Short Film Analysis 3

3x3

3x3 is a Portuguese short comedy, which has won numerous awards from many film festivals over Europe. The film is a comedy, professionally shot, simple with a great location. What I love about this film after watching it the first time through is that it can appeal to people in every language, as it has no dialogue just like a black and white comedy with funny characters, over the top characters and a comedic storyline.

The film is about a security guard at a basketball court who is a typical male, muscular man who we see trying to throw the balls in the court and successfully scoring many hoops. Then there is the janitor on the court who sees the guard playing basketball, and when the guard has gone to his security room he sees the janitor trying to play basketball through the CCTV camera screens. The guard laughs at the weedy janitor’s pathetic attempts to score a hoop. The janitor stops, pulls up a table and starts measuring distance from the hoop to the centre court line, the weight of the ball etc. The janitor draws up a formula and figures out a technique to score from the centre line. The security guard is amazed by this and runs down to the court to see with his own eyes, the janitor is dressed in a basketballer’s outfit throws the guard his own outfit to play with him.

The purpose of this piece in my mind is to tell the audience the moral of the story, ‘Don’t be arrogant and give everyone a chance’. For this reason I think that the target audience can be quite a young age group because it is a good lesson for children to learn, much like reading fables. The film opens with an establishing shot of the basketball court with the two contrasting characters, which immediately places the audience in a setting. Just from first appearances you can see the contrast in characters, as the guard is big, strong and handsome whereas the janitor is thin, young, weedy and not particularly handsome. This could connote different stories with contrasting characters such as David and Goliath.

There are lots of long and mid shots in this film, with not many close ups and extreme close ups. Unlike the other films I have analysed, there isn’t much focus pulling and interesting camera movement and angles, with simple cuts between each clip. There are no special effects, and the only transitions are when the establishing shot fades into the frame from black, and fades out at the end, creating a smooth start and finish.

There is a good backing music track to this film, which is very well used considering there is no dialogue. The music is comedic, and builds up in certain places, telling the audience when there is going to be a hilarious moment and creating a perfect atmosphere.

With all these point in mind, I think 3x3 is a great film, and a prime example how not using interesting camera angles, edits or movements can still be successful. In this film it’s definitely more about what happening then using camera angles and shots to make something more exciting.

Short Film Analysis 2

Get Off My Land

Get Off My Land is a dark comedy which was recently written and directed by Douglas Ray, and was supported and funded by the UK Film Council and Screen South. The film features Robert Glenister (Hustle, Spooks, Dr Who, George Gently, Spartacus), which might draw the audience into this short film.

The film is about a couple going for a walk as they make their way overland on a hike but are halted by a man who claims they are trespassing. The couple and the man argue about whose land it is, and the man goes to his car, gets a rifle and shoots the couple. At the end he turns to the camera and says ‘I think it was a public footpath afterall’. The purpose of this piece is evidently to entertain the audience, but it’s quite a horrific and very dark humour, definitely not intended for children.

The editing and continuity between each shot is fantastic in this film with some smooth fades between some shots and some jump cuts. The jump cuts really help build up suspense, and connote that something bad is going to happen, because each cut speeds up between the final gunshots. In terms of special effects, there is only a gun flash and some light blood splatter effects. These really help to make the film even more shocking, gruesome and feel a lot more real.

This film is a dark comedy, leaving the audience in suspense and shock when we hear the gunshot, but the only comedic element is the final comment from Robert Glenister. The film is shot really well, and the movement of the camera in the establishing shots is fantastic. I thought the shot of the couple walking through the grass was interesting, as the foreground was out of focus and the background was in focus, creating an interesting depth of field. This could connate that someone is watching the couple from a distance, creating suspense until the climatic ending.

This film has very little dialogue, and most of it is spoken between the farmer and the man. The farmer has a very rough and aggressive way of speaking, whereas the man doesn’t which connotes that the farmer has the high ground and more manly authority over the couple.

This film is only five minutes long, much like the one that I have to create but I feel that this is a good length of time for it to be because the audience doesn’t lose interest and there is still enough time to go into brief detail and show the relationship between the characters through strong dialogue and acting.

From this film, I have discovered that even though I have to make a short film in 5 minutes, you can still make a film that provokes, interests and stimulates the audience. The cinematography is well thought through, much like in my previous analysis and I can now see how important it is to frame your shot and create movements and angles.

Short Film Analysis 1

The Siren

The Siren is a short film directed, written and created by a group of student filmmakers for their university courses. The film was a great success and won awards at 9 different film festivals such as the ‘official selection’ at the Cornwall Film Festival.

