Working in the group with visual and textual aids

CATastrophy:

Derek is hated by cats...really hated, no matter where he goes a cat terrorizes him every day, it makes life hard for him togo about his daily life. Derek realizes its the final straw when his girlfriend takes him to her house and He's instantly mauled by the ginger tabby cat from hell...this leads derek to question why he's constantly being bullied by the feline monsters...it turns out that derek has upset the king of cats because of a minor misunderstanding and derek sets off to make amends to remove the curse.

Binary Opposites:

Derek vs Cats

Locations:

Alleyways in Camden,

king of cats lair, a flat above a pub in brick lane

Dereks house in Harrington Lane

Equilibrium- Cats Stalking Derek

Dis-Equilibrium- Derek has had enough and sets out to sort the problem

Restoration- Derek and the king of cats have a ferocious fight but it ends when he trips over a bucket of water and it falls on the king of cats, he ends up getting the girl and they live happily ever after

Costume:

King of cats:

Hairy/camden pirate with oddly pointy teeth and guy liner

Derek:

Average guy, early 20's.

The Lord Of Pancakes:

Its pancake day and a couple are laying in bed wanting breakfast so the woman- lindsay tells her boyfriend to set out on a quest of extreme proportion to find the perfect pancake ingredients. So Henri Sets off on his journey braving blistering colds, exhausting mountains and disgusting marshland to return home with the perfect breakfast of pancakes for his princess little does he know his brother is on the same quest for the last pancakes....

Binary Opposites:

Good- Henri

Evil- His Brother

Costume:

Cliche over the top adventure outfits like lord of the rings for henri and his brother.

Lindsay- Cliche princess night dress

Everyone else- normal everyday clothes

Locations:

Tescos

Corner Shop

A park, sand Box, hills, slides

Equilibrium:

The couple are having a perfect morning together and he sets off on his journey

Dis-Equilibrium:

Henri is confronted by his brother and a fight occurs as they are on the same quest for ingredients then they battle it out and race to Tescos

Restoration:

Henri returns home to find his brother has already returned home and is in bed with the princess having breakfast

Inspiration Week

During Inspiration week we have looked at various texts and pictures from across the creative spectrum, everything from pop art, poetry to lyrics to inspire us to create ideas.

one exercise in lesson was to write 1 line of a story then pass it around the class until the story is done.

Each line had a specific thing it had to include, the first line was:

1) A man and his job

2) A woman and her job

3) How they meet

4) One line of dialogue

5) Major event

6) End story

my example of this is:

"Bob is a builder

and florence is a machine

they met at a camping trip in france

"take me to your leader"

a bat took the man away and left the woman in tears

the woman didn't really care about her pregnancy so carried on being a stripper."

From this exercise in lesson i learned that its so simple to create a story with just one line of from multiple people.

Protest

Organisations such as Greenpeace and Peta 2 have taken it upon themselves to create documentaries to inform audiences about products being tested on and animal cruelty in general, this is a huge base for the organisations to do things for "the better good" by publishing the videos across the internet and their personal web pages to show the world about "what happens behind closed doors"

Fishing Hurts:

this organisation documents their campagn to show the world what the world of fishing is actually like behind the mask of the oceans and seas. they inform and have under cover footage to show the public what they are consuming. videos like these are like warnings to the public of what may happen when fish products are consumed. Greenpeace and Peta 2 also have documentaries like these swabbed across the internet.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJAeAQqCgvo - Fishing Hurts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPaxE9ouHpI- Kfc Cruelty (PETA2)

Convergence Technology

Convergence technology is simply where the media overlaps with eachother to be combined into a hybrid piece of equipment.

Products such as the:

Iphone puts the technology of a phone, music, internet, camera, video and games all together and is one piece of hardware the same with Gaming Consoles they put the internet, sky television gaming , films, music and virtual reality all togeher; technology like this is vastly used in the world of short film as they seem to be more cutting-edge and experimental when it comes to distributing their media.

Atom!

"We've been around the block. We've spent the past 10 years (formerly as AtomFilms) discovering hilarious, talented filmmakers and unleashing them on an unsuspecting internet. Our formula is simple: Find talented people, make them famous across the Web and beyond, and pay them well. In return we've found that they bring us more funny content, the cycle continues, and everyone lives happily ever after."

Atom films is a production company that focus' on distributing short films (especially comedy) across the internet to reach the youth and perhaps entice them to join and start creating shorts of their own.
Atom has the most innovative system of getting the youth to see and perhaps find some kind of inspiration from their films by using the internet television and Ipods; (three of the most used things for the youth).

"We're more than a website. The Web is what we call home, but you can find Atom videos on just about any screen that plays video. Your computer. Your mobile phone. Your iPod. Your TV. According to our fancy sales team, that makes us a 'convergent entertainment network'."


Atom films has also teamed up with comedy central to add to the mainstream, as previously stated they look for talent and want to get laughs for it, and comedy central is the biggest comedy network in the world so more of the youth get to hear about Atom and the cycle continues
http://www.atom.com/about/

Companies that help to promote

There are a few companies that help to bring aspireing directors of short film into the industry one of these companies isFirst light.

First Light inspires young film makers from the age of 5 to 19 by funding them on film projects that show the diversity in their lives. Since launching in 2001, 12,000 fresh filmmakers have been able to, write, shoot and produce over 800 films; The films they create cover a huge spectrum of topics and genres that allow them to work and have acess to the latest digital film technology.
http://www.firstlightonline.co.uk/about-us/

BFI Trip

Looking at short films at the BFI i managed to find films sorter than the "micro-short" (90 seconds)
these films were called : the X-RAYS by George Albert Smith, he was a counter-part to George Melies who was one of the first people ever to ever experiment with fictional/ science fictional work when it came to film making.

The X-ray (1897) is a Minute long, with no sound (due to the date it was made) and a static camera shot of a couple appearing to have an argument, or the male trying to flirt with the female, a third character then enters the shot- appearing to hold a x-ray machine (boxes with x-ray written on them), the couple then appear to be skeletal in a jump and then revert back to normal, and that's the end of it, its simply got a story of a couple and a man coming and watching them, then the man leaves and then that's it the story ends, this completely changed my look on short films as not only can you evolve them past needing a huge length to tell a story you can keep them as simple as possible to show the audience whatever is necessary.


The Postal Delivery 1971 -John Beech 10 mins

This has to be the most surreal but realistic piece of short film i've seen, its simply about a man who is going to post a letter but his hand gets stuck, and through some-kind of miss-hap he becomes famous for drawing on the pavement, he then builds his house around him (this is shown solely through props around him) he then gets freed from the post box during a passionate kiss with a stranger, this then leads to the protagonist realising he didn't post the letter he was meaning to in the first place, consequently he runs back and gets stuck again,
the camera angles of this are mainly on the street corner within 90 degree view of everything around, with the camera being specifically stuck in place; this is particularly shown through the shots looking past the protagonist with his hand stuck in the post box.

Borderline:

Borderline by Alex Chandon is a surrealist view of london being turned upsede down and inside out on itself in a very experssionistic artistic way; this is a very good short film due to the fact that most of the mise-en-scene of this piece consists of camera and editing work to boost the surreality of what the audeince sees. There is no voice in the piece too, only a melodic tune to add to the fantasy that the piece shows, it was supposed to be in the style of artist Maurits Cornelis Escher; with his abstract renditions of the world around him.



(Note: All information on this blog comes from the BFI Database.)