2. What were you trying to
achieve
Our film had to be a maximum of 6 and a half minutes long, which we just
achieved, including titles and credits. Through the uses of titles, colour, effects and
language, we tried to establish a moral to send out to the audience.
We made our film to be a modern fairy tale because fairy tales are examples of
situations that happen to young people as they experience adult situations, such as
Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel. Though they are fantasy and magical, they
involve hidden messages and morals that are useful for teaching young people. Our
chosen fairy tale inspiration was Cinderella, as it represents real life situations more
clearly without being blinded by entertainment aspects such as magic etc. We tried
to make this apparent through our characters; the heroin is a young, bright girl with
hand-me-downs, put down by two of her peers, has a love interest and a fairy god
mother character who boosts her confidence. However, taken from Tarantino styles,
we have an unexpected ending where instead of living happily together after
admitting feelings, the heroin is killed. The film’s main slogan “Get busy living or get
busy dying” is not only our message and moral, but we’ve taken it from the film The
Shawshank Redemption, a classic thriller. We did this because we didn’t want the
film to be too much of a comedy/parody and wanted it to be taken seriously slightly
to get our message across to the audience which is intended to be socially
educational as well as morally. Regarding the theory of Utopian Solutions, this film
would appeal to people who feel empathy towards Ella. This film contains
knowledge, empathy or modern teenagers, community and romance; these
aspects are what common teenage lives revolve around as they grow and discover
more adult aspects of life which are new to them. Watching our film would satisfy a
teenager’s needs and curiosity about such things and would put into perspective/or
confirm the reality of teenage life. In comparison with our studies, most people who
would watch and rate our film are people aged between 13-21 year old students.
3. Richard Dyer
Richard Dyer’s Utopian theory of entertainment basically consists of the viewers watching a
film in which the genre fulfils the viewer’s emotional or situational needs, for example:
Loneliness – Company (romance, community film)
Poor – Wealth (gangster film, law suit film)
Sadness – Happiness (comedy, chick flick etc)
Ignorance – Knowledge (documentary, murder mystery, urban drama)
Bored – Excitement (Action, thriller, fantasy adventure)
Weak – Power (Action, Martial Arts)
And so on. If a person is feeling an emotion, they may want to watch a film that is the opposite to
what they’re feeling to fulfil their emotional needs. Sometimes this can make the viewer worse by
realising what they haven’t got. However it can also have the opposite effect and it can give
them a sense of hope in that by watching a film with situations similar to their ambitions, anything
can be accomplished. If a person is feeling lonely due to being single, they may want to watch
a romance film. It may either make them realise how lonely they are or it could make them feel
hopeful and want to accomplish what they’ve seen someone else like them do on a film. This is
an example of viewers not being able to detect reality from the media but can be a helpful
therapy. When making a film, a film maker has to consider this theory when deciding who to aim
the film at. When we decided to aim our film at teenagers, we tried to identify how teenagers
normally feel (different, alone, confused), what situations they find themselves in (bullying,
puberty, school work etc), what locations are teenagers normally found (house parties due to low
budget, parks also due to low budget, schools and home due to still living at home) and what is
the modern teenage community like today (latest fashion, hair styles, make-up, hobbies, dialect
etc).
4. Utopian Theory in our film
Our film would appeal to teenagers in Ella’s position;
lonely, un-popular, a social out-cast, someone who
chooses work over a social life or simply anyone who
is different. Due to teenagers being emotional at that
age, many feel this way about themselves; Ella is a
typical stereotype of an average teenager. Our
moral is to be yourself and not be someone you’re
not or do things you wouldn’t normally do for the
sake of fitting in. This is reflected in Ella’s death at the
scene of a party; a location she would not normally
attend. The emotions established through this film
would be senses of community, knowledge and
comfort (in a hopeful way in that any teenagers
watching this who empathise with Ella aren’t alone).
5. Ancillary text 1: Poster
Our two ancillary texts were a radio trailer and our poster. We created our poster through the use of
colour, images and position to establish meaning in our poster. The main character was the main focal
point and an over-lay of broken glass and paper represents distress and unhappiness and it corresponds
with the title of our film, “The Last Shards”. The dark black and grey colours foreshadow a tragic event to
happen in the film. This is all the audience needs to know to be interested without giving too much
away; however it is just enough to draw the audience’s attention. Obviously, if your film was about the
Wolfman which is a well-known horror story loved by many, you’d not need much on your poster. But if
it’s an urban drama like ours that has a unique story and theme to it not commonly used every day, you
need slightly more detail.
