Research & Planning

Research Methods

How do I create an animatic or storyboard?
Where are the locations for my film?
How many actors will I need and who will they be?
How many minutes of film will I need to shoot to end up with 5 minutes?
How much of my sound will be in camera and how many will be added non-diegetically?
Will I need to gain any permissions to film?
What did i learn from my AS foundation production that I could apply to my advanced production?

Secondary research methods:

• The internet: Strengths and weaknesses
• Library - (books) BFI , under Waterloo Bridge. Westminster reference library, Leicester Square

Primary research methods:

• Questionnaire 
• Interviewing - face to face, telephone, Skype, experts
• Focus group - cineastes
• Observation of audiences

Planning.

This year our production group is going to create and maintain a wiki space. We did not do this last year and my experience was that not everybody in the production team worked as hard as each other.

Planning jobs to do: 

• Complete a recce (reconnoiter) 
• Write a script.
• Produce a storyboard (animatic) 
• Hold auditions.
• Rehearsals.
• Practice using the equipment.
• Show work in progress to audience to receive feedback.
• Produce a production schedule (16th September till the 10th December)
• Maintain a wiki over 12 weeks.

Below is an example of a logo that may be used for the poster of our film:

I have also taken a look at the codes and conventions of short films:

Characters - these are one of the main conventions included in Short Films, as usually the director tends to stick to 2 or 3 main characters. Being relatively short in length, short films don’t have time to create a deep back story or history of the characters involve; therefore, character numbers are kept low to allow the audience to relate to the characters in the small amount of time.

A "twist" - usually Short Films contain a ‘Twist’ to make the story line is more interesting and have a new dimension to the short clip. Without a "Twist" in a Short Film the story-line would simply be rather boring and have no story to it.

A Low Budget - This is based on the fact that most Short Film Directors are independent without the sufficient backing in terms of funding. To ensure their budget is low, they stick to one or two locations for their film as well as only using a few actors. Having such a short film allows costs to be little to nothing in some departments, as some actors will work for free if they really like the story line.

Length - as the name clearly states "short" film, the clip will need to be made in a small amount of time, approximately 5 to 10 minutes usually.

Everyday situations - these particular story lines are created so that the audience are able to relate to them and then somehow the story will be flipped it on its head in some way. This allows the viewer to relate to the Short Film, but at the same time intriguing the viewer.

Todorov’s Theory of Equilibrium - this is typically applied to Short Films as a sort of guideline to stick to.

This year, I have been assigned the task of creating a short film that is about five minutes long as well as creating a poster paired up with a 30/40 second radio advert. To start my research, I began to look at a few short films that may give me inspiration, i also need to expand my knowledge of shots and camera work by analyzing a few short films, below are a few short films that I have found:

Short Film Research.

BFI Film Festival.

I attended the BFI film festival to start off my research into short films. 3 professional films were shown during the time that I was there, we also heard from the directors after the films were shown telling us what inspired the film etc.. I believe my time at the film festival will help me in the future with my film work as well as my editing experience.

This short film cleverly integrates the use of effects that are included during the production of the film. This film only includes one main character that never speaks but the camera is always centred on him. This simplifies the film but also keeps the viewer intrigued as to what will happen. The use of camera effects involving the desk is very smart and even though it is not very realistic, it still attempts to make it believable and succeeds. The camera shots in this short film are also very smart, one of the shots is when Peter is writing on the desk and the hand and pencil are in the shot with no shadow of the camera. This is a shot that I may imitate when shooting my own short film.

Above is another short film called Identity that grabbed my attention, this film, to me shows a life where there is no identity, where nobody has a distinct identity even a distinct face. This is due to the masks that everyone wears throughout the short film. About halfway into the film, there is a poster that says: "This is what beautiful looks like" In my eyes, this is there to mock what the image of beauty is in our society and how everybody wants to be "perfect" as you can see from the masks on the girls standing around the banner. At the end of the film, the main character takes off her mask and says: "The truth found me" meaning she has finally found her own identity. When she is walking outside, everyone else is looking at her as she is the only girl in the school without a mask. The idea behind this story in my eyes is that you should't let society define your identity. This is what I like about this short film so much, that there is a meaning behind it. The shots in this film are also very smart in my opinion, especially the last shot, which is a broad shot behind the main character.

We also looked at a few short film posters before attempting to construct our short film poster as shown in the ancillary task post, below are a few short film posters i chose to take inspiration from when constructing the poster for our short film.



Above is a poster that I took inspiration from when starting to construct our short film poster. In the poster above, the names of the actors are displayed under the title at the bottom of the page then under that is the location where the film would be shown. I implemeneted this into our poster when creating the image.



The poster above is very simplistic, this is what we tried to achieve when creating our poster. Under the list of actors and cast is contact details and logos that relate to the production of the film which is what we tried to imitate.

New productions

After abandoning our last production and pursuing a new short film in a new production team, we decided to produce our latest short film based on a fictional story which seems like an obvious improvement in comparison to our previous productions. Below is some work to do with our final film called Inhibition.

Below is the final script for Inhibition: