Genre research: Romance

In a romance short film, it is stereotypical for their to be a male 'hero' in a 'boy meets girl' style scenario. Throughout the film it is suggested that the boy and girl would/should get together but for some reason they end up separating and going their different ways. However, in the end of the film they are reunited and there is a traditional 'happy ever after'.

Most romance films are aimed at a female demographic (the target audience), although other elements from other genres can be mixed in with romance to widen the target audience. For example, a common genre mix is romantic comedies.

 

A professionally made romance short film - textual analysis
 

 

This short film is pretty cool as it features the story of two teenagers that meet at a party, but instead of hearing what they are saying, we see clips of their adventures and hear a voice-over of a male talking about a past relationship, which we understand to be the one shown in the video. At the end of the video we find out that the 'narration' is in a fact an email that the male character is writing to his ex-girlfriend as he reminisces over their past relationship. Throughout the entire video there is no other dialogue but there is slow music with a gentle beat playing. I think that this type of music has been used as it makes the audience understand that the general theme of the video is sad, and so the slow rhythm portrays this. 

 

I like how the story is told in this way because it is different from others that I have seen and it also allows you to watch the video without paying too much attention to what is happening in each shot - the audience can mainly concentrate on what is being said by the male character and from this they can picture for themselves the relationship between the two teens. I also like the range of shots used to show the actions and emotions of the characters, something that I will bare in mind when creating my own coursework.

 

Using these thoughts, I have created an idea for a music video in this genre. This video would feature a male and female character (age uncertain, maybe late teens/mid-twenties) and the video would tell a story of their relationship. This video would show more of the positive side of being in a relationship, rather than showing the negatives. The video would contain montage scenes of the couple going on days out, to theme parks and the beach for example. For this idea I would choose an up-beat song, something like She's So Lovely by Scouting for Girls. If I were to film this video then I would use a range of shots, like panning shots to establish location and zooms to show the happy emotions on the character's faces.

 

Genre research: Documentary

To help towards ideas for our final video, my group and I have been researching and thinking about different genres of film. We will research the genres in some depth, as well as looking at existing examples of short films and music videos of each genre.

First, documentaries. This genre of film is a more serious approach to film (much like a drama) but it is real and the story and what is happening is all true. This could be a documentary about anything from animals to buildings. I enjoy watching wildlife documentaries as I am interested in animals so I know what can make one interesting or boring. One thing that is important in a documentary is to keep the story interesting. This is because some audiences may get bored if someone is talking about one subject for an hour, however I do not see this as a big problem if the documentary is good enough to disguise it. One series of documentaries that was recently shown on BBC is 'David Attenborough's life stories'. This is Attenborough at his best. These documentaries are exciting, fact filled, and enjoyable. One thing that I particularly like about his documentaries is that after the program, you get to see how the camera crew found and filmed the animals. Something that I find amazing is how they will look years for maybe only ten minutes of good footage, but it is well worth the wait. This is exactly what happened in the last episode of life stories that I watched, in which the crew had been searching for 2 years to see the endangered African Wild Dog hunting in its habitat. Eventually, they found a pack of the dogs and managed to get ahead of them. By doing this, they were able to capture footage of the entire chase, catch, and kill. They were also very lucky to get more exciting film than expected when a hyena decided to come within a couple of meters of one of  the cameramen, fight with the pack of dogs and be chased off by them. This unexpected action is what a great documentary needs.

The most important feature, in my opinion, of a good documentary is a strong, authoritative voice over. This is needed so that the subject can sound serious, interesting, The footage also needs to be genuine (unless staging a re-enactment) and exciting. One good short film that I found was about a double amputee and his wife...
https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2015/09/04/the-next-part/
I found this film very insightful and by the end of it, I felt like I knew the couple. This engagement is what makes a good documentary.

Preliminary task evaluation

1) What technologies did you use in the filming and editing of your preliminary task?

For the filming, I used a basic HD camera and tripod. The tripod was for support for still shots, but I also managed to use it successfully as a shoulder mount for the tracking shots. The editing software that we used was a combination of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. These programs were the best thing to use because they were the best available option we had, and they offer a simple but professional editing process.

2) What have you learnt from the ideas process, casting, script writing, filming and editing of your preliminary task?

For our preliminary task, we used the same editing and camera techniques as we did with last years coursework. As this is something that we are familiar with, it was very easy and we did not learn much from it. However we did try new methods of holding the camera and longer shots which we may use in our coursework. When it comes to our coursework, we will also cast differently, using a larger choice of people and most probably not friends or family if possible. This will give us a more professional approach and make us keep up the planning and organisation. We have already begun a new ideas process for our coursework that will use some methods (such as brainstorming) that were used during the creating of the preliminary task. Script writing will not be an issue as it is a music video using a song so no dialogue will occur.

3) How did the group dynamics work?

There were three people working in our group. Me, Becca, and Luke. My role at the start was to do the visual planning of the video; a very well labelled storyboard. I decided that I would only do this after we had found a place to film, so that I could make the planned shots fit around the setting. While this was being planned, Becca was looking at different places that we can go to film, and after emailing and calling a few catteries, we found one that was perfect for the job. Luke wrote the emails. For casting, we had a group decision which was to talk to the people we thought would be good for the role, and if more than one volunteered, we would see which is best suited. In the end, only Nathaniel was up for the role. When it came to the day, me and Becca filmed the video and Luke was the editor for the task. We decided this as Luke was unfortunately not available for the filming. This was very successful and both the filming and the editing was as good as we could have hoped for.

4) Audience feedback

"The video was very interesting, well edited, funny, and overall very enjoyable".

-Daniel Saker

"The lip syncing was exquisite – top notch, might I say. The execution of the video was excellent, and I was thoroughly surprised once I found out that it was not professionally made".

- Poppy Frost

"It was really great, the singing was in really good sync, the edits were smooth and in general the video was comical and impressive".

- Jamie McGregor

As well as these three people, we also asked Nathaniel (the actor in the video) for his feedback on the video and the process that he went through. Here is what he had to say:

"The video was well planned, with the setting and camera shots planned out beforehand. While it was very embarrassing, it was also a lot of fun, although the cats could have been more cooperative. I can’t watch at the final piece without another little bit of my self-respect dying, but it was well filmed and edited".

- Nathaniel Jones

5) Looking at your finished video and the feedback, what changes will be looking to make in the planning, filming and editing when it comes to your main coursework?

When it comes to the main coursework, we will use very similar filming and editing techniques as in the preliminary task. This is because the equipment that we used was the best that was available to us, so it would be pointless looking for a different way of editing or filming. The only change that I can think of is changing the camera to a DSLR for better video quality and automatic stabilization. The main change we will make is to the planning process. As the task we recently completed was only a preliminary task, we did not fully plan our video to the extent that we want to in our final video. For our final video, we will use multiple storyboards, plan locations more, work more on costume, and spend much longer on the casting. This will hopefully allow us to think of many more ideas and explore a large range of areas before we make our final decision.