Here are 2 posters we used for inspiration: I Robot and The Love Guru.
I Robot was our favourite for a number of reasons; firstly, we have the main character as the focal point in
high definition and colour. The hundreds of robots in the background are to give the audience a rough clue
as to what the film is about. Not only that, they have a blue hue to them. Blue is a sad colour and therefore
represents the robots as either a bad thing or an antagonist to this film with Will Smith being the protagonist.
It stands out more than the other poster because while the whole poster is blue, Will Smith is in normal colours
which makes it eye-catching. The genre of the film can be guessed through the chrome-textured
typography. Lastly, we like the fact it has a slogan for the audience to remember by the film. However the
Love Guru gives no information away at all regarding the film’s synopsis and the array of colours make it less
eye-catching, as the nothing stands out individually for the audience to spot. Apart from a slogan and the
protagonist as the focal point, there’s nothing else on the poster to suggest the plot or the genre.
6. Ancillary text 2: Radio Trailer
We could not find any existing radio trailers so decided to look at existing video
trailers instead to see how much information and exactly what information they
gave away. In a radio trailer, as there are no visual aspects, there needs to be more
narrative throughout the trailer introducing the main characters, dilemmas and the
date of release in the cinema. Main aspects included in trailers are whether there’s
a heroin/hero, a dilemma and questions such as will it be solved? Will there be other
things to worry about? Will everything go as it should? And then a build up of quick-
fire scenes from action packed parts of the film to tease the audience; obviously
we’d have to use dialogue from the film instead of that. Another factor within trailers
(unless it’s for a sequel), they don’t normally mention the names of the main
characters unless their name is in the title, which ours isn’t and instead of naming our
character, which is giving away too much information, we briefly describe her. This
will also attract the attention of younger viewers who would listen to the description
and be able to empathise with it. For some originality and quality, we used AS&T
labs for our narrative for the radio trailer. It’s an internet download device that
allows you to choose a voice (regarding accent, age and gender) that will read out
aloud what you type in the text box. Not only is there no interference but no
background noise which is essential in a radio trailer so the dialogue and rest of the
audio can be heard. We used audio and songs from the film its self to not only set
the mood for the audience listening to it, but so if they decide to watch the film,
they will recognise the music from the trailer which would create a memorable perk.
Lastly, when adding dialogue from the film into the trailer, we cut down some
dialogue to not only make the trailer shorter, but so the listeners don’t get bored
with it and stop listening. Quick, punchy, rhythmic audio will keep someone on the
end of the radio listening and interested. With the voices, we added on an echo
effect for a “ghost” effect; the audience haven’t seen the film yet so the characters
“don’t exist” until they go to watch the film in full quality, making them curious and
want to watch our film.
7. Make comparisons with
studies
We studied other fairy tales to see which fairy tale was the most realistic and
most connective and relative to modern society. We looked at Rapunzel,
Snow White and Cinderella. Rapunzel is about a girl trapped from the outside
world and rebels at the first new thing she encounters (a young man) and
wants to experience it like everyone else her age. However it’s because she’s
in a door-less tower courtesy of a witch, so that wasn’t realistic enough and
not enough characters to make it interesting enough for the film and the
moral doesn’t really apply to modern day teenagers because it could apply
to anyone at any age. Snow White doesn’t really have a moral and is about
royalty and jealousy more than anything and we wanted the young girl to
represent the moral. Therefore we chose Cinderella, which is about a young
girl treated badly because of the clothes she wears and because she is
different. In the book, her step sisters are jealous of her beauty. But to apply
more to teenagers (as our message was to imply that appearances aren’t
important as most teenagers seem to think), we made her intelligence and
unique personality the subject of social abuse. It revolves around the looking
and acting different and being the subject of bullying because of it and not
having many friends because of it that we wanted to portray. And similar to
Cinderella, Cinderella only had a few friends who liked her for who she was
and was therefore the best type of friend you could have. Our character Ella
is lonely because she is different and only has one friend who likes her for her
personality.
