For our AS film production coursework, myself and my group chose to make a short film to portray a sense of enlightenment and generally to create an uplifting, happy experience for the audience. The genre of our film is a family film with child references and connotations throughout. Our chosen setting, a family home also conveys this with genre conventions including a kitchen and a happy ending. For our coursework, the two main features that we focused on were Mise-en-scene and cinematography as we thought that these features would be most essential for conveying emotions to an audience. Ideally, our audience was aimed at our own age group, primarily teens and older. However after producing the short film, we realised that our target audience could in fact be applied to a younger audience. This is because one of our primary focuses, the bear, could expand the target audience to younger eyes as children would familiarly recognise the key prop. This is because they can relate to the character as stereotypically, the majority of children own a teddy bear and can adhere to the current situation. In our short film, we applied a range of different micro-features to communicate to the audience what is currently happening as well as possibly foreshadowing what may happen next. Some parts of our short film breaks generic conventions, however in a restorative way. For example, our generation is known to be the generation of technology with mature teens engrossed in their phones, unproductive in every way. Our chosen protagonist is a teen; however she breaks the stereotype as she is represented as innocent, childlike and constructive. Allegorically conveying the sense that hope is still left in our generation as our protagonist is optimistic and sees things positively, unlike our current generation.
In the beginning shot of our short film with the character
walking up to the bear, we introduced our character dressed in light, girly
clothing to establish to the audience her kind nature. Initially, the shot
consisted of the character walking past the bear and coming back to retrieve
it, however we thought that the shot deemed to be too long and would be
perceived better if she approaches it; like an outsider. In the new shot her
trousers are shown to be unevenly folded which conveys to the audience a
scruffy, childlike persona. Also, we purposely made the bear dirty and ragged
in order to follow the narrative of the character restoring the bear to its
natural state.
This
childlike persona is continued into the next shot where our protagonist is
shown to be balancing on a small wall – like a child with the bear in her hand
which also communicates to the audience an instant bond with the bear. Children
are renowned for making quick bonds and easy friendships and this element is
demonstrated in this particular shot.
The
second feature that we focused on was cinematography. In the group, this was a
shared job between myself and another group member, however before any
decisions were made, we negotiated as a team incorporating each other’s input.
Many different shots were taken to include a range of shots for when it comes
to editing, so that editing could be played around with to see what worked
best. I made sure that regarding cinematography, the angles that we used were
explorative and unusual. For example we used a lot of ground shots as well as
angles that aren’t used occasionally in regular films. This was to create a
more artistic, perceptual atmosphere to our short film. We minimally used
handheld shots in our short film as I felt that this created an unstable feel
to the sequence. It was essential to use stable shorts as it reflects the
deeper meanings in our short film. For example the use of stable shots incorporated
the sense of a stable home, a safe setting.
Before the short film was complete, we decided as a group
that we would like our audio to be played over the whole sequence, without any
excess sounds. This is because we felt that it was necessary for the footage
and the audio to convey the same emotions towards the audience. The audience
played a large part in how the audience are manipulated to feel. For example if
we added a gloomy audio over the uplifting footage, it would create a biased
reaction. We chose our audio based on the way it made us feel. For example with
both the footage and the uplifting audio put together, it created a sense of
happiness followed by something that is aesthetically pleasing as you don’t get
to see a bear being restored every day. The first audio we found was rushed and
we felt like it was a bit tedious which had the same effect on our audience.
So, in our second draft we changed it to something more exciting and upbeat.
