Thursday, 25 November 2010

location recci at the park

When we went on our location recce to the park we found some major issues that we knew would affect our filming. Due to weather conditions we decided that we could not film in the park because:

  1. It is now winter and therefore the location is wet and muddy making it harder for us to move around and film. If for example we film the first part of the script and then one of the actors step into a muddy puddle by accident it would be hard for us to continue filming because this would affect the continuity. The audience would wonder how he got his leg muddy and how it wasn’t like that in the first place. This would then mean that we would have to film again and find a reason for why his leg is muddy. The benches were also wet, making it harder for the Aldo, Nabil and Sarah to sit and talk as if nothing was going on.
  2. Lighting was also a big issue because when we went out on a location recce and filmed a scene from the script we saw from looking back on the camera that the lighting in the scene was much darker and subtle than on real life. This is a serious issue because when filming a comedy the lighting has to be bright and clear representing the humorous and funny side to life. Having dark lighting would make the film seem more of a drama and horror rather than a comedy. It can have a major affect on our audience because if they can’t see the scene clear enough, it would not only irritate them but it would make them feel more distanced from the action, realising it is not real and they would find the scene more depressing rather than funny.
  3. Mise-en-scĂ©ne is also a major concern because when we were on our location recce we found that the surrounding of the park seemed very gloomy and dull. All the flowers had completely disappeared and the leaves of the trees had also gone, only showing the bare branches. This gives out the idea that we are filming a horror film rather than a comedy, thus changing our genre. The surrounding of a comedy film is very warm and bright, usually consisting of bright furniture or nature such as trees and flowers blossoming. 
  4. Finally we found that the wind was also our main problem because it makes a loud noise and therefore it can disrupt the dialogue of the characters, making it hard for the audience to understand them. Secondly the force of the wind would make it harder for us to keep a steady shot when filming and so as a result the film would consist of shaky scenes breaking the connection the audience feel with the characters, making them realise the film is not realistic. In addition the force of the wind would make it hard for the characters to stay still and not make sure that they fall down or prevent their clothing from being blown away. This issue would apply to Lilly also because we wanted Lilly to keep her hair out in order for her to swish it about as this follows the conventions of other comedy and romantic films like Shallow Hal and various Indian films; where a beautiful girl comes out swishing her hair, emphasizing her beauty and perfection. However because of the wind we knew that her hair would be covering her face and therefore her facial expressions which is something that the audience must see in order to connect with her character.    
We decided to look at the weather forecast in order to see if there would be a change in the weather and if there was a day where there would be a clear sky with some sun then we would decide to film on that day. This is a print screen of the weather forecast that I took and we immediately knew that filming outside would be an issue because the weather is getting much colder with a lot of snow and rain and therefore there was no point for us waiting to see if there was going to be a sunny day, so we decided to film on a different location which didn’t involve being outside.
Silva

Wednesday, 24 November 2010

Chosen Characters

After the audition we believed to have a very good view on who our actors were for our film and which ones were most suitable for the roles needed. The auditions were very helpful in giving us a clear idea of some changes we could do in order to improve our film. Such as having both of the children being a part of the film as it added an exellcent comic effect. For the role of Nabil, before performing the auditions we had a vague idea of which actor we were going to use , unfortantly our views changed at the auditions stage as Sajan seemed to perform the role of the ideal "geek" in a very good comic way which was exactly what we were looking for. This was useful as it relates to our stimulus of creating a comedy film.


Sajan Shah
   
  At the beginning we had analysed all the characters and had reached a decision that we would have both of the children in our film because they created an excellent comic effect together. Also, due to the fact that we wanted Sarah, Aldo and Nabil to be some sort related we discussed that Robert fit this perfect image. This was because Robert and Aldo looked very similar. However, we came to a conclusion that we had to think about our audience in more depth and how we did not want to exclude any race as we wanted to attrack a wide audience. So therefore we wanted to have our main protagonist who plays Nabil to be of a different race.


