Applying Narrative To our Short Film

Applying Narrative To Our Short Film

One of the key components of our short film and how the story is going to be told is the flashbacks, because of this we are using a non-linear narrative. In using a non-linear narrative, we are going to have to be very careful that all components of the story make sense in the order that we present them, otherwise the story may become confusing or even incoherent. I think that we will be able to achieve this, in making our storyboard we have laid out all of our ideas and written the plot in an order that makes sense from a viewer's standpoint. In using flashbacks we can also create enigma by leaving out certain pieces of information which we can reveal later in the story.

Some of Barthe's Narrative codes apply to our film idea. The most prominent of these codes in our idea is Enigma. We are planning on hiding the face of the psychiatrist throughout the whole of the film, and at the end revealing him to be the same character that the patient is imagining. We are going to hint towards this throughout the film but not give it away. Barthe's code of enigma can also be applied to some of the details which we are going to incorporate into the film, for instance we are going to make the imaginary character's voice inaudible and his face blurred out. We are also using cultural narrative codes within our short film, we are using a psychiatrist office setting which we have chosen based on how well the mise en scene fits what we are looking for. The place which we are filming in contains a lot of leather bound furniture, heavy fabrics, small ornaments, and dark colours. These elements are also widely present within stereotypical psychiatrists' offices, and in incorporating them into the mise en scene of our filming location we are using cultural codes to tell narrative.

Applying Genre To Our Short Film

Applying Genre To Our Short Film

The genre that we are going to apply to our film is Psychological Horror. We are using this genre because it has the most relevant elements to what we would like to achieve with our short film, and we also feel like we can recreate the common tropes and effectively make a psychological horror within 5 minutes. Unlike conventional horror films, psychological horror films replace physical threats with psychological, we are looking to explore the mind of the protagonist in our film, representing a psychological threat with a physical one.

We are interested in including as many subtle, creepy details as possible in order to hint the audience without giving anything away. In doing this, we also want to create the film so that the viewer notices details/techniques which they hadn't noticed before each time that they watch it.

In our film, we are also using the protagonist's mental illness as a device to create a psychological threat. As mentioned earlier, this will be represented as a physical threat.

Other examples of psychological thriller similar to the film we are creating are here:

The Smiling man:

The Shining:

The Silence of the Lambs:

Organisation of Actors

Organisation Of Actors

Our initial thoughts for actors in our short film is to keep it within the group, with Oscar playing the role of the patient, and Erol playing the role of the Psychiatrist and the person that the patient is imagining. 

By doing this we are saving ourselves a lot of time that we would have to spend finding other people to act in our short film, we can dedicate this time elsewhere. Also, it will be much easier to organise filming dates and suchlike if we use actors within the group. We can also easily re-shoot shots as needed as we will have the whole cast available throughout both the filming and production.

We plan to decide on our filming dates very soon as we are unsure of what dates each of us are available yet because we all work and our work dates are not confirmed.

Second Animatic

The second Animatic with Oscar trying to explain roughly whats going on in each scene.

First Animatic

The First animatic showing the duration of each clips, some clips are longer or shorter than what it says on the post-it notes and we re used one of the post-it notes in the sequence becasuse we want to use the exact same shot and emotion, when you watch you will see what I mean.

Expected Audience For Our Short Film

What Kind of Audience Are We Targeting With 

Our Short Film?

We are aiming to reach as wide an audience as possible with our short film, however, it will more specifically target an audience of both male and female, older teenagers. The usual demographic for psychological horror films such as the one that we're making is 15-30 year olds, but this doesn't mean that they don't get attention from other age groups as well. We are targeting a wider audience consisting of both males and females, this is because we want to make the film as accessible as possible. 

One of the reasons that psychological horror films attract this audience is that they usually use detailed plots which contain events which keep the viewers on the edges of their seats. This plot often includes plot twists, like the one that we are using within our film. We also think that the film would be inappropriate for anyone younger than the age of 15.

We are looking to make use of a lot of enigma in our film, while hinting at certain things towards the plot twist so that the audience keeps guessing. We also don't want to reveal everything to the audience, leaving some enigma unrevealed and unexplained by the end of the film, leaving the audience with questions.

The social class that we're aiming our film at is middle-upper class. We're pretty much targeting anyone who has access to a computer to watch videos online and has an interest in short films. We're interested in putting the short film on both Vimeo and Youtube as we think these are the two most accessible platforms for short films to be posted on. We may also post it on social media.

Health and Safety

Health and Safety 

While producing our short film it is importanrt we consider the possible safety risks that we may face. This blog post will be highlighting how we can avoid them. Although the shooting of our shortfilm will be in two seperate locations; my (Erol's) house and Bolnore village we still need to consider the risks. However having a small number of shooting locations helps to recude this risk. 

