Evaluation Question 4 (Part 2)

Evaluation Question 4 (Part 1)

Research & Planning:

Annotated film:

Annotated ancillaries:

We worked on the YouTube video annotoations as a group.

Evaluation Question 3

Adrian on Themes and Styles:

Jamal on Titles and Target Audience:

Oli on Brand and Target Audience:

Evaluation Question 2

Scott's feedback:

Tom's feedback:

Adrian' analysis:

Jamal's analysis:

Oli's analysis:

Evaluation Question 1

For A Handful of Rocks – Final

So here it is: Our final short film. Enjoy!

Final Ancillaries

Double Page Spread Ancillary (Making Of)

Here is an example of a shot we directed Adrian to take. Though the angle is regarded as  strange, we felt it would be good to use a variety of shots, focuses and angles when we collected all the pictures in the end and picked what we thought were the most appropriate ones for the film.

Here I'm using the Burn & Dodge tool to manipulate areas of the image so darken/lighten them.  If  I thought the image needed a darker or grittier tone to it I went over certain areas with the Burn tool. If it became too dark, I reverted that with the dodge tool.

This is a plan of the double page spread conducted on the programme "Pages".

Here the text is being manipulated to make it look more visually pleasing, and aesthetic to the eye, There were a few things we regarded as "tacky" which we decided to omit.

This is a separate image of a brick wall taken on site. We originally thought the lighting here wasn't great, so we took a picture of the chicken and another of the wall. We cropped and layered the chicken in front of the wall and used the "healing tool" to make it look like one image. However the general consensus of the group was that the brick wall would make the typography too difficult to read, so we abandoned this and stuck with the original image.

As a group we went through the film to take any screenshots for stills we thought would make a good background image for the double page spread. However we didn't find anything worth using so we stuck with the original image that we deliberately took for the ancillary.

Double Page Spread Draft

This is a draft for our double page spread. The photo in the background is a representation of a still in the film, and I split up where the writing could be over the page. This is obviously a rough draft and is subject to change.

Final Ancillary (Poster)

Here is the final ancillary produced through photoshop and indesign. The font took a while to choose as there were so many, for both the title and billing board - we tried to stay away from stylised fonts, as well as "plain" fonts. The spacing of the words more or less fell into place.

Poster Final Draft

After exploring our options we decided to go with the poster that can be seen below. It is mainly based off Oli's draft of the poster as we found that it was the most effective and induced a little bit of narrative enigma.

As you can see, the poster is still missing the title. This is because we yet have to decide on one. After the change from Sweets to Diamonds the title 'For a handful of Sweets' obviously doesn't work anymore.

At the moment it looks like we will go with 'For a Handful of Rocks', but this is not 100% decided yet.

Poster Draft #3

Here is a rough sketch of what our film poster could look like. We took some photos at one of our shoots to get the photos for the ancillaries.

Short Film Posters Analysis #2

Feature Length Poster

Short Film Poster

Similarities:

• Close ups.
• Reveals Mise En Scene (related to close ups?).
• Title relates to the film somehow.
• Billing Board present.

Differences:

• Close ups are graphically contrasting. Drive includes a filter and is taken from the film. Curfew has two simple close up shots purposefully chosen for the poster. Could be to do with the simple techniques that short film purport.
• The feature length movie has a longer billing board.
• The short film has no mention of the casting in bold, unlike the feature length film which explicitly states "Ryan Gosling" as a selling point.
• Instead, the short film displays in bold the movie and culture festivals it was shown at and won at for "Best Short Film".

Wanted: Film Title

With diamonds now replacing the sweets as loot, we had to think of a new title for our film.

We wanted to stick with the reference to the Fistful of Dollars films, so we started brainstorming.

Mind-map showing our brainstorming.

As you can see we didn't go for the obvious choice of "Handful of Diamonds", but instead thought about other words that can be used to describe diamonds.

In the end we went with 'For a Handful of Rocks', with rocks being a colloquial term for diamonds. We found this more fitting as you would think of the robbers as being of a lower social class as shown e.g. by the location and their getaway car, and thus expect them to use a slang term to describe the diamonds.

The idea was to give somebody looking at the poster, or just hearing about the film, an impression of what kind of film this is.

Inspiration for our soundtrack

As we changed our film we decided to change the music too, since our original stuff didn't work as well. The inspiration that we took is music that is oxymoronic with the scene it is being played to. For example, in The Punisher there is a fight scene with Opera music playing. We thought this type of music would contrast nicely with the film itself.

As well as this scene, when I read "A Clockwork Orange", the main character - Alex, commits violent acts when he hears any classical music such as symphonies performed by Mozart or Beethoven. The classical music can be a representation for the violence that occurs during the film.

A New Beginning

Today we showed the draft of our short film to a focus group.
The overall consensus was positive, however most were confused by the narrative as well as the fact that the loot consisted of sweets. The ending was also pointed out to be quite bland without much of a twist.
One person mentioned that the theme of the film does not match the one we had aspired, not being dark and serious enough.

As a consequence of this feedback we decided on the following:
- We will refilm the movie, using fake diamonds rather than sweets.
- We will add a scene at the beginning, explaining how the robberes acquired the loot.
- There will be a different ending with a more intriguing twist.
- The theme of the film will be darker and grittier.

For A Handful Of Sweets (Draft #1)

And here is the finished video. We will show this to our Media class and teacher, and will make changes to it based on the feedback we receive from them.

Legal Problems During Filming

During our car scene and introduction we were stopped by armed police.

The Barracks are just behind the garages pictured here, where we drive our car into.

This was due to the army barracks being so close to our location.

As our characters are three bank robbers who speed in a car to their location while wearing their masks, the local authorities received a complaint from the barracks of "suspicious behaviour".

Fortunately the officer who stopped us was understanding enough to let us carry on, but it was a reminder that we should be wary of our surroundings and the occupants of the areas we film in.

Choosing the right sweets

In our first shoot we used Quality Street. In ours second shoot we used Ferrero Rocher. The biggest concern that we have with chocolate that looks aesthetically pleasing is the cost. Obviously this will go into the overall budget, however this limits the amount we use, so therefore the amount of chocolate we use is going to be limited.

We didn't really want this to affect us, so we decided it was a good idea to take a look online, compare, contrast and split the budget to purchase the sweets.

Update on Movie Title

On the way to filming we were discussing what we could name our film as we didn't have a definite idea on what we could call it. We thought about relating it to sweets, as well as relating it to the western film trilogy "A Fistful Of Dollars".

We put both of the ideas together and as a group came up with:

'A Handful Of Sweets'

That obviously worked better than the film name generator that I used earlier.