First draft of my A2 coursework piece: The Best Years of Your Life?

After an extensive amount of filming and editing, the first draft of my A2 short film has been exported! I am really happy with the outcome and I feel that it achieves the main message I wanted to get across to the target audience: to spend less time worrying about every little detail of being a teenager and just enjoy your youth instead of wishing it away.

Video Diary: 30.10.2014

Stop-Motion Animation

Examples:

My Happy End from Talking Animals on Vimeo.


(notes on) biology from ornana films on Vimeo.


Hello, I Like You from Mixtape Club on Vimeo.


Pros of Stop-Motion Animation:
Unique
Animate life-less objects
Original

Cons of Stop-Motion Animation:
Can be difficult to get the correct speed
Can be difficult to maintain a consistent image quality
Time-consuming

Narration

Preliminary Task: Film Poster

For our Ancillary Preliminary Task, our class were split into pairs and were each given a different poster to reproduce with the equipment available to us. I was in a pair with Emily Weal and were given Disney's Enchanted poster to recreate:

We began by planning how we would reconstruct the poster and decided on a school theme as the same effect can be used to contrast work with relaxation.

 

We used a Nikon D3100 to take several photos of our two main characters and two vastly contrasting backgrounds. From these, we selected the best ones that are displayed below:

 

 

 

We then used Adobe Photoshop to crop the background images and to remove the background completely of the photo of the couple that would be our main focus:

 

 

 

Resulting in the final photos that would be merged together to create the poster:

 

We used Google to search for an image of an animated bird, similar to the one in the original poster, and for the title. We edited these in Photoshop to remove the backgrounds before adding them to our recreation:

 

 

We then used Photoshop again to merge all the photos, but that left a white mark down the middle where the backgrounds differ:



 

We used one of the brush tools to create a 'dream-like' cloud effect, emphasising the difference between the two scenes:

 

We added relevant text to the image before exporting it and this was the final product:

 

 

Video Diary: 26.09.2014

Textual analysis of existing professionally-made short film: The Big Shave

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g5Y_RUDUE0

 

 

Textual Analysis of The Big Shave

Textual analysis of existing professionally-made short film: My Beast Friend

http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p007xb6t

Textual Analysis of My Beast Friend

Textual analysis of existing professionally-made short film: Spider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmbv8kevQ-E

Textual analysis of existing professionally-made short film: Spider

Video Diary: 20.09.2014

Video Diary: 17.09.2014

Textual analysis of amateur-made short film: Never Judge a Book

Never Judge a Book:

 

 

Textual Analysis:



Never Judge a Book

Textual analysis of existing amateur short films: Youth

YOUTH from Tommy Petroni on Vimeo.

Textual Analysis: Youth

Textual analysis of amateur-made short film: Stranded

Stranded:

Textual Analysis: Stranded

Video Diary: 10.09.2014

Video Diary: 9.09.2014

Video Diary: 30.08.2014

Video Diary: 27.08.2014

Video Diary: 22.08.2014

Video Diary: 20.08.2014

Video Diary: 18.08.2014

Video Diary: 15.09.2014

Video Diary: 2.08.2014

Narrative

Final Idea: Character Biographies

Although there aren't any specific characters in my short film, I wanted to do some research into what people typically expect a teenager to be and how they behave to give me a rough idea of the expectations of my documentary.

I researched online to see what others had suggested are the most common traits amongst teenagers and conducted a survey using this as inspiration and received the following results:

1) What physical characteristics do you expect from a typical teenager?

2) What social characteristics would you expect from a typical teenager? 

3) What intellectual characteristics do you expect from a typical teenager? 

4) Where would you expect teenagers to mostly hang out?

5) What emotional characteristics do you expect from a typical teenager?

6) What behaviour do you expect from a typical teenager?

From this research I plan to take note of what a wide range of people would expect from the teenagers that will feature in my documentary. As well as playing towards the expectations from the research, I also want to challenge the views to show some people that view teenagers as loud and a bad influence that most of them do work hard, have to deal with a lot of stress and can be more self conscious and insecure than they sometimes let on.