Reflective analysis

Reflective Analysis

I and my partner Holly Huzzard made a short film which we decided the genre would be drama and we would aim it at a target audience of people aged 16-25 and try and get a message across so that it is helpful to the market which we aim it at about a specific issue within our nation and that age range. We decided to do the film about a man who returns home from a stressful week at work which he wants to unwind from, to do this he turns to alcohol, after this he also gets out some drugs, cannabis to be precise. Within the film we have tried to show the dangers of both drugs and alcohol as the man within our film who uses both of these to relieve his stress, as both of these substances are seen as stress relievers to the youth of today we thought it would be a good idea to show how if used this way it could become dangerous to your own and other people’s lives.

We used the Syd Field paradigm as our narrative theory we used this as each of the strands within it linked up to a moment within our film, such as the inciting incident would be the protagonist coming home from work after a busy week, the plot point 1 will be the protagonist deciding to have a few beers, the pinch 1  will be finishing the beers and deciding to do drugs, the midpoint would be actually doing the drugs, the pinch 2 would be the friend coming round and disturbing the protagonist, plot point 2 would be the protagonist actually killing his friend, and finally the climax would be the protagonist waking up, seeing the blood soaked knife and deciding what he should do.

When editing the film we decided that because of the eerie nature of our films storyline it would be best not to include any extra non-diegetic sound within the film as what we were trying to get across to people was how real the danger is and therefore we wanted to make the film look and sound as real to the actual experience as possible, therefore we thought that non-diegetic sound would have made it less real then we wanted it too. However when our protagonist smokes the drugs we wanted there to be a change to show that he has lost consciousness a bit and isn’t all there, to show this we changed the sound so that everything echoed, this is to show that it is taking him longer to register what is being said and he can’t understand it very well, the echoing is also very effective when the protagonist pulls the knife out as it really makes the knife predominant as it goes on for so long so you know that something bad will happen with that knife. In the beginning shots were our protagonist is filming himself, we edited the sound to make it sound more muffled so that it’s more believable that he is actually filming himself.  

We also edited the colour of the film as it goes towards a sepia colour which is called dream, we used this as we wanted the protagonist to be in a dreamlike state which is what the “stress relievers” have done to him therefore he feels it’s not real and that he is unaware of what is happening, this happens at the same time as the sound turns to an echo, this is because that is the disruption of our film and we wanted to make it significant, so by changing the colour and the sound we were able to show the audience that this is the moment were everything has gone wrong, this therefore helps show that drugs and alcohol can be bad as it is after the protagonist has these that everything goes bad so therefore it helps our main aim.

One of our key shots which shows that our protagonist isn’t really himself anymore and that he is losing his head is when he looks in the mirror and it looks like his face is cracked rather than the mirror looking cracked, this particular shot was done by using make up (eyeliner) on the protagonists face so that the mirror image could look the way that it did otherwise it would have been difficult to get the shot by actually cracking the mirror so that his reflection would look smashed. It is a close up so that you can get a really good luck at the lines on his face so you get as tormented as the actor by it, it also fits in with our drama genre as a convention of dramas are close ups. The reaction to this shot is one of anger as he smashes the mirror, this shows that later on in the film he can become angry which as we do see later on in the film he does, therefore this shot is like a warning to the audience as this was just a taste of how angry and aggressive he actually is going to get. Another one of our key shots is the one of the protagonist pulling the knife out of the block, it is an extreme close ups which again fits in with the drama genre and allowed us to stick to conventions. The shot is significant as it is the point where we really feel like something bad is going to happen, this is because the knife is brought up so slowly and the noise is so sharp and with the echo it really emphasises the importance of the knife which is what we wanted to bring across when filming this shot. 

When filming the first shot which shows our protagonist waking up we altered the focus, as during the shot when the protagonist lifts his head up the focus blurs and then it does the same again seconds later, this was to show that there is a blur/glitch in the protagonists head as to what had happened the night before because he does not remember what he had done, this is then confirmed during the monologue after this shot.

We filmed a particular scene which didn’t actually make it into the final cut, this was a beer scene were we have several beers put down onto the table in individual very short close up shots and this was inspired by a previous students work, Riley Wong’s ’Avarice’ has a scene in which money and parcels build up, and in this shot the camera stays still and more money is accumulated and more parcels are posted through the door. The inspiration we took from it was the build-up idea whilst the camera stayed still, therefore we decided that we would keep the camera in an individual spot and one bottle at a time we would accumulate them up, this way it shows how much the protagonist is drinking and that time is moving forward, however in Riley’s film it built up to the beat on the non-diegetic sound that he had included however due to us deciding not to use any non-diegetic sound within ours to get that real eerie experience across we could not quite get the same effect and therefore decided to take it out as it just wasn’t the same as how we wanted it to be.

There were a few mistakes in our short film, one of which is that when we film the protagonist in one of the shots in the kitchen, in the reflection of the microwave you can actually see me in the background filming the shot. This was a mistake we could not rectify as we didn’t have time to re-film due to myself, my partner of the project and the actor all having other commitments; therefore we had to live with this error.

Another mistake that was made is that the computer we were working on crashed during the editing of our footage and we lost some of our footage therefore we had to re-shoot some shots and it was whilst re-shooting that there was a continuity issue during the shot of the knife being pulled out of the knife block as the protagonist is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled down, however during the re-shoot the protagonist had the sleeves rolled up therefore the shots go from having a sleeve, to having no sleeve and then back to the sleeve, however due to time difficulties we were unable to correct these issues.

In conclusion I believe we included a lot of good shots and editing techniques such as the mirror shot were the protagonists face is cracked, the extreme close up of the knife to show that the protagonist is going to do something bad with the knife, there was also the editing of the colours to make it dream like to show the protagonist wasn’t himself and was in a different state of mind and the echoing sound to make it even more clear that his state of mind was lost. However there were also mistakes which were made such as continuity errors and reflections during shots. Although I believe that we managed to achieve our main aim in producing a dramatic short film aimed at which had a message that could educate people of our target audience age range about a specific topic which is a problem for that age group within our nation.

 

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