issues, this shows as the beer we see the protagonist take out of the fridge is a ‘Carling’ however the beers which accumulate on the table are ‘Budweisers’, this has lead to another change in the development of our final film. re-using the same shots of the of 'Billy' drinking the carling repeatedly, however with ever shot, i increased the speed of the shots, therefore creating the illusion of time passing. Another issue we had whilst re-shooting was during the shot of the knife being pulled out of the knife block as the protagonist is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled down, however during the re-shoot the protagonist had the sleeves rolled up therefore the shots go from having a sleeve, to having no sleeve and then back to the sleeve, however due to time difficulties we were unable to correct these issues.
I believe we included a lot of good shots and editing techniques such as the mirror shot were the protagonists face is cracked, the extreme close up of the knife to show that the protagonist is going to do something bad with the knife, there was also the editing of the colours to make it dream like to show the protagonist wasn’t himself and was in a different state of mind and the echoing sound to make it even more clear that his state of mind was lost. However there were also mistakes which were made such as continuity errors and reflections during shots. Although I believe that we managed to achieve our main aim in producing a dramatic short film aimed at which had a message that could educate people of our target audience age range about a specific topic which is a problem for that age group within our nation.
