Creative Project - Reflective Analysis (Zach)

How successful have you been while making the type of film you have created?

For my A2 Film Studies Creative Project coursework I was asked to create a short film. I worked with my friend Emma Jackson in a pair to create the best film that we could produce together. The role/job list was divided equally at the beginning of the year between us both to ensure that we both knew what we were doing. However due to some problems we had the roles were changed around to suit the individual. The roles that I was responsible for are as follows; Genre Research, Synopsis, Screenplay, Animatic, Music Choices, Sound and Audience Feedback. The roles that I and Emma shared are; Target Audience Response, Shooting Schedule, Camera Set Ups and the final product.

When I started my genre research I thought it would be wise to first research the different themes within the drama genre. This helped us to define the themes that would be included in our short film. The themes of the drama genre are; Drama often relies on the characters emotions, Development of realistic characters, Real life issues are often used and that Drama aims to tell stories of human struggles so that the audience can relate to it and understand it. This let us know that our story definitely fit the drama genre due to our short film revolving around the nameless female protagonist as she struggles with real life issues and by the end of the film develops and conquers her fear of isolation and loneliness. I also found well known examples of drama films such as The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption which aided me understand further what we needed to do to create a successful short film of the drama genre. Additional things I researched in reference to the drama genre were the sounds used in the genre and the plot elements. With sound, in the drama genre sounds are often exaggerated for additional effect on the spectator and to support the development of a character. I believe that this research was very successful because it allowed us to create a short film that included conventions of the drama genre in the correct way. Obeying the codes and conventions of Drama was an objective of ours; otherwise our film wouldn’t make any sense. Therefore we had to ensure that the research was done effectively to achieve our aims.  

The next thing for me to do was the target audience research. This was important as if we did not carry it out then our short film would have been substantially more difficult to produce as we would know who will be watching our film and therefore how to please them while watching the film. When I started I pointed out that the three main key themes to take into account when undertaking target audience research is the age, gender and interests of the spectator. For example, we had to ensure that our spectators were interested in drama films because if they wasn’t they would be likely to not be entertained by the short film which is of course one of the main purposes of a film, to entertain your spectators. After my research I pointed out that since our film would contain alcohol and smoking it would have to have an age restriction, however we didn’t want to limit our audience so we decided on the age of 15 up to the age of 25 as our film would touch on issues that people within that age range are more likely to have to deal with. However even with this in mind we thought that it would be in our best interest to show the film to people not in this boundary also so during our audience feedback we should get a varied set of answers. I many ways I feel that the target audience research could have been improved. This is mainly due at the time when we carried out the research, we were both still not 100% on whom our short film would appeal to. Therefore I think that if we targeted a more precise audience from the beginning it would allow to have been more successful in the long run.

Next on my list was the films synopsis. The synopsis was very important and had to be done twice as the original was too long. Since we knew at this point what our film was about and what would happen in it we decided to write it down and create a synopsis so that there was no confusion later. In the synopsis I used 142 words to sum up our imagined short film. This outlined the brief details of our film. I believe that we fulfilled and followed through with our aims in this sense because the synopsis never changed and it still fits perfectly with the final product that we have created. Consequently I think that the synopsis was very successful as it only needed re-doing once when the word count was too long, although since then nothing else had changed and it fulfils its purpose of a brief summary of the short film. If however the synopsis did not provide an accurate summary of the film it would be unsuccessful.

Therefore the next obvious thing for us to create was a screenplay. However to create a screenplay I needed to meet up with Emma and discuss what we wanted in the screenplay and storyboard which was her responsibility. The two things go hand in hand in a sense because the storyboard is basically a visual form of the screenplay. Therefore once we had discussed the details we went our separate ways and created each of them. When we had both completed this task we met again and compared the storyboard and screenplay, only a small couple of adjustments were needed to be made so that they were identical shot by shot. Therefore this shows meeting the aims of our film planning due to the accuracy of our screenplay/storyboard and only a few minor adjustments needing to be made. This suggests that our planning was successful as we would only be unsuccessful if our storyboard/screenplays were completely different which they weren’t which suggests the planning of such things that Emma and I did was successful.

During this time Emma had created a storyboard which was on her role list and as a result an animatic needed to be created. To create the animatic I found an iPhone app that allowed me to take photos of each of our drawn storyboard shots and make them into a video animatic with added music. This was one of the simpler things I had to do and wasn’t that complicated in comparison to other things that needed doing. In terms of creating the animatic, the production was very successful and productive. This is because I found a simple way to carry out the task of the animatic which I originally thought would be a difficult/long task. Since I had no idea where to start to create an animatic I would say I was successful in finding a resource to create one easily which I know many other people didn’t think of doing.

Now that the majority of planning for the short film had been done we needed to organise a shooting schedule so that we knew when our filming would take place and be completed. Myself and Emma got together in one of out Film Studies lessons to ensure this was done. We looked at a calendar to see what were the best possible dates we could use for our filming were not only me and Emma were available but our cast also. Therefore this was an important thing to get right so everyone was in the same place at the same time. The only one problem we had was on my part. I forgot about a day Emma had put forward for filming which clashed with a day that I was unable to do due to work commitments. This ‘bump in the road’ let the pair of us know that more effective planning would be needed. Although since that incident we have not had a problem. Overall when it comes to the shooting schedule there is no doubt that we could have improved it to be more successful. The immediate thing to do that comes to mind it to give ourselves reminders for certain dates so that neither of us forgot or double-booked a date, this would have led to less hassle and a smoother process in my opinion.