Safety hazzard number one; traffic









We are filming in a quiet village which helps to reduce the risk of getting hit by any traffic however we will make sure that we are fully aware of the traffic that we may face. Something which may be important to consider is we are going to be filming at night so perhaps it would be safe if we were to obtain some hi-vis jackets. Hi-vis jackets would allow drivers to see us filming while filming and help to prevent getting hit.


Safety hazzard number two; wires 

We are going to prepair my house before hand to make sure that there are no loose wires anywhere for us to trip on or even get electricuted. My mum has given us permission to move anything where we need to in order to make our project run smoothly.

Safety hazzard number three; heights 

We want our shortfilm to be as successful as it can be, in order to make this happen we agreed a variety of different angles will help us to achieve something which looks professional. This means getting up on a stool to get those effective high angles. This still may be a risk due to the height but we will make sure that the stool is stable and safe to use, this will help to prevent us from falling off.

Shooting Location/Prop Research

Main Shooting Location

Erol's House

Out of all of the shooting locations that we have evaluated, Erol's house is the most appropriate place for our film. Due to the research that we have done, we have found many common themes between actual psychiatrist offices and Erol's living room. There is a lot of leather furnishing, heavy fabrics, and wooden furniture.

Erol's living room

The wooden furniture, wooden floor, leather desk chair, and the heavy fabric furniture are all common components of psychiatrist offices.

Above is a picture a physchiatrist's office, there is very similar decor in an actual psychiatrist's office as there is in Erol's house.

In the picture above there is more leather furniture, and a rug on the floor. This isn't the part of Erol's house that we are planning to film in, however it does show the same kind of decor as a psychiatrists office.

The picture above shows the planned filming location. We are going to move certain elements of the set around, for example we are going to take family photos out and other ornaments around.



This chair is also contained in Erol's house. We think that it fits the setting that we're trying to achieve, and because of that we are going to try and incorporate it into our short film.

What we have done and what we will do 13/10/17

In today's lesson we have successfully finished the storyboard, we have also made multiple key decisions which involve lighting, sound, location, and plot. We have also made multiple blog posts.

Any ideas that were rejected and why

Ideas that were reject and why 

• Many ideas floated between Jacob, Oscar and I about what type of short film we were going to produce. Initially we wanted ideas that were inspired by other films that we had seen, for example: Whiplash - a film about a passionate drummer who aspires to be at the top of his music ability. Our idea was similar to this and we wanted to show the progression of a talented young drummer grow with confidence who also aspires to be at the top of his game. We planned to show his confidence grow through the use of shots like ECPU's and character development. This was probably our first idea though so i feel as if we may have gotten carried away with making it too similar to Whiplash itself. 

• However this led us to our next idea about what short film we decided to do which would be the story of a boy who has some form of mental disorder, for example OCD. We thought that we could show the extreme troubles he faced by being reclusive in his own bedroom. We decided that the use of props would be very important in this short film as we would have needed props which created an iconographic meaning. We would have made the room look very clean and particular and the props we chose, for example neat book shelves, cleaning products, neat rows of pencils, would have built up a good image for the audience about the boy's disorder. 
• We combined the Whiplash idea with this one and decided that perhaps he would be given an instrument (guitar) from his parents and although initially he decides to dismiss the idea of playing it, he finally picks it up one day which helps him grow with confidence. This guitar allows him to slowly forget about his OCD and it gives him the confidence to come out of his room and play for his family and friends. Although this idea was good too as it combined two ideas we still felt that this would be too hard to show as it would have required a lot of character development and we would have only had a maximum of roughly 5 minutes to show this. 

• Another idea we came up with about a young boy whose parents are forcing him to join a private school and although their best intentions are at heat he feels as if they are being too forceful; even in some cases he feels as if they are being abusive towards him. As as result of this he decides to leave home and move to Brighton where he lives with several different people whilst he 'sofa- surfs', but eventually he becomes homeless and lives a reckless, sad life on the streets of Brighton. Although Brighton being an accepting and understanding place of all types of cultures and different types of humans this is not enough to save him getting involved in small gangs in Brighton. Finally he realises how good his life was at home compared to being on the streets and decides to make an apology to his parents, but to find out that they no longer care about him anymore. 
• This type of short film would have been far too detailed and complicated for it to have been kept in the allocated time. We felt that this idea would also have taken a lot of character development which may have been hard to show in such a short period of time. We decided to chose this theme of being homeless because of a short film I watched about Gun crime against small gangs in London - the short film was called 'Two wrongs' And although this does not have much to do with being homeless it made me realise imagine if the boys in 'Two wrongs' were homeless it would have made their situation so much harder. 

