Synopsis

My film will centre around one location and two characters. It is inspired by Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

It begins in a park/woodland area where a young man called Liam is walking along the path when a car stops abruptly next to him. Another young man jumps out of the driver's seat, runs over to Liam and punches him in the head which knocks him out. The car then speeds off.

The next scene is the main scene and takes place in a garage. The driver slams on the brakes outside the garage and gets out. He then drags Liam out of the car and into the garage where he ties him up and waits for him to wake up. After waiting for around an hour for this to happen, he is fed up so he gives Liam some smelling salts to wake him up.

The man interrogates Liam for a short while whilst also playing some mind games with him. He also punches him a few times out of anger. The back story is revealed through dialogue however the reasons for Liam killing a man are not clear. What is clear, however, is that Liam is not getting out of the garage alive. 

The Conventions of Drama Films

Conventions of Film

Film conventions from Nick Richardson

Film Analysis

The Trigger (5 mins) - Cobalt Digital Films

The Trigger is a short film written by Brie Boltz and Justin Merriman and is currently available on the YouTube channel, CobaltDigitalFilms. This YouTube channel is run by a film maker and currently has five short films ranging from fifty seconds to five minutes. This channel usually produces thrillers.

The film is about a girl who we are led to believe has killed her boyfriend. For the most part of the film, the girl is presumably talking about her boyfriend as if she regrets killing him as there is one scene in a restaurant where she tries to remember his favourite thing on the menu but she can't remember and breaks down crying. However, there is a twist and the end where we are taken back to the first scene where we think she kills him but instead of cutting away at the gunshot as it did the first time, we see more as the boy disarms the girl and the gun goes off but she didn't actually shoot anyone. The whole time she was talking about her best friend who was killed by the boy. Therefore, the film is out of order which is breaking the conventions of film but a lot of films now break the conventions of film so it is almost actually conventional to have scenes out of order to create a twist. Twists are effective in shot films because they are easily remembered and highly rated among viewers because they are very entertaining.

 There is a lot of emphasis placed on the cinematography being aesthetically pleasing in this film. One way this is achieved is the use of depth of field. The director has used a very shallow depth of field which creates a cinematic look. Also, in post production, the editor has lowered the reds and increased the blues in colour correction to create the gloomy and wintry look, which is very atmospheric. The sound is very effectively used in connoting the madness inside her head. The girl is telling us her thoughts inside her head through the use of voice over for most of the film, as well as there being a sad underscore throughout. The audio levels sound quite close which can at times make it difficult to hear a word here or there and it can seem quite chaotic and intense which could have been done to connote the chaos and madness she is experiencing in her mind when she recalls what happened.

Alone (6 mins) - Ruffneck101

"Alone" is a six minute short film co-written by Brock Torunski and Alex Vietinghoff, and directed by Brock Torunski. The film is about a man who believes he is the only surviving human in a post-apocalyptic world. But as he finds out, he is not totally alone.

The first scene of the film is set in an office and is a look at how his life was shortly before the apocalypse. The mise en scene tells us this is an office setting due to the suit he is wearing, the desk, computer, and the man that walks in is also wearing a suit. The protagonist is wearing a blue tie in this scene which is significant because blue has connotations of calmness and stability which is what the protagonist had in his life before the events that led to the apocalypse. During this scene, a man walks into the room and hands the protagonist a report. Torunski used a medium close up of the man's waistline so we can't see his face, which to me connotes the lack of human contact he has in the following years, alone. The director has used an extreme close up of the protagonist's eyes when he receives a phone call from presumably his partner because she tells him what's happening, which we know is the apocalypse starting. There is also asynchronous sound of sirens and explosions coming from the phone to connote that a disaster is happening. There is then a sound effect of something coming closer to him, it gets louder and louder until it cuts to the next scene.The next shot is of him waking up from a nightmare, which was what we saw in the first scene. This shows that it must have been a really traumatic experience for him. The shot used here is a close up of his head as he sits up. One thing I notice is that he has more facial hair than previous and what I infer from this is that he now cares less about his appearance and more on surviving because there are no other people around, or so he thinks.

We see the man has a large stock of toothpaste which could signify that he has no way of getting to a supermarket or other shop regularly or that it could be too dangerous for him to travel back and forth to get supplies in case something happens to him. Also, he could fear someone or something else could take supplies, which leads to questions such as "does he believe there are other survivors?". 

When he goes to search for food in another house, there is a low angle long shot of ivy growing all over the outside wall of the house which gives us an idea of how long it has been since the apocalypse because the ivy is fully grown. The ivy is olive green which is significant because this connotes peace and there is definitely peace in this world because he is the only human around.

"You're Safe Now" - Captain Phillips - Final Scene

This is the final scene from the film "Captain Phillips", directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. 

