Influences: Running Man

We have come up with our final idea and have been influenced by certain films, television shows and adverts and these have given us ideas towards our final piece. I have looked at various pieces which have running scenes, so that I can see what shots look good and where the camera is best positioned.

Le Cheval 2.1


Forrest Gump Running Scenes

Final Ideas

After developing our idea we came up with a short film that we felt our intended audience would enjoy watching as it features a taster of what the final piece could look like.

Final Idea
The film starts with a digital clock, the time turns to 6:30 and at the sound of an alarm, a student aged around 18 wakes up suddenly and rushes around the house gathering books and keys etc. He runs out the door and carries on running through the streets of a city and carries on running through more extreme situations such as the woods, a river. He carries on running with an air of purpose as if he is running somewhere important, the audience is left hoping he arrives there on time as he is running with urgency. He suddenly turns a corner and the screen splits and on one half the student see's the bus just about to leave, just as he starts to run to catch the bus, someone not looking accidently spills a drink down him, this delay makes him miss the bus he then turns to leave. The other half shows the man turning the corner and dodging the man with the drink, he then manages to catch the bus. The split screen stops and we focus to the man who missed the bus, he has just arrived home, he goes upstairs to change his shirt as he does he turns on the radio. All sound stops except for the radio, it tells us that a bus, the one which he was meant to catch, has been in an accident. While this is playing the scene has changed to the man on the bus, as the news bulletin finishes the man looks up in fear and the screen goes black. There is then white noise playing the credits up. The film then ends.
We will now need to storyboard this idea.

Running Man- Development

After we came up with the Running concept we started to mind-map ideas which would help to develop our ideas further and make a really great short film. Below is the way in which we altered the ideas we had from the original.

Running Man 1
The shot starts with some close ups of an 18 year old boy waking up, he then starts to run. He proceeds to run, and we see him running past landmarks of Bristol, like The Clifton Suspension Bridge, @Bristol and the S.S Great Britain. Also we would see the man run through more different settings like forest and parks.

Thoughts:
We felt that this idea wouldn't be suitable for a short film, but more like an advertisement for Bristol and we wanted our film to be light-hearted entertainment. We came up with a few problems that would need to be addressed if we did go through with this idea?
Where is he running to?
Why is he running?
What is the purpose of this short film?

Running Man 2
Our man wakes up suddenly in a rush, grabs his things from around the house and heads for the door, he then runs through different settings like the park, forests, roads and other places. The purpose of the film is to make the audience wonder why he is running and where he is going. It suggests that it is an emergency or he is late for something.
At the end of the film he will arrive at a mundane setting such as the dentist or a bus stop which will give the film the comedy twist.

Thoughts:
We really liked the idea that the man runs through quite extreme settings to get somewhere that really isn't that important like the bus stop, therefore we will incorporate this into our final idea. As the short film is going to be around the 5 minute mark we felt that if the whole film was the man running it may become quite boring to watch, therefore we need to find a way to keep the audience engaged until the end. After discussing ideas about how to keep the audience engaged we decided not to produce a film of the comedy genre. We felt we could move this idea further if we went down a more serious route, however we still wanted to include some light comedy in the film which will be the running aspect of it.

Running Man 3
The man, a student, wakes up suddenly and rushes around the house and gathers his stuff. He quickly goes out the door and starts to run. As the film goes on he runs through settings such as streets and onto fields and forests. He is running with a sense of emergency and suddenly he arrives at a bus stop. The bus arrives and he gets on, the shot will then go black and we find out that something has happened to the bus.

Thoughts:
We believe that this idea would be much more interesting to watch and will engage the audience until the very end. We liked the idea that the ending was quite sudden and it will shock the audience, however we felt that we could make it more interesting.
Our final idea will be in my next post.

Codes and Conventions

Generally, short films consist of very few main characters, for example one to three. This is due to the duration of the film as it makes creating relationships between the audience extremely difficult. Mis-en-scene is important, as shown in the short film Goodbye Mr. Snuggles:



the characters clothes and the overall presentation of the film creates a lot of imagery. From the surrounding we can tell that the characters are wealthy and also the way they are dressed enforces this. The use of music in short films, is often used. Depending on genre, music can be used for atmosphere, tension, sadness and happiness. In the short film Joyride, we can see how the use of music is effective in creating suspense.