• We used the student room for ideas which helped in some ways but a lot of the ideas were too ridiculous or had been done before which was not too helpful. However we read the story of a post about a boy who was being stalked on his way back from a night out by a man in a suit. At first we thought this idea seemed comical as it suggested the man who was following him was dancing around with a big grin on his face. This idea actually got made into a real short film called 'the smiling man'. We first watched this film without sound and a times it seems comical due to the dancing and the over friendliness of the man, however we then listened to it afterwards with sound which really adds an element of suspense and eerie atmosphere to the film. 

• We finally decided on a short film about a man who has schizophrenia. The main storyline will be about a man who gets stalked by another person - however this person's identity is left a mystery all throughout the short film so that the audience are left in suspense. We were inspired by the short film 'the smiling man', which has been previously mentioned but we thought the idea of someone getting stalked was something which we could represent through using someone professional like a psychiatrist asking questions to the patient. We are also going to represent the idea of having schizophrenia through the use of flash backs which will illustrate how this character is being stalked and how it is progressively affecting him more throughout the short film.

Today's Lesson Goals

Today's Lesson Goals

Today's goal is to finish the storyboard, we are quite behind in this area and we need to work hard to finish it within this amount of time. We are also planning to begin the animatic in this lesson, even if we just take the pictures for it today and finish it off tomorrow.

We are also going to work on the blog intermittently throughout the lesson.

Allocating Pre-Production Roles

Allocating Pre-Production Roles

Before we finalise the idea for our film or begin filming, we need to allocate pre-production roles which will enable us to prepare for the filming stage of our project. These roles will be allocated equally throughout the group.

 The first role that we have allocated in our group is the Location Scout, we are sharing this role between the whole group as we think it's important to evaluate our options for shooting locations as a group. We have already done part of this as yesterday we went to Bolnore Village in order to see whether or not it is a suitable filming location, and we have decided that we will probably shoot part of our film there.

The Prop Buyer role in our group is once again shared between all of the members, we think that it would be unfair to make one member of the group buy all of the props. Once we have decided on the props however, we are likely to order them all at once to save costs on delivery.

The StoryBoard Artists are also going to consist of the whole group, this is because it is an integral part of the pre-production and everybody needs to contribute their ideas and make sure that the film is going to be as everybody wants it.

The Animatics Director is going to be Erol, however we are all going to contribute the both of the animatics as they are once again a very important part of the pre-production of our film, therefore we should all be involved.

The Sound Director in our film is going to be Oscar, in all of the projects that we did last year Oscar did the sound to a very good quality. We will all contribute here, but Oscar will be the driver for this part of the project.

The Lighting Designer for the project is going to be me, from past project experience I believe that I will be the most appropriate person for the role.

The Screenwriter for our group is going to be Erol, he's the most creative in our group and thinks the most outside of the box. Because of this I believe that he will be the best person for the job.

The Camera Operators in the group are going to be everyone, however I am going to be doing the majority of the filming since we are planning for both Oscar and Erol to be acting.

The Costume/Hair/Makeup Designer + Buyer is going to be Oscar, he has shown that he is interested in doing this before. However, we are all going to buy the make-up since it would be unfair for one person to buy everything.

EROL'S RESEARCH

Short film name: Tune for Two

  Name of director: Gunnar Jarvstad

• The scene opens with a black frame which morphs to become a blurred outline of the protagonist's legs being dragged through white snow. This short film begins from the viewpoint of this character - created by the use of a  POV shot. The fact he is being dragged suggests that he has been unconscious, and therefore that whoever is dragging him is the culprit responsible.  Consequently, the audience is aware that the character may be in danger. 
• The diegetic sound of a heart beat heavily, pounding in darkness, is accompanied by a high pitched ringing sound - created by a Foley artist. The strong, heavy heart beat is in contrast with the diegetic sound of the high pitched ringing, which can be associated with the confusion associated with coming around after losing consciousness. When this sound is pieced together with the quick blinking of the character, it becomes apparent to the audience that the character has fallen out of consciousness and the ringing sound represents him waking up. Also this high pitched sound is screechy to listen to which would most likely cause the audience to cringe.

• This element of enigma leave the audience in suspense concering the welfare of this character. It makes the audience question why they are seeing a pair of legs being dragged through the snow. This would raise questions about how the protagonist ended up in this situation, and the intentions of the characte who is dragging him.
• After this, the high pitch sound fades out. However, the sound of the strong heartbeat continues while the frame fades to black, leaving the audience in suspense, for about 5 seconds. In this short frame of darkness the audience have time to think about the enigma which has been created. Another point is that the ringing sound stops, which may be because he is fully awake and has regained consciousness. Alternatively, the frame may fall into darkness - and the high pitch sound may stop - to suggest that the subject has fallen into an unconscious state again.