To put this scene into context, Captain Richard Phillips has just been rescued from a lifeboat after he was taken hostage for five days by Somali Pirates who stormed his cargo ship. Navy SEALs killed 3 of the 4 pirates with snipers right in front of a blindfolded Phillips. During this scene he is very traumatised and overwhelmed at what has just happened.

There is use of a handheld camera throughout the entire scene to convey the trauma Phillips is experiencing. Handheld cameras are typically used in this way as it creates tension and anxiety as it is almost like a documentary because most documentary films are shot handheld. Also, this film is based on a true story which makes the handheld camera have a greater impact on the audience. The director chooses to have long close up takes to highlight the captain's facial expression, and the trauma is clearly visible on his face due to this, which also has a profound effect on the viewer. Furthermore, his facial expression is made more intense by the use of a shallow depth of field because only his head is in clear focus.

When Phillips enters the room, the doctor greets him with "Captain Phillips, please come in". This conveys the respect he is still shown by his fellow Americans, even after he feels he has been degraded and humiliated by being threatened with his life several times inside the lifeboat, and having two Navy ships and a helicopter rescue him. Also, he feels as though he has let his family down by captaining the ship as his wife expresses that she does not like the fact he goes to dangerous places of the world, at the beginning of the movie.

Additionally, when he enters the room, he is wearing a yellow Navy t-shirt. This is significant in conveying Phillips' feeling because yellow has connotations of hope and optimism. This shows that at one point he had no hope that he was going to survive and see his family again, but when the Navy arrived, he was given hope and optimism that he would survive his ordeal. 


A Fistful of Dollars

This scene comes soon after Leone’s iconic character from his Dollars Trilogy, The Man With No Name (dubbed Joe), arrives in the terrorised town. He is greeted by four bandits who taunt and insult him before shooting the ground to scare his horse off. 

The first shot of this sequence is a slightly low-angled medium-wide shot  of Joe riding into the town. This is a classic example of Leone’s composition technique as in this one shot, we can see the setting for most of the film, which is the town, and we can see the mountain backdrop which gives us a clue as to the type of place this is - hostile, open, and lonely. This emphasises the long, tireless journeys Joe, who is a wandering gunfighter, endures to reach towns and survive. The dominant colours in this shot/scene are light browns, dark browns, black, and beige. These are the colours which are most commonly associated with the western genre, due to them being the dominant colours of the hostile, hot, desert landscapes and vast, open plaines. These may sometimes make the scenes look boring and plain, however, Leone had a huge interest in surrealist artists and composes composes his shots so that the whole frame is occupied, which holds our interest as each shot is composed to look like a piece of art and has strong representations of aspects such as the location or time period. 

I have already mentioned some of the mise en scene of this shot, however, Joe’s poncho is an important point as it was an unusual thing for a cowboy to be wearing at the time this film was produced. The american westerns of the time had their heroes wearing waistcoats, shirts, coats etc, but Leone has Joe dressed in a poncho. This is seen as the birth of the new archetypical cowboy and also added to the mysteriousness of Eastwood’s character because we do not see where he got it from or even why he’s wearing it. Interestingly, in one of the first drafts of the script, there was a scene at the beginning which revealed where got it from, however, Leone omitted this scene from the shooting script to add that sense of mysteriousness. Again, the primary colours here are brown, beige etc, which is significant to Leone’s themes of greed and materialism, because brown has connotations of stability and material security, and the objects which keeps more or less every character safe are the weapons such as revolvers.

Sound is an important aspect of Leone’s films as the music used in his westerns was something never heard in a film like a western before, because he used a mixture of opera and rock, composed by his long time friend, Ennio Morricone, who he also went to school with. This opening shot has a sound bridge from the previous scene as the end of the operatic underscore is still playing but soon fades out.

There is a sound motif in this underscore, which is a piano riff. This is played at various points throughout the film, usually when Joe meets some bandits or is about to get into some trouble. This underscore is operatic which is a stylistic feature of a lot of Leone’s films because he wanted to give the western something different to the dying american westerns of people like John Wayne, John Ford, and Sam Peckinpah.

The dialogue, like in all of Leone’s movies, is all dubbed on in post-production. This is because the film would be release in both Italian, English, and other languages, so it was much easier to film the movie silent, and add all sound in the language of their choice. 

Technical History of Film

General History of Film

Film Theory

Skill Development Essay

A2 Production Brief

For my A2 Media project, I have chosen to produce a short film.

7. A short film in its entirety, lasting approximately five minutes, which may be live action of animated or a combination of both, together with two of the following three options:

-a poster for the film;

-a radio trailer for the film;

-a film magazine review page featuring the film.