Evaluation question 1

1. In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our film generally follows a simple method in terms of the story telling and goes straight from start to end without any flashbacks or flash forwards, although the editing of the film means that our film may break away from conventions as we used a lot of editing which shows both characters at the same time on a split screen.
An example of shot-reverse-shot during a conversation in our film:



Shot-Reverse-shot



Our conventions of continuity worked and flowed throughout the film quite well and we thought our short film was smooth with no obvious cuts between characters or scenes. We also edited a lot of our film, in some parts when we were cutting between two scenes sharply and we put a black screen before we cut to a different scene. In addition to this, we used shot-reverse-shot which made the conversations between two of the characters, this makes the conversation between the two flow more naturally as you can see the facial expressions of both of the people having the conversation.

We also used a few close-ups in our film which we needed to edit correctly to make our film run smoothly, but they had the effect that they can give more of an indication into the emotions of our characters and writing on a note from Claire to Kieran. Here is a link to our film on YouTube:

Unforgettable YouTube Video Link

We use close ups in a significant amount between 3:06 and 3:15.

To the left is another screenshot towards the beginning of our film, it is a close up of both of the charaters when they are having a conversation over the phone to each other, this gives the audiene a view into how close the relationship is between the couple as you can see their facial expressions when they are talking to each other and shows how similar they are.

We believe our film takes a different approach to how these films normally lay out in terms of content, and is almost like two film genres rolled into one, one of these being a love genre and the other being disaster. Also as the film starts of as a generally happy and uplifting film which is the general convention of this type of genre, it quickly turns towards the end of the film which is why we think it goes against people’s expectations of what might happen in the film which will cause an element of surprise which is what we are going for. Our film and the plot could be considered in some ways, to the very successful film ‘Titanic’ which features two people in love and is a generally happy film throughout until the end where disaster strikes.

Our film follows the traditional genre of these types of films and several of our shots are split screens with Kieran on one half and Clare on the other doing the same thing, for example, one of these shots is where they are both walking past a fence and stroking their hand across it. We needed to make sure that both of the characters put their hand on the rail at the same time and in the same spot so that this particular ran smoothly and started and finished at the same time to each other because we are making the point across to the audience that the two characters are similar in many different ways, if they are not equal in this shot it can have a negative effect. A screenshot on this shot is above.

To ensure that the editting and cutting between two different shots was not noticable and to ensure smooth running we also tried to keep our characters in towards the centre of the picture when they are walking on themselves. This can be seen on the two screenshots above when Kieran is walking out of the house. Keeping the character in the centre of the screen ensures that it is not too noticable that there has been a cut in the shot and makes for a smooth running throughout the film.

There is not really any reference to any other films in our short film although the idea to use split screen came from another short film that we looked at during our research although we changed the method of this in many ways. We generally wanted to make our film unique and offer the audience something which they haven’t seen before in terms of the plot and the content of the film so we decided to try to keep away from using anything which may have been in another film.

We wanted our film to have a certain amount of audience pleasure because it breaks away from modern and general conventions, and we believe that it is an ‘old-school’ film in many ways where we let the disaster happen in the end unlike many modern films where the disaster doesn’t happen, we just let the film get on with it in some ways, which hopefully the audience wll have enjoyed as it doesn’t follow a normal plot and varies throughout the film.. This is why we took serious attention to the plot and script, because we didn't want to give anything away that there would be a twist at the end that breaks away from normal traditions of this type of film genre.