The Siren is drama about a retired trawler man who is facing the decline of his twilight years as he begins to catch visions of a beautiful young woman, representing both his doom and redemption.

We see shots of this old character all alone and going about his daily life, through what happens we can see how he is reminiscing about his past. He starts seeing a beautiful woman and goes out looking for her but fails. He then takes his little rowing boat on the water and we see him and the siren touch and the film ends.

I absolutely love this film; it is charming, memorable and cinematically brilliant. The way the shots are composed are fantastic and the sharpness, depth of field and smooth movements of the camera really help towards a professional feel. The purpose of this film is to make the audience sympathies with the character, therefore drawing the viewer into the film. The opening scene is an establishing shot of Weymouth, which shows immediately the setting, and then goes to a shot looking through the sand dunes at the old man on the beach. This shot has a great depth of field, with the reeds in front out of focus and the man in focus, clearly showing that he is alone on the beach. The fluid motion of the camera movement is also very interesting due to the amount of pans that follow the main character, although as the film gets to the end there is noticably less movement. I believe that this is because the camera motion within the film relates to the fluid movement of life, and as the character progressivly gets older, the motion begins to fade and eventually stops.

I think this film has an adult target audience, not because of any adult content, but just for the fact that children may not understand it. Its quite morbid in the way that it can show life and death, which may prove to be more effective in the older generation because they themselves are closer to death then children.

The film was shot in Weymouth using a Canon 7D DSLR, which gives us the crisp sharpness and fantastic depth of field. The soundtrack really contributes to the films impact on the viewer, building with emotion to make the viewer sympathetic and background noise when people are talking. The editing is quite basic in this film, with a number of jump cuts and fades on the title, which is shown at the beginning and the end.

It is important to note, that there is no dialogue in this film, and this is why the acting, cinematography and soundtrack play such a key role. The fact there is no dialogue could connote even more loneliness and remoteness to the viewer which the character is feeling.

I feel that in my short film I am to create (depending on the content) I should get some suitable music to create a soundtrack. For this I hope I could get some copyright free music, but we’ll see when we get to plan the film.

Conventions of the short films I analysed

From the three Short Film Analysis’s I posted on my blog, I am now going to discuss the common themes and conventions of the three videos.

When deciding the three films to study, I decided to choose films that were no longer than 10 minutes, but not shorter than 5. Get Off My Land is approximately 5 minutes long whereas The Siren and 3X3 are 7-8 minutes long.

All three films had characteristics that I really enjoyed, such as the Comedy in 3x3, the suspense, which was built, by the editing and camera angles in Get Off My Land and the beautiful storyline and finish to the Siren.

In terms of cinematography, I think that The Siren was superb and really helped catch the drama in the scene. The way the camera pans, moves, and changes focus in the film really creates a sense of fluidity, which could connote the fluidity of the sea on which the film is based. The cinematography in 3x3 however was not so impressive, as the camera didn’t have much movement, pans or editing techniques. This didn’t matter because the storyline within the film was so funny, that there wasn’t much drama to be caught by using impressive camera angles and pans. Get Off My Land fits right between the two other films in terms of cinematography. The shots are framed marvelously and there are moments when there were cut away shots of long grass blowing and close ups of the couple’s muddy feet. What is common in Get Off My Land and The Siren is that they used ‘steadicams’, a device you attatch to the camera and hold which fluids out your movements in control and creates a slight steady movement, for which you can get some great effects. This could be something I look into getting hold of for when I start filming.

The genres of the three films are different, but there are other similarities such as the way the three films are edited. There seems to be mainly straight cuts, and match cuts with a few close ups and cut aways, but the editing all seems to be quite straight forward to these films. There are no special effects in them all, which is interesting because in my film I don’t want to have to worry about special effects, so I will avoid using them, as like many short films, I don’t have a large budget.

Style and Genre

My initial thought on style and genre is that I feel I am more suited creating a drama or horror piece, mainly because in the past I have create film in both of these genres with success. Genres such as fantasy and action I feel would be too hard to create because of difficult plots, special effects and locations.

I am interested social realism/drama because it is something that happens all around us that doesn’t require many visual effects but does require good acting. This could also be another problem, as between my friends; none of them are keen on acting. When I decide on my story and plot I will have to bear this in mind and try to get hold of some drama students to be in the cast.

Although I have an idea of a genre I would like to film, I think I should create a survey to ask the public so I can see the average age of the cinema attendee, the most popular genre, and also find out which age group reads magazine reviews on films the most, because I will have to write a magazine review page for this task too.