The music choices for our film were something which I needed to do as the micro-feature sound was my responsibility so I needed to pick out music that would be most effective and fit successfully with the film. I spent a great deal of time listening through my own music collection and research possible music that I could use for my film. I eventually decided upon using three songs; Asking Alexandria – To The Stage, Of Mice & Men –The Calm and We Came As Romans – A War Inside. I selected To The Stage with the purpose to go with the scene in which out female lead starts drinking and having flashbacks of people bullying her. The main idea of this was because up until this point in the film the female lead been bullied and everything in the film was rather quiet and as this scene is one of the most important where she has enough and does something drastic. Therefore a drastic and different choice of music is needed to show the disrupted narrative of the protagonist. However in our audience feedback many people said they didn’t like this point in the film. This was brought to my attention through my audience feedback which alerted me that people didn’t understand the jump from soft quiet music to loud rock/metal. Although this is something I anticipated and did on purpose to shock/confuse my spectators in the spirit of Quentin Tarantino who I studied for my Small Scale Research Project. Therefore I think it is fair to say that I was both successful and unsuccessful in this respect. At the same time however there were some people who completely understood the use of this song and enjoyed it. The song stands out to me as well because lyrically it fits with the scene very well. ‘’Just like the cigarettes hurt, just like the whiskey burns. I guess I’m never gunna learn’’, are the lyrics whilst out protagonist is drinking and begins smoking. This reflects her pessimistic attitude during this point in the film and how she thinks she will never escape this loneliness that she has put herself in. I believe that this would have been more effective if spectators knew the song and lyrics, as they would see how and why it fit in place. Furthermore I think that I could have selected my target audience more effectively to ensure a greater success.

This leads onto the sound which was my role to find appropriate candidates for recording separate parts of sound for the film. The main element to this was the voice recording for the male voiceover of the chapters within our film. For this I needed someone who I was friends with to make the whole thing much easier due to a long script of chapters. Naturally one the first voices to spring to my mind were Callum Ahmed who was a deep voice with a tone that we were looking for. So after discussing the idea with Callum, we arranged a date to meet up and record the sound. We used a silent music room at college as a space that we could record the sounds without any background noises being an issue. In this respect I think I was successful in recording sound as all the sounds we have used in our film have been up to standard. In the scene when our protagonist comes home from college and runs up the stairs, on the video recording the audio wasn’t very clear. So I decided to watch the clip numerous times and recorded myself running upstairs and I managed to quiet successful match the video up with my audio. When we asked what spectators disliked about the short film on our audience response not a single person made a negative comment on any of the dubbed-sounds that I recorded. This tells me that nobody had any problems with it or could tell that the sound was over-dubbed and not the original, which suggests that I was successful in achieving my aims of recording the best possible sounds for our film.

When it came to when we filmed parts of our films, we needed to set the camera up to the best of our ability. Camera set ups were done by both me and Emma who would take turns for different shots making sure that the frame and everything was set right to ensure the best results would come from out recording. I believe we were very successful because there was never a scene which we had to go back to re-record due to poor camera set ups, therefore this indicates that we did our jobs properly. On our feedback sheets multiple people commented on the camera work as one of their favourite aspects of the film. Bearing in mind the amount of people who said things like this it suggested to us that we were successful with our camera set ups and frame work, otherwise our shots would have not been up to the standard that they were and people would have commented on it during our audience feedback.

Since Emma did the majority of the editing for the film once we had the final product it was my responsibility to create an appropriate survey to give to spectators to fill in while watching our film as part of our audience feedback. I researched by looking at a lot of different examples of questions from past students audience feedback, however the same few questions were coming up which suggested to me that there wasn’t a great deal more that I could ask people other than what people had already chosen. Once we had finalised out own questions we invited people to attend screenings of our films, we also handed out questionnaires to everyone who agreed to help us out while they were watching our film. Then it was just a case of analysing our results and use them in out reflective analyses. To make sure that I got a varied set of opinions from my audience feedback I made sure that I asked a variety of different people to give feedback from my film. For example, I asked people from the ages of 13 – 39 the results of which went hand in hand with the age of the individual and how much film knowledge they already had. I also made sure to ask not only people who study Film Studies but additionally people who don’t. My idea was that this way I would get feedback from general spectators at the same time who watch films for entertainment rather than critics who will pick at the film and read into it which some people were. However we still needed feedback from all these different people so that we could be critically analysed and learn were we went wrong and to see what others thought about our film.

Overall I think that it is fair to say we were successful in creating our short film for the most part. I think it is fair to say that out short film conforms to the conventions of the drama genre, which is something that people commented on in our audience feedback. Also our film uses these conventions very well I feel to express what genre it is and to show the spectator the themes of drama which we incorporated into our film. An example of a film to compare with our main theme of loneliness is Bridget Jones. Both films are personal stories of the female protagonists who are working through issues, in this case loneliness. However I think our film is much darker than Bridget Jones and takes into consideration more realistic issues that some people go through. The Diary entries/chapters make this seem more realistic and more of a personal story of the female protagonist.  Further evidence for this is the idea of trying to fit in and being unsuccessful in love. This is because our protagonist attempts to fit in more by reading about how to make friends, she even owns a blog named ‘Lonely Hearts’ to assist her in making friends however the problem still stands that no matter how much she tries she still doesn’t fit in. This is backed up when she begins drinking at home and starts to have flashbacks. In these memories we see from her point of view people bullying her and calling her names. This was used in order to show the audience what has happened to her previous to this which has led her to drinking and smoking. The flashbacks are things that she is trying to forget but can’t. Therefore I believe we were successful in creating a film of the Drama genre as it fits with other films that are in the genre such as Bridget Jones which suggests that we have conformed correctly to the codes and conventions.

 

Final Word Count – 2,903