• This POV shot above shows a large, dark clothed male digging a hole with a spade. Although a spade is not a typical piece of iconography, digging a hole is commonly associated with burying people - which helps the audience to build a picture in their mind of what might happen to the character getting dragged  through the snow.
• Despite the fact that the audience are still viewing what is happening in the eye of the character, it is still clear what is going on. The fact this has been shot in a POV will help the audience feel more involved in what is happening, meaning that they are likely to feel sympathy towards the character being buried.

• The high pitch ringing sound continues with a faint sound of the digging in the background. When these two sounds are combined with the blurriness of the characters view it suggest to the audience that this character is perhaps falling in and out of a conscious state. The idea of this character being in this condition most likely means he is injured to the point where he cannot keep himself  awake - suggesting a severe state of  injury. This point is backed up when the character passes out again, indicated by the screen fading into darkness to show his fading vision.

As the character is revealed it is obvious to see that his face is bloody and his eyes are closed which suggests he is scared of what might happen to him. He is still partially unconscious and has been forced to wake up - this is conveyed by his tired looks and indicators that he is in pain.

•  This shot above shows the man being dragged through the snow in a close up. The fact it is close up shows the audience how the character has realised what type of danger he is in as it conveys his deep emotion. He is standing before his own grave with a bloody nose and a mysterious dark figure pointing a gun at his head. The audience are likely to feel that there is no way out for this man and he is facing his death.
• This extreme long shot below shows both the characters in the frame. One character standing tall, the other with his face covered in blood is kneeling down looking into his own grave. The setting is shown nicely in this shot, which appears to be a cold country. This type of climate holds a reputation for a lack of survival and life. Perhaps the cold, harsh conditions around him suggest his cold fate to the audience. Another point to make would be that this type of setting is most likely in the middle of nowhere, with no one for miles - this shows how little how this character has.

• These three shots above demonstrate how the emotion of the protagonist gets the better of him. In the long shot (second picture) it is clear that this character is in distress, however in the close up the audience are fully aware that this character has probably lost hope which is shown in his despairing emotion. As well as this, his injuries are more obvious here too (dried up blood and a purple bruising suggest he was beaten up) which helps to add the level of sympathy they feel for him.

This picture above shows the antagonist clenching his jaw with a stern look on his face. This type of facial expression is typical of negative characters, showing anger and possibly hatred.

Although this character is meant to be a typical antagonist, it appears that after the protagonist begins to cry he looks up to the sky and takes a deep breath. Perhaps this is a sign that he may be struggling or feeling bad about what he is about to do.

A close up of the gun is shown while he takes a deep breath. This deep breath could be to symbolise how he does not really want to kill him but perhaps he has to. The tightening clench of his hand on the gun paired with the squeaky sound of leather gloves reinforces the fact that he is going to kill him despite any bad feelings or doubt in his mind.

• The protagonist then begins to sing hesitantly. His eyes are looking into the sky for hope, although his face still appears scared.

• The picture above shows the confusion on the antagonist's face. Although the antagonist is about to shoot this man in the head, he joins in with the song. The two men start to hum together as if they are good friends, which is an unexpected plot development. This part of the sequence would likely make the audience feel confused, as well as delivering some relief from the negative emotions which have been building against the antagonist because it makes him appear like a normal human who also has feelings. 

• This sudden change of emotion can be seen on the protagonist's face as he is seen to be smiling while he sings along. However relieved he looks he still continues to have fear on his face, and also continues to look towards the sky as if he is hoping for a miracle. 

• Another long shot of these two characters mirrors the same shot from the start, but the mood is a lot happier; both above and below images demonstrate this. The audience are likely to feel surprised by the sudden change of events, and also to feel more positive emotions towards the antagonist - especially after he lowers his gun. It is also possible to see a smile on the antagonist's face.

• After the singing comes to a stop there is silence as if the pair are waiting for something to happen. The antagonist waits nervously looking side to side - a sign of being anxious. Despite the shared moment of friendship between the two, the antagonist then shoots the man in the head before the protagonist can turn around and look at him. This suggest that he wanted to get it over and done with before the character could look him in the eyes. This is another sign that the antagonist may have been forced to shoot him. The short film ends in a long shot of the antagonist burying the man. The loud sound of the gunshot makes this scene spine chilling and has this would have a deeper impact on the audience, especially due to the fact they shared a small moment of friendship together. 
• This moment of friendship they had is likely to make the audience feel even worse about him shooting the vulnerable male. Something which would also raise high emotions to the audience would be the fact that they both look happy towards the end, even more so for the protagonist because he believes that the other man might not actually shoot him.

• This extreme longshot above shows the reality of this cold and lonely landscape, which brings the audience to realise that although the two men shared a song together in a small moment of friendship, the reality is that the protagonist was always going to be shot in the end. The ending of this sequence plays the original version of the song that the two men were attempting to sing; this song is upbeat and happy - unlike the death of this man.  This non diegetic soundtrack contrasts the situation which makes the short film seem at times comical.