Henry's NEA Blog

One place you can take inspiration for a short film is the news, especially local news where there may be some smaller, irregular story's. In this news article, A woman pranks her husband, saying that she won £250,000, a few months later, she won £1 million. After calling her husband to tell him the news, he doesn't believe him. This caused me to wonder weather anything along these lines has happened before but with something else other than money. If it was just another prank, then nothing desperately bad will happen other that disappointment. If the wife had previously pranked her husband with something a lot more serious before, then this may not have been such a happy story. One example, may be if she pranked her husband into thinking that she was kidnapped. If this then actually happened, a lot like the news article, then the husband may not believe her and not do anything about it as he thinks it is a prank. I personally think that this would make a good short film, if...

Randomly generated ideas One way that you can generate ideas is at random. we did this by having a grid with different characters, locations, situations, objects, and when it occurred, we then chose numbers at random that corresponded to each of these. After doing this, i got: a swarm of bees where everyone is weightless alone on a strange planet with a golden hammer in a few weeks  If i was to create a film about this scenario, it would be a sci-fi film about a space explorer, this explorer may come across a strange planet and goes to check it out, it at the start he thinks it would be a great planet for humans to live on as there is oxygen in the atmosphere and thousands of different plant life. However once venturing down a cave, he discovers the truth about why the ecosystem is so great. There would be a swarm of giant bees living in the cave which pollinate all of the plants, as there is no gravity on the planet, the man must fly away from the bees and there is a...

Montage We have been looking at montages as possible ideas of what we can include in our short films. We watched the training montage from rocky. The use of montages tend to be used to show when large periods of time is passing as we do not have enough time to show absolutely everything that has happened. We also watched the montage in up, which is a montage of basically the whole life of a certain character. After watching these montages, we attempted to make our own montage. Mine shows one school day of a student, and I ended up editing it to be a little over the top in a comical way, this is because nothing interesting really happened so i had to add the over the top music to engage the audience more, this film is shown bellow. If I was to have a montage in part of my short film that I am creating, I will make sure that there is a focus to what is being shown on screen or it will be a struggle to keep the audiences attention for a full 5 minutes.

Why are there short films? Unlike feature films, short films are not usually made for revenue as they can neither be shown at cinemas, or brought. Although there are ways to make money off of them for example ad revenue, many people make them in order to get recognised and possibly have the chance to make a feature film in the future (where all the money is). A lot of short films are made as a work of art and expect nothing from it apart from for people to appreciate it. Other short films are created to put across a message, for example a film may show the bad side to drug taking, in order to prevent people from getting into drugs by scaring them.Anyone with the correct equipment can make a short film which is partly why they are so popular, however only the best directors of these short films get the opportunity to go higher with feature films. Despite the fact that short films are not in many of the mainstream places you would find feature films such as cinemas and t.vs, there ...

Features of short film Vladimir Propp  Vladimir propp was a literacy critic born in 1895, his idea is that a certain type of character is part of every narrative structure These characters are: Hero/anti-hero-  This is someone that the audience invests their support, no matter weather they're good or bad Villain- They are against the villain, the hero wouldn't be needed unless they have someone to go against them Helper- Assists the hero in their mission False Hero- This is someone who takes credit for the heroes actions and is often not as they seem Dispatcher- Sends the hero off on their quest, for example the princesses father. Donor- Aids the hero by giving something Princess- Is in need of help and is often the prize at the end, generally saved by the hero There are examples of these in almost any film. For example nick fury in avengers, he would be the dispatcher as he gathers the heroes together and sends them off to fight ...

Choice: In this short film, I expected for there to be a big choice to have to be made, which there is, however, the majority of the film is about the lead up to him having to choose between his own life, or his girlfriends. He is basically a hacker and the police find out about him, the man with the gun was his boss sort of thing however it never really showed why they had to make the choice, other that the quite confusing nature of this short film, i did like the style that it was filmed in. the lighting, i thought, was just right for the film and a few of the camera angles, for example the one with the gun pointing directly at the camera, looked quite professional. Every so often, the acting would stop and the main character would speak directly to the camera. This did not work well at all in my opinion because it disconnected the audience from the story line, meaning that they didn't feel as much emotion as they maybe would have without it. The setting of the film was go...

Watching short films Operator: By the title of this short film, I expect that it may be relatively tense. I think that there will be one main character, who is the operator, and they may be controlling something very important. These expectations were relatively right, it was about a call operator for the fire service, they were directing a very stressful call where a woman and her child were trapped in a burning house, waiting to be rescued. We were focused on the operator the whole time and despite the fact that she sounded like she was staying calm throughout, we could see on her face that she was worried herself. As the short film ends, the phone call cuts off and she moves straight onto a new phone call, without finding out the end of the traumatic experience. I found this idea for a short film to be very creative as it challenged how with generic film, the audience are focused on the location where all the action is whereas here we are the other end of the phone c...