Critical Evaluation: 1

In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Continuity is extremely important when creating a film due to the negative impacts a lack of it could bring, such as confusion to the storyline. Due to this, as a group we tried our best to make our short film lack any continuity problems and make it flow.  To do this, we stuck to the conventions of the 180 degree rule, planning and shooting our shots around this. We also did the typical shot reverse shot when filming conversations between characters as it allows you to see the person who is talking and their reactions. As our film consisted of many different locations, we often broke continuity when creating a passage of time. We did this by making characters walk in and out of the camera or putting an editing effect on such as a fade. Despite trying to stick to continuity conventions, we often found in editing we had obvious problems such as a characters nails being different colours or being in a different position. This meant we had to go and reshoot the scene again to make it perfect. We also had the problem of an actor changing the colour of their hair halfway through filming, meaning we had to change half of the script so that she didn’t appear in it otherwise the whole film would lack continuity. However, we manage to fix these problems through clever editing, reshooting or changing the script so our film had continuity. 

The genre we originally choose was drama as it opposes the horror genre we did last year. After more discussion around the script, we decided on it being a supernatural drama as the main character is a ghost. We stuck to the conventions of this by setting the scene in the hospital and family home as this is typically where drama films take place, eg ‘My Sisters Keeper’. The music used consisted of a soft piano at sad parts and an emotional guitar at points which had more tension and drama. This is something that is used in drama films to create an atmosphere for the audience. The protagonist character Lola, sticks to the conventions of a typical main character as the audience often feels sorrier for young girls. However, the storyline consists of her waking up in hospital and visiting her friends and family to see they are taking no interest in her. The audience finds out with her that she is actually dead towards the end. This subverts the conventions of a supernatural drama due to the twist ending. In films with this genre, the audience usually knows from the start the protagonist character is a ghost, however this short film only gives clues. The storyline subverts the typical drama films mood in which they visit many highs and low throughout the film. Our film apposes this by going from a high (when she wakes up in the hospital with her friend) to a low (when she discovers she is dead at the end of the film) to create a more emotional ending.

There are no elements of deliberate pastiche or parody, neither do we ‘play’ with genre’s codes and history due to having a serious storyline. Our film genre had no comedy values in it, therefore we did neither of these to keep the audience feeling emotional towards it. We didn’t hint at a reference to any other films as we wanted it all to be our original own work.

Richard Dyer’s theory of entertainment and utopia explained that ‘intensity’ is one of the satisfactions that an audience will receive whilst watching our film. The film starts at a high, Lola waking in hospital with her friend and going to visit her family, to gradually an ultimate low, her thinking her boyfriend is cheating on her then realizing she is dead at the very end of the film. The twist ending brings realization to the audience as they realise the boyfriend was having counselling sessions due to her death and also realizing she is dead. This will make the audience feel closure as everything that may have not made much sense at the start of the film is all coming together to a conclusion. We are confidence we achieved this due to feedback we received from audiences – they all said they understood the film and rated the storyline a 5/5. As our film was drama, we wanted the audience to feel elements of sadness throughout. We did this by giving an emotional twist ending, which would have had a shocking impact, paired with sad piano music to hopefully make the audience tear up. As storyline involved many different drama aspects, such as family arguing, cheating boyfriend and death we felt the audience would be able to relate to the film in some way.

We wanted to create an original film, however when researching into others with the same genre we discovered many had similar aspects to ours. A film that we took inspiration from was ‘The Sixth Sense’ in which the protagonist character here speaks to ‘ghosts’. Similarly, our main character was a ghost. Another similar film was ‘The Lovely Bones’ in which the protagonist character is a young dead girl who is coming to terms with her death. This was very much like our idea, even including a dead friend helping her along the way to realization. We knew from watching the film that the main character, Susie Salmon, had the audience feeling sorry for her and we wanted to create this same feeling so based our character, Lola around Susie. We knew we achieved this as in our video questionnaire, many people said the main character reminded them of Susie Salmon and that they found the film emotional.

Trailers to The Sixth Sense and The Lovely Bones

 

Overall, I feel our film stuck to the main conventions of the film genre supernatural drama, such as keeping it emotional with highs and lows. However, I do feel we subverted this genre with the twist ending – the protagonist character actually being dead.