Rachel Evans

                                      
 Also after auditioning to see which acter we can use to take upon the role of Lilly we concluded that Rachel was the ideal sterotypical beautiful girl with very long brown hair and stunning blue eyes. Which we believed followed the codes and conventions of a typical comedy film.


Antigona

Auditions

We held our Auditions in the drama room in our school; Canons High school. We had also filmed each person auditioning for their roles. We had each actor act out Nabil's character with Aldo (the little boy) first and then Seura (the little girl) to see which kid added humour to the scene and would be best for the role. However we could not choose between the kids and decided to involve both of them to add to the comic effect of two children ordering Nabil (a young adult) around. Consequently, we had to change the lines of the script a little and try and split the lines between the two kids. We did this very carefully and tried to think which line would suit each kid, for example we thought Aldo should say 'Hot chick' because it added to the comif effect even more, where a little boy already feels emotions for girls and judges their appearance.

In the end, we decided to choose Sajan out of all the other characters because he was not only a drama student and already had good acting skills that he would be able to portray in the film but the fact that there was something about his acting that was very exaggerated and therefore added to the comic genre.

However, due to the fact that we had a technical difficulty we could not export the videos we took at the auditions in the computer.

Silva and Antigona

Characters

As we had decided our films main genre is going to be Comedy, we have to develop and follow the codes and convention which are needed in Comedy films. Therefore, our main point was to start of by choosing the suitable actors in order to achieve that effect we want for our film, as the actors we choose were one main aspect in order for our film to be a sucsess. So we had to choose the suitable actor for our main protagonist Nabil, Lilly and either a little girl or a little boy as Nabil's friend. The following are the actors who were willing to audition for us in order to choose the character we were looking for.

Robert              
                                 Plays role as: Nabil
                                 Age: 18
                                 Weight: 59 Kg
                                 Description:
                                 Light Brown Hair, Blue eyes, Tall
                                 Nationality: White British 
                                 
                                 
Sajan Shah

                                Plays role as: Nabil
                                Age: 18
                                Weight: 62 Kg
                                Description:
                                Black Hair, Dark brown eyes, 
                                Nationality: African

Rachel Evans       
                                Plays role as: Lilly Marsh
                                Age: 18
                                Weight: 45Kg
                                Description:
                                Light brown Hair, blue eyes 


                                Nationality: White British
Seura Beshi
         
                               Plays role as: Sarah
                               Age: 10
                               Weight: 27kg
                               Description:
                               Medium light brown hair, Hazel eyes
                               Nationality: White British


Ben

                              Plays role as: Aldo
                              Age: 9
                              Weight: 26kg
                              Description:
                              Short Blonde hair, Brown eyes
                              Nationality: White British


Antigona

Power Presentation

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

Research

Research
Aim:  To see which age group is most popular with watching short films and their favourite genre.
Back- Up Research- secondary research:
We researched short films on two main websites; You-tube and BBC Website. We found that BBC website shows that the most favoured genre was drama (111) followed by animation (73) then followed by comedy (70). However, when we researched short films in You-tube we gathered that the main genre was comedy. This was due to the fact that You-tubes main target audience people aged from 14-25 while BBC’s main target audience is from 25 and over. As a result this shows that the comedy genre is favoured more by the younger age group.
Methodology:
We decided to go to Leicester square and give out our questionnaire to ten people and then interview four people of different age groups to gather more in-depth information. We chose Leicester Square because we thought that this location would be ideal to achieve a wider range of audiences.


















 















Quantitative Questionnaire:
Are you male or female?  (Circle answer)    Female         Male                  
What is your age?
What is your preferred genre?
Comedy     Horror    Drama     Animation      Action       Adventure     Thriller
State the name and genre of your favourite short film.

What did you enjoy about this film?

State the main type of films you watch? (Circle Answer)
Mainstream cinema films             independent cinema films               short films

How regularly do you watch short films? (Circle Answer)
All the time     regularly     sometimes     hardly       never
Where you aware about the film festival during last week and have you ever attended one before?