Short films also allow the recurring theme of hybrid genres, this creates an interesting and unique film. For example the short film Le Cheval 2.1, features a mix of French art house genre and a comedy. Short films are often made to break through into the industry, by creating a hybrid genre film your film is more likely to standout and be noticed.



In general, from watching a selection of short films, we can see that they sometimes tackle various subjects, including serious or humorous messages. The narrative is fast-paced and usually there is a sense of a morals and consquences for certain actions.

Holiday Work

As we have two weeks off of school, we will be editing our blogs frequently during, trying to complete pre-production tasks. We will create a shooting list, which will show the order of shooting the scenes, this will be useful as it will save time and extra work. We will also do our storyboards, including time, shot type and lighting. These storyboards will be accompanied by the shooting list. The storyboards are what show us the order of the scenes on the screen. When we have completed the storyboards we will scan in the sheets and create an animatic.

We have allocated group roles for the holiday:

Dani: Target audience questionnaire
Mike: Storyboarding
Lizi: Location planning
Josh: Set up facebook group for Fuse Films

These should be finished by 3rd November, this will allow us plenty of film efficiently.

Lizi, Dani, Josh and Mike, Fuse Films.

Location Planning

During the holidays, I scouted my local area for places where I felt it would be suitable to shot scences for our short film. I really liked the thought of having the 'Running scenes' through rural parts of Bristol, however I would like to incorporate urban area's also, for the contrast.

The area around the Bus stop is fairly grassy, with trees and park situated at the bottom. One of the pictures shows a collection of metal poles, which we felt would effective for jumping over, (having the camera in a extremely low angled shot e.g. looking up) underneath, to capture the quick and urgency to get to the bus stop. We did some practise shots for this, which can be seen in the Running Man test shots.

Digital Technology

Advances in technology have contributed widely to the convergence of film and digital technology, this has helped significantly as we are now able to access films easily through websites and blogs. Short films have benifitted greatly as they are featured widely on the web. Web 2.0 provides an interactive way of searching all over the internet, and allows for anyone to produce a film and upload it to the internet.

Web 2.0 is an extremely useful way for upcoming film companies and producers to upload their creations to websites like 'Youtube', this enables them to reach a wide variety of people. Sites like 'Independent Lens' offer independent film companies the chance to showcase their work. By having their work out there, the opportunity for their work to be seen could eventually lead to funding from people. Film companies tend to use a wide variety of media's to gain publicity and show their work, social networking sites are a great way to do this. Our group decided to create pages for our Fuse Films company, for example on Facebook and Youtube.

Our Youtube Channel
Our Facebook Page

Teacher Feedback

A very good reflective paragraph. You made some targets at the beginning of your blog and it is probably a good time to revisit those targets with a follow up and reflect on how well you have met those and create some new ones.

There needs to be more evidence of textual analysis of exisiting short films that relate to your work. Remember you can discuss a range of media products that you feel have helped you to make creative decisions - i.e. Sliding doors.

Reflective Paragraph

In preparation for my production piece of creating a short film, I have spent a significant amount of time analysising a variety of short films, including Le Cheval, Bulletproof Vest and Big Career. I have found that doing in depth textual analysis's incorporating shot types, music and mis-en-scene have helped me to understand the importance of planning for my own piece, as I want the film to look as professional as possible. I chose to use a website called DepicT as I liked the variety of films to pick and analysis, this was useful because they were all in the same place but they were all completely different. Throughout the course, I decided that short film analysis was extremely helpful to the development of my production piece and this is way I did more than the three required.

In order to understand the preferences of my target audience (aged between 17- 20), I devised a questionnaire which would help me to understand what my target audience want and expect from a short film. We also filmed a focus group of around ten people discussing their preferences on short films.

Costume-

We decided that we needed to create a character that our target audience could engage with and relate to. Due to our film only being around 5 minutes we had little time to establish a character. This is why we thought and planned ideas concerning the costume thoroughly.

Mikes-Costume