Short film analysis

Short Film Analysis

My short film is a narrative that develops a single character however there is a narrative twist.The films narrative follows a young girl on a journey of finding love and through this journey she experiences an event that changes her and her outlook on life. The narrative focuses on her and the life she lives after experiences the twist in the narrative. The media chosen to display my short is a script accompanied with a story board. I intended the audience to respond with high emotion and empathy towards the young girl and then have the audience surprised by the narrative twist which will have the audience gripped to the narrative allowing for an active response. My genre goals for this short film I wanted to create a similar aesthetic to a Connect, a short films that I personally found pleasing for the narrative and for the cinematography.

In order to come up with an idea for creating a short films, we had to watch a variety of short of short films from different genres some conformed to the genre genre conventions and others didn't conform to the with genre. The first short film was called the Gun Fighter, in this films the main protagonists were introduced one by one by a voice over, known as the voice of god. The voice over is unconventional of the western genre this makes the narrative less predictable as the conventions are already being played around with. The narrative conveys are conflict between two or more characters which is expected from a western genre. The camera varied in shots from establishing shots to close ups, the close ups and extreme close ups were mainly used to display visually what the voice over just alluded to like a gun or a bottle of alcohol. This short films is humorous which again isn't common for western but he did make the film a lot more enjoyable to watch. As for inspiring my own short film this short film wasn't particularly inspiring however I did like the close ups on the key points in the mise-en-scene to allow the audience to feel as if they are apart of the narrative, as I intend for my audience to participate in the narrative and personally identify with the characters. The next film was called Connect, this film played a key part in being a major influence on my own film. The film had a narrative twist, as the passengers on the bus began to dance to the non-diegetic music. What I particularly liked about the film was the lack of dialogue was made up by facial expressions and body language which makes up for the lack dialogue, despite having no dialogue the audience were able to read the intended emotions from the mise-en-scene. The camera uses a shallow depth of field to create a fantasy like scene creating the lights to look like orbs flying in the background, I really liked this use of depth of field as added to the narrative which really aided in helping to inspire my film idea. The last film we watched was one called Wasp, this was a social realism film directed by the same director who created Fish tank. The narrative develops one character and their lifestyle. A handheld camera was used for the majority of the shots which added to the social realism film genre. Within the film a lot of close ups were used in order to create a sense of intimacy between the character and the audience. Throughout the film diegetic sounds were used again conforming to the narrative genre. Although this film hasn't directly influenced my short film by watching the narrative it allowed me to see how narratives and genres are conveyed through the length of shots and type of shots.

From these films I was able to come up with an idea for a short of my own, I've called my short film Cigarette Daydreams and I intended it to be heavily influenced by Connect with the narrative and the types of shots used. The reason why I chose Connect to be the main influence on my film is because I found the techniques used were the most effective in conveying a narrative without using explicit means such as dialogue. However, the process of making my short film was a little difficult as I ad the idea in my head but I struggled with finding the right words to describe this 'daydream' in my head but I do find that in the end I found a way to describe what I was visualising. When writing the script it was a little daunting and from this I recon I've added too much parentheses and not enough information on the different shots used. For next year I will vary my types of shots. Also, in the process of creating this short film idea we had to come up with a storyboard, I had the shots I wanted in my head but I took them in portrait rather than landscape this has caused my images to be distorted and not capture the images in the way I intended it. To improve this I'll male sure that I take my photos in landscape to keep the images consistent in quality.