Semi- Structured Interviews:
We decided to choose this method because we believe that this method allows in depth information to be gathered. This will also allow us to understand reasons to why there may be a difference in the genre of short films watched from different age groups.
We intended to interview a wide range of different age groups; we want to begin by interviewing two individuals from seventeen to twenty five as initially they were our target audience. However, we want to develop our research so that it involves people from the age group of twenty six to forty. The reason to why we want to include the older generation is to be compare them with the younger age group and see wich group are more aware of short films. Furthermore we wanted to see not only if our target audience would watch our short comedy film but to also see if the older age group would  watch our short film and if so then we know our film will be succesful with a wider age group. 
It’s a semi-structured interview so therefore it’s going to consist of very few closed ended questions and many open ended questions as we want to develop an in-depth conversation with the individuals in order to gather more information for our research.
These are some samples of the questions which we may ask:
 1 – What age group do you belong to?
2- Do you watch short films if yes, state what you enjoy most about them, if no state the reasons to why it does not interest you?
3- What is your favoured genre in terms of short films?
If no, state your preferred genre in a feature length film.
4- Would you watch short films if more comedy was involved?

These are the videos of the two different age-groups that both Me and Antigona interviewed in Leicester Square:

1)


Sex- Male
Age- 28

2)

 

Sex- Female
Age- 36
3)

Sex- Female
Age- 19

4)


Sex- Female
Age- 20

Questionnaire on short comedy films
After we did research on YouTube about short films we found that comedy was the most favoured genre, whereas in the BFI we found that it was drama; which is a genre mainly associated with an older age group. Therefore in order to back-up our studies we carried out a questionnaire; asking 10 students in our sixth form questions about short films. We wanted to be sure that the younger generation would be interested in watching short films if more comedy was involved.
How old are you?
What is your gender?     Male      female
Do you watch short films? If no, please give reason    Yes             No    
State the main type of films you watch?
Mainstream Cinema        Independent cinema films        Short films
Would you watch short films if there was more comedy involved?       Yes         No
Due to research we found that:
·         6 out of 10 students do not watch short films
·         4 out of 10 students watch short films
·         2 out of ten students would not watch short films, even if more comedy was involved
·         8 out of 10 students would watch short films if more comedy was involved.
We asked the students who replied ‘No’ to watching short films and asked them why they didn’t watch them. These are some of the replies;
·         “There’s no advertisement for short films, so I’ve never heard them.”
·         “Because their way too short, so there’s no point of even watching them.”
·         “They’re too short and they don’t have enough detail, so I don’t understand them.”
From this we found that our short film will be successful with the younger generation, as long as there is comedy involved. Some of them also said that they don’t have enough detail in them to understand and so in our script we will include information in the dialogue that tells the audience the relationship between the characters.

Silva and Antigona

BFI Research

We contacted the BFI for further information about our research into short films and permission to carry out research in the BFI. These are snapshots of what we wrote to them.  

Couple of days later; we recieved a message from the BFI with some vague information. Therefore this still did not answer our question to whether comedy films are popular within short films. This is the message that we recieved by them; informing us on which webpages we can look into to find more information.





However, even though this did give us little details we decided that we would attend the short film festival which was going to happen from Wednesday 13th of October to 28th of October. We believed that this would be the best time as it would allow us to gather very valuable results. Our main intention was to conduct our research at the festival as it would allow us to gather in depth information by people who do watch short films and would of answered our question 'if younger adults watch more comedy short films as against older adults'. However, due to personal issues this meant that we could not attend the festival during these specific dates. So, we decided to make some changes to our research which would still allow us to gain some information. Instead we gave out a questionnaire to ten students in our sixth form to see if they watch short films. We then  decided to go to Leicester Square where we can obtain more information about short films. We produced questionnaires which we will give out to young people as well as older people. Also, to make our research stronger we also decided we would conduct interviewers in order to back up our results for the questionnaires. This would also allow us to show differences or similarities within the different age groups.

Antigona and Silva