Final Evaluation

Evaluation of Short Film Production

The use of camera shots, angles and framing, is crucial as the sequence will need to remain interesting throughout its entire length. We used a panning shot of outside to represent time passing as the cake was being made. A lot of films start with an establishing shot which out film did as well with the outside of the house waiting for the father to leave for work in the morning. The forms and conventions which short film follow are things such as, no character names are shown throughout the clip and instead are left until the end of the clip or not included at all. This is because the cast isn’t well known enough to include and wouldn’t help to improve viewings if they were included. This is true in our film because we don’t reveal any of the people names who created the film until the very end of the film, so the audience isn’t confused or distracted only the title of the film is shown at the very begging. The lack of/or low quality CGI is very common in short films because the film wont be based around a large budget and the use of a continuous setting for example in our film we used one of our groups house and we filmed all of our inside and outside the house. The CGI we used was we only used a fade at the end of our film before the credits scene and our whole film was shot inside and outside the same house. Short films only have two or three actors because of the low budgets and too many actors will over complicate things in the film. We followed this because we only used three actors in our short film. Short films use cheaper more direct methods to target their audiences such as specialist sites where independent film makers can upload there creations and broadcast them for free to a large audience via the web. Using such sites as You Tube, Future Shots and social networking sites. Our films will be uploaded on to YouTube so that we can use in for future reference and to attract a larger audience. In terms of music, short films tend to be very similar in the way that it is used, in terms of gaining a reaction. Such as in our film we use two non-diegetic extracts of music. The first extract is of the “happy birthday” tune which is what our film is based upon and the one that plays at the end is and instrumental lullaby which is a sad piece of music which represents the strong emotions shown by the characters in the film. The use of camera shots, angles and framing, is crucial as the sequence will need to remain interesting throughout its entire length. We used a panning shot of outside to represent time passing as the cake was being made.

Our ancillary texts combine with our film perfectly because, the poster doesn’t reveal any of the scenes in the film because we used semiotics because we only showed the birthday cake on the poster which when people think about birthday’s the cake is one of the first things that springs to their mind. The main colour of the poster is black, this helps the viewer to focus on the cake in the centre but it also connotes mystery which is what our film is about. We had to make our own review page I believe mine gives an incite to one of the characters roles more and his name is revealed but the plot of the film is not revealed in any way. The review page also advertises the film in a big way because on the sides I wrote “ the best short of 2010” empire and “a great debut hit” the sun. You see things like this on most films either on a review page or on the case of the film, people trust the companies that give these ratings and it makes them more likely to watch or purchase the film. The layout of my article is very similar to ones you see in professional magazines such as Empire, the over lapping of a smaller picture with a white outline makes them clearly separate. The transparency of the text box of the photo makes sure that some of the photo is still visible.

From our audience feedback we have learnt that we need to re-think our target audience slightly because people over the age of 15 may be able to grasp the plot of our film rather than just people over the age of 18. We also gathered that a lot of people said that the smoking scene in our film was irrelevant and maybe if we re-did the project again we may have replaced it with another scene. We also learnt that the majority or the audience liked the use of our music and thought that our camerawork was very good. They said that the music we chose wasn’t irrelevant and it fitted into the film perfectly and didn’t ruin the film.

We used blogger to show the whole of our project online which in the past hasn’t been the case, I think blogger is a simple and easy way in which to show your work because it allows you to show links to research and embed YouTube video codes onto your blog so that people can see the video your referencing about rather than having to search for it themselves. We used Photoshop to create our poster where we used skills from our as level production to help us, we used an effect which makes in look like you are looking down a camera lens and that is why you only see the cake rather than the whole photo. For our preliminary task we used editing software such a I movie but when it came to our actual short film we decided to use final cut pro which made it a lot easier to edit things more precisely and it was a lot simpler to edit the sound. We decided not to use the school camera because we had the opportunity to use a professional one which a better picture quality and a better sound quality because he had a separate sound microphone which we could move closer to the actors so that we could pick up on the dialogue. I used Microsoft publisher to create my article because we used it last year and it gives you the perfect layout for a double page article.