Technological Advancements

Since the first film was captured over a hundred years ago, there have been nearly constant advancements in technology, from black and white to colour, from reels to disks and from low quality silent comedy films in cramped theatres to Super HD 3D action epics with blasting surround sound, all from the comfort of your own home.
For my filming I am looking to use a Canon DSLR camera to film on, which is full HD, very portable and easy to use/pull focus and create high quality results. Although these cameras are meant for still photography, industry professionals all around the world have recognized their capabilities and are using them to capture footage onto SD Cards.

“The making of the new and the re-arranging of the old” (Bentley 1997)
In this quote, Bentley says that in order to create a product that is fit for purpose you have to carefully research the conventions of existing media texts that are from a similar genre, and pitched at a similar target audience, to the product/products you intend to produce. But, if you’re re-arranging the old the technological advances are going to be quite different in my medium of film. In the short films that I analysed, such as ‘The Siren’ by Alex Nevill, were all shot on DSLR cameras, such as the Canon 7D giving the films a professional high quality and depth of field to match. I followed the conventions of these short films by also shooting on a DSLR, a mid range Canon 60D which puts the high quality footage straight onto SD card, giving fast, tape less recording. For my editing I used a program called Final Cut Studio, used to edited films such as ‘300’, ‘The Social Network’, ‘Jarhead’ and ‘X-Men’. This product is a simple to use, professional standard program which I personally brought before I began editing my film. A week or so after I spent money on this program, a totally new version came out, which puts into perspective the advancing technology in editing and the professional film industry. Most film editors don’t use Final Cut Pro, but use a program called Avid Media Composer, a more expensive and complicated film editing solution. This program has been around for longer than Final Cut; therefore, just like 35mm film, people still seem to use it as a professional grade way to edit their films. Putting these products at a relatively low price makes them available to the mass public, which is something that really benefited me in the making of my film.

Gauntlett (2007) says that new media (and new media technologies) erodes the boundary between producer and audience to the extent that it makes little sense to talk about media audiences at all anymore: “Conventional research methods are replaced—or at least supplemented by new methods which recognise and make use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers'”. With the availability of professional grade products, what stops any of the general public being a filmmaker? Therefore your audiences are no longer ‘receivers’ but ‘producers’. With this in mind, I feel that the advance in new media technologies really seems to work in my favour, as it has reduced the cost of products that would have been thousands of pounds a few years back, therefore making them more available to people such as me.

If I cannot access these cameras I will have to use another camera that is high quality but records onto DV tape which can sometimes be an unreliable source that takes time in import from the camera onto your computer. The upside of this camera is that I have used it before and know how to capture footage on it, attach it to a tripod, clean the lens and export footage from it. The upsides of the DSLR cameras are that they are higher quality, more portable, versatile and it’s quick and easy to put what you’ve filmed onto a computer.

In terms of editing, technological advancements aren’t such an issue as the school always update their operating systems on the Macs to avoid them crashing. I am intending to use Final Cut Pro to edit the film together, either on my laptop, as I happen to own a Mac with Final Cut Pro, or on the school system. I personally think I should stick to one computer (probably my own) so that the files don’t get lost moving between different computers. There has been a recent update to Final Cut Pro, but I am not planning to get it, because what I have at the moment is capable of handling the film I am going to be taking in the future.

In terms of storage, I am not intending to store all my files on my computer but on a separate device that I own which has 1TB of storage. This should be enough to store all the high quality footage and render files during editing without slowing, crashing or filling my own computer.

I will also have to consider methods of recording sound whilst filming. I could use an external recorder connected to a line microphone and match the audio and visual up in the editing process like in my last project. Ideally, I would prefer not having to do this in the editing process because it takes a lot of time, but if worst comes to worst I will consider it.

To briefly sum up, with the use of this new technology being available, I believe I will hopefully create a professional grade film using high quality cameras, online distribution and editing software.

Institution Information

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster, headquartered at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff. Its main responsibility is to provide public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Channel Islands and Isle of Man. The BBC has their own film network, which screens and occasionally broadcasts an array of short films, ranging from 3 minutes to 30 minutes to showcase new British Film Making.

Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster, which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned. They have a sub section specifically for films called Film4, which is a free digital television channel available in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland, owned and operated by Channel 4, that funds and screens films. Just like the BBC, Film4 also has a section for short films, showcasing them online and screening them occasionally.

I think that Channel 4 would be a suitable institution to position my product towards, because the film I intend to produce I feel would suit in the array of short films that they already showcase and fund. I also feel that they are more prestigious in the way of films than the BBC are, although they both have their strengths and weaknesses.