Evaluation

A short film is a motion picture that is shorter than the average feature film in today’s society. Short films vary from 2 minutes to 30minutes. They can include all different genres and sometimes be a lot more direct as they are so much shorter. From my foundation portfolio in As I have learnt a lot of new skills and used them to inform my A2 production.  What I feel I have learnt from my As portfolio to my A2 portfolio is how much research has to be done and the huge input it can have on my final production from the project. In my A2 coursework I have made sure that all my research links to my production and has a good effect on it. For example using features from other short films I researched and following theories from narrative theory studies.

Research into similar texts guided and influenced my choices by a huge amount. When doing my own research on different successful short films it gave me a lot of ideas about different narratives and how many messages can be sent across in a short film in such a small amount of time. The genre of the short film is a hard decision as it determines your target audience and all the genre conventions which should be included. As a group we looked into sound a lot and how it must link in with our target audience of the short film we planned to produce. We knew more about our audience through doing some research in to huge blockbusters such as Titanic and Dirty Dancing and excelled from this through doing an audience survey which I think helped us a lot. From our audience survey we collated the results and put them into pie charts so that we could see which audience to aim towards. We found that the majority of under twenty year olds that filled out our survey enjoyed watching romance films more than any other genres, we also found that romance is still a popular genre with all other ages and therefore we will aim our film towards under 20’s with the use of sound but we also wanted our short film to appeal to all ages. This influenced our choices as to which music to use in the short film and the meaning that these lyrics would have behind the overall storyline.

Matthew and I applied the form of a short story to our product as it is extremely short and uses techniques such as music, short takes and fast edits to keep the audience engaged throughout the five minutes. The short film is direct and snappy which works well in such a short product. Aspects of other texts influenced our production by a huge amount, our individual research supports our short film and by looking into the plan of our production in detail has helped a huge amount. I feel this is what I was lacking in my foundation piece of coursework and the difference shows in my A2 coursework folder.

Overall I am extremely happy with our production and I think it is successful. The research into 11 other short films looking at micro and macro elements helped me a lot as I tried to make a successful short film, I took elements from a lot of them which influenced my final edit.  I found it hard to come up with four ideas generations and therefore decided to come up with four completely different ideas which all had advantages and disadvantages. When choosing one of the ideas generations to develop I found it easier when I had all the ideas in a spider diagram. As I wanted my short film to develop from my foundation piece of coursework I decided to research storyboards, scripts, shot lists and shooting rushes in order to make mine the best possible. In my advanced portfolio I also found that looking at narrative constructionists helped me form a professional short film which includes expected conventions. When going into my group we found it easy to pick the idea ‘The Dream’ as although Matthews was also good we thought it would be too complex to film in the time span we had. Having done audience research, sound research and research into the two of our characters we knew exactly what it was that we wanted to produce. Furthermore by doing the script, shooting and storyboard we knew every small detail of what we wanted when we filmed. As we found our self’s organised we are both happy with the final outcome, if I was to change anything I would have liked to of looked into the ancillary tasks a little more and given ourselves more time towards the end of the project.