The Jellybaby Task - Film Brief 2.

For our second film brief we chose a thriller and decided on the narrative of two brothers arguing over the fact that one thinks the other has stolen their father's fortune, the argument ends badly and one ends up dead in a lake by the other shooting them.

The narrative theory is Todorov's Equilibrium theory as we thought this was an appropriate theory to choose for a thriller film, the part we shot was the disruption but the equilibrium at the start would have been that the brothers were close and got on well together followed by the shooting and then ending with another equilibrium section.

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3



Shot 4

Shot 5

The Jellybaby Task - Film Brief 1.



The film brief my group chose for the first jellybaby task was a Drama/Comedy better known as a Dramedy. Our plot told the storyline of a Princess who was all alone and needed to find her true love, this then cut to a Prince's story about how he needed to find a Princess in order to be king. The prince got on his horse in order to go find a Princess but was then suddenly stopped by an evil villan in the woods who decided he wanted to be king instead but the Prince killed the villan and rode on to the castle to find the Princess waiting to find her true love and they lived happyily ever after. THE END.

Our narrative theory was based on  two main theories, the first being binary opposition with Good vs Evil with the Prince and Villan and Male vs Female with the Prince and Princess, this theory was created by Levi Strauss and we thought this was a typical narrative to include in a teenage audience film of Dramedy. Our second theory was produced by Vladamir Propp who believed that each narrative contained the same 8 common characters each time and in our shots we included the typical Princess, Prince, Villan and Doner.




Shot 1



Shot 2





Shot 3

Shot 4



Shot 5

Shot Library - The Reunion

This was my first task in my Media Studies coursework. Rebecca, Louise and I had to produce a short film with as many shots as we wanted about any topic we wanted, this was for us to experience first hand using a camera and to also start practicing our editing skills on the computer. The film tells the story of two best friends being reunited after a long period of time and towards the end of the film the other friend noticing and not being too happy about it. The shots we included were:

v     Close up shot – This was of the feet and we edited this to slow motion in order to capture the idea of a cheesy run towards each other

v     An establishing pan shot – For when the two friends run towards each other

v     Point of view shot - When they are both running

v     Long shot – Going in for a hug

v     Over the shoulder shot – For when they hug, with some dialogue being used

v     Pan shot – Of the two walking off together

v     A zoom – to capture the reaction of the friend on the bench

v     And finally a pan long shot – of the friends walking off together and turning back with a disgusted look on their face

We decided to use some sound to add to the atmosphere of the two friends reuniting again and we thought the Chariots of Fire theme tune was appropriate for this as its dramatic. Overall, the exercise was useful and started getting us into practice for our main coursework task.

Prelim Task - Concerned

My Prelim Task

Our task was to create a short film of dialogue between two people incorporating in this a shot reverse shot, match on action and the 180° degree rule. We decided that our topic should be something based around school life as this is something we can relate to easily, we agreed on the idea of a teacher being concerned for a student about her academic life as she seems to be concentrating on her relationship with her boyfriend more, hence the title ‘Concerned’. Our match on action is seen first with the headteacher writing out a letter to the student’s parents and then a close up of the letter is shown focusing in on the word ‘daughter!’ The 180° degree rule is used next with a 180° rotation being shown of the teacher and student staring directly at each other across the table. The shot, reverse shot is of the dialogue part of the film, the group and I found this the hardest task of all as we had to film each character saying the whole dialogue scene separately with the camera only focusing on one person each time and then when editing this we had to make sure it all ran smoothly together and didn’t look like they’d been filmed at different times. Other shots were built-in within the film, such as an over the shoulder shot when the student reaches the table and the teacher asks her to sit down and also a high angle shot when the student is walking up the stairs at the beginning of the film. We found these shots the easiest to add in as we’d already previously done them and we gained more experience by practicing and using them again.

We also decided to add in the element of sound, using an orchestral type sound track in order to add some tension into the film.

This is a picture of our storyboard for the film:

Introduction to my blog

Hi!

I'm Nicola Reynolds and this is my blog for my AS Media Studies coursework. This year I am working with Rebecca Mathieson and Louise Kalverkamp and our production company is called Blue Apple Productions.

Enjoy!