film reviews

Christmas with dad

The shorts main focal point and energy is directed towards the main subject, the father. A lot of close ups are used showing him dealing with everyday life. This produces a feeling of warmth and connection with him as we see him sacrifice his life to bring up his family. His honesty is felt throughout as we see him struggle. The continuation of this builds when we discover he had a poor upbringing, possibly explaining why he's immersed himself in such a large family at such a young age. He is the only character to have a 'one to one' with the camera which builds our favour of him; as does the location of these interviews(back garden etc.)which make us feel like a neighbour or friend listening to his woes and worries.

The fly on the wall style of production works perfectly, allowing us a quick glimpse into the lives of the family involved. The blinking of montage from light to dark gives us the idea of the day in day out routine of the family with slow blurred shots relating to the young fathers life.

The blurred focus of the initial shots coming in to focus almost relates to our feeling about the family. From first sight it is easy to judge the family(and the dad) however as the short progresses we become much more in focus to the reality and likeability of them. We become much more aware,with a greater clarity, of the situation of those involved.

The interview style with the dad creating a one on one atmosphere is used perfectly about three quarters of the way in. This means we have enough knowledge about the family to understand the context which he puts it into.

Sound is used to very good effect throughout this short. The immediate 'jingle' heard at the start tells us a lot, by informing the viewer it isn't a traditional christmas documentary; It's almost remixed, delayed style reaffirms this alternative look at christmas, from a less than traditional viewpoint. The lack of background music throughout the majority of the short reinforces the realism and fly on the wall feel...allowing us to become fully submerged and interested in the family. The foley track backs this up. The original 'jingle' is then re-introduced halfway through, giving the viewer the pondering time to reflect and review upon the footage just seen. After this much needed thinking time the viewer is re-submerged in the documentary.

Terminal Bar

Terminal bar is a short documentary describing the life of a once thriving Bar in

the background music used relates very closely to the bar its trying to immitate. You don't have to imagine very hard to picture the bar in its golden era; similar music playing a background beat. This absorbs us with the distinctly New York voiceover backing up the feel of an american bar.

The films form mirrors its content quite closely. The on screen image is constantly changing with new faces and stories constantly circulating; As people and stories would have actually circulated in the bar. The narration and foley track changes with new stories with the mood never staying at one place for too long. Even the most serious of stories are presented with an air of humour, as things are presented in real life bars. The constant flicking from story to story keeps the viewer hooked untill the end, replicating the feeling,emotions and memories this bar once hosted.. The interview style combined with the actual pictures of what life was like in the golden era combine superbly, perfectly painting a picture of life in a New York bar. Overall this production works extremely well to create the feel of a new york bar, full of action and life whilst also creating the contradictory feeling of the now destitute and failing establishment which is sadly finally coming to a close.

research

When researching for our silent movie production i spent a long time looking at the techniques used to create shots for nature documentary, especially Attenborough pieces such as Life and Planet earth(which i already had an interest in). I particularly loved the time lapse montages(eg. a plant growing) however realised this type of highly sophisticated shot was well beyond our means. I loved the focus pulls used and the more unusual shots such as inside a nest or from floor level. These shots seemed much more achievable and i planned to focus my efforts towards these areas. Planet earth also uses a trademark aerial shot using sattelite imagery which i hoped to recreate using google maps or similar software. I also researched short narratives such as 'the package' which were a much more achievable level of film to produce. Whilst researching shorts i realised that one of the major failures of them seemed to be poor filming and control over mise-en-scene etc.(These factors are what made some stand out over the others-narrative ignored). For our production i realised that camera control is the key element...something which due to various negative factors we failed to achieve. For future work i plan to research camera's extensively whilst also taking a higher role in camera function(im currently much more involved and interested in script work and idea creation)

storyboarding

Storyboarding for the Edale trip was difficult due to the fact we had never visited Edale for locations. For this reason we both decided to draw up rough storyboards which could be completed virtually anywhere with the majority of cinemetography and mise-ene-scene planned at the shooting location. Examples of this 'simple' storyboarding include string going over a wall, into and out of odd locations eg. beer bottle,machinery etc. The majority of this simple storyboarding worked however for a few examples eg. String traveling through small gap(character climbs over) we couldn't find a suitable location. In retrospect i would have changed a lot about the way we produced the short we did. Planning was relatively poor as was timekeeping however the finished product did reflect aspects of what we had initially planned. An example of this is our failure to secure a decent quality camera before the shoot, leading to lost/poor footage. All things considered i would have much rather produced a story in which a character follows the string, becoming increasingly lost and deteriorated; However he is really on a drunken journey(represented by a trail of bottles rather than string-revealed by different camera angles). This would have allowed for a much more thought provoking story which could have had a revelation at the end as he looks down, sees the string, looks back and its a bottle,before slumping against a grimey wall finally realising his issue with drugs/drink. This is an area i hope to explore in future projects and private work and look to take all the mistakes we made as positives; after all the best way to learn is to make mistakes.

Planning,initial ideas Edale trip

Initially i researched differing kinds of film eg. documentary, narrative, montage etc. We original planned to create a piece of beautiful work focusing solely on nature, using lots of focus pulls and close ups eg. water dripping from flower/tree. We veered away from this idea however when we realised it would be a completely silent brief, originally planning on using music and image to create an almost realisation moment. We also believed this approach would be used by many members of the course so tried to create an original and interesting alternative. From this we decided to go with a simple narrative approach which would keep the viewer interested even when sound is absent. From this thinking i decided the main difficulty within this assignment was to keep interest high. I believed this could be solved by introducing a simple question eg. who is the character,where are they going?what are they following etc. Due to this reasoning we decided that the character should follow a simple quest-a piece of string(This idea was completely original in its conception however we discovered at a later date,on the train to Edale, that this idea has been used before). The strings destination was pondered over with a few different ideas appearing. We toyed with the idea of the string taking the character on a surreal journey of self realisation however deemed it to complex and ambitious to plan and create for a project at this stage of the course. We also toyed with the idea of the string taking the character to the place he needs to be most eg. taking him to girl/money/happiness. One idea was to make the string lead the character to a frosty cold pint, revealing at the end that its actually a beer or cider commercial. To create a situation that would leave the viewer questioning however we decided that the string should lead the character back to the original place he found the string; however in a much more tired and diminished condition. We believed this would raise questions surrounding the importance of the characters journey and whether or not it has been beneficial or not. On a final thought we decided to possibly add a last scene showing the character looking down to reveal bottle of beverage in his hand rather than the string, showing that its alcohol that took the boy on the journey, not string(with anti-drinking slogan).