Evaluation Question 1

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

Genre

There are two forms of genre that my product both conforms to and subverts: the genre of the short film and the genre of the narrative/plot. 

The genre of the short film:

After a lot of research at the start of making my Advanced portfolio, using sites like Vimeo and Youtube, I found a few conventions within the short film genre:

The film is, usually, either

     An arthouse drama, revolving around an intense event that we get a short glimpse into

     A comedy, with a joke and a punchline at the end.

Short films often have open endings (even if there is a conclusion, there is still a sense that the characters' stories have not yet ended). 

There is no boundary to its duration, other than it not being feature length. Short films can last anytime from 30 seconds to one hour. 

They're a vocational practice. They're made by filmmakers, for other filmmakers. 

In order to make my work feel like a 'real short film', I had to conform to all of these conventions.

Already I had a restriction, as this course requires an approximately five minute short film. This therefore meant that I would have to establish a situation between the characters very quickly in order for the audience to understand what's at stake.

I chose to go with an arthouse drama short film

There is no real restrictions on narratives at all for short films, but arthouse films fall into this category for certain reasons. They often include open endings, which is something I considered when I was first putting together my research. 

An opening ending would also really useful considering the duration restrictions of my short films, and would allow for there to be many different interpretations of what happened to their relationship, and having parted at the end whether it is truly the end of their relationship/story.

For the moment Rachel leaves at the end, I had two texts in mind that I wanted to take inspiration from. First, even though it is a feature length film, La La Land is the perfect example of an open/closed ending relationship. The reason why I say it has both is because there is a sense of closure, but also that there is unfinished business. I thought that this would be the route I would use. 

Another film that has a similar ending is Volume, but this time the girl the protagonist is in love with isn't in the scene. Instead, she is symbolised through the distant house that she has left behind which the protagonist looks towards longingly. The final shot tracks away from him, leaving the protagonist by himself, having to figure out his life without Georgia, the missing girl. 

Characters

There were certain conventions seen in mainstream media that I wanted to conform, develop and challenge when it came to developing my characters. 

Firstly, I wanted the man to be more hung up on the relationship than the woman. In lots of mainstream romantic dramas, we follow the woman's heartache once a relationship ends, and often the man causes the disequilibrium and is the much less emotional of the two. Some of the short films that I looked at, like Hotel Chevalier and Volume, focus on the man's heartache and loss while the woman causes the problems, and is less innocent than the man. Like these short films, I wanted to subvert the stereotypical roles of men and women in relationships. 

In my short film, Jack is the more emotional of the two. He is ruled by his infatuation for Rachel and we follow his story rather than hers. He is the victim in the relationship, not her. 

Rachel, on the other hand, holds the power in the situation. She is the one who leaves Jack, and as one participant of my audience survey observed, she plays the femme fatale role rather that the damsel in distress. Rachel isn't solely cold-hearted though; she still feels guilt for what she's done, and doesn't have the strength to face up to the consequences of her actions, hence why she ghosts him and runs away when she sees him again at the station. She holds power but it isn't overpowering. 

stills from Hotel Chevalier

Rachel is almost worshipped by Jack, and he sees her as an angelic figure. Gilbert and Gubar observe that women in literature in the 20th century are either seen as pure and angelic or demonic. This applies to film too: in Memory 2.0, the female protagonist is seen by the man as angelic, and is often bathed in bright light, sometimes backlit so it looks like she has a halo. Here I wanted to use Laura Mulvey's theory on the 'male gaze' to show Jack's point of view, that she is an angelic figure. However, I didn't want Rachel to completely conform to this: Jack sees her in this way, but her character is certainly flawed, and causes him a lot of pain. Therefore I wanted to use this halo idea for the lighting and colour, and juxtapose it with her actions betrayal. This makes the viewer uncomfortable as she is admired by Jack even after he discovers the truth.

Stills from Memory 2.0

Rachel's 'halo' from the natural light in my short film

Colour

Colour is a vital part of many short films I researched, and also a really important feature in my short film. In order to differentiate between the past and the present, I used colour: a warm palette for the past, to reflect the better, happier times in their relationship and the way that Jack looks at the past through rose-tinted spectacles, whereas the present is very cool toned, and reflects the harsher reality of the situation he finds himself in. Volume uses this sort of pastel colour palette for the past and present: the first group of images below is a time when the two protagonists are together before the woman disappears, and the second set of photos is a present event, when the man discovers his dad was having an affair with the now missing girl. Immediately the audience recognise the change in tone and intensity by this use of colour.

my film: past

my film: present

Another key influence for colour/tone is the scene in Memory 2.0 when two men are having a conversation in one of their bedrooms. The lighting is low-key  and they are red lens flares in the background of each shot due to the shallow depth of field. I recreated this for my scene with Jack and his roommate Alfie using red fairy lights, and put them in the background of my shots and shot with a shallow depth of field. Other than this I used one bedside lamp, and the light from the laptop screen for the first half of the scene. For location, I used my male friend's bedroom, which makes the scene look more realistic as the posters on the wall and the bedsheets would be things that a young man like Jack would likely have in his room. The conversation is intense but there's still a feeling of trust between the two men in Memory 2.0. This is the tone that I also wanted to have in my film, so I tried to write a natural script, and a realistic conversation that two guys would have if one of them had to give the other serious advice. Below are some stills from my short film that take inspiration from the scene on the left.

stills from Memory 2.0 shown above 

with the light from the laptop and the red glow behind

Alfie is lit only from the side from the lamp and the fairy lights which makes the back of his silhouette glow

He is again only lit from the side and he has a strong red glow from behind him.

Narrative/structure

The most important aspect of my film is my use of flashbacks throughout. This means that the film does not have a linear narrative, with the plot being told in chronological order. I liked that this was not the generic way that most short and feature films tell a story.

The film structure is told with this timeline:

• several months ago: house interior
• present day: station interior
• several months ago: station exterior
• a few days ago: Jack's room
• present day: station interior - street scene

I was inspired by the flashbacks in Low Tide when creating the structure of my film.

Low Tide uses one scene with a gun to link all of the scenes together, After cross cutting to a different time period, it would always return to the gun scene. The main problem with this short film is that the story mad very little sense to me. Clearly there were big problems in their relationship, but I didn't understand the significance of the gun, and why they seemed to be playing this Russian roulette game. The entire narrative, not just the ending, was left far too open to interpretation for me. I think this was not helped by the way the narrative was structured. You can assume certain things from the colours used in the film, which did assist in knowing when the events could have taken place, but there was no purpose behind seeing certain flashbacks, they didn't do anything to show much about their relationship and what was going on in the gun scene. I wanted my flashbacks to be necessary to reveal something about my characters, not just pointless conversations that have no real relevance to characters' arcs. Low Tide taught me how I shouldn't be structuring my film. It couldn't be 'too clever' and shouldn't mean that a viewer has to rewatch the film in order to know what's going on. The flashbacks had to be necessary to drive the story on.

The second row of film stills shows the story in the present day. We return to this point at the end of the film, shown in the last row. The other two scenes are sandwiched in the middle to explain Jack and Rachel's relationship and the impact it has had on Jack and his friends. 

The structure challenges Todorov's theory of narrative:

• we begin with a feeling of disequilibrium, as the words 'we'll stay together, won't we, not matter what happens' imply that this is exactly what won't happen
• the second scene feels like a small return to equilibrium as there is no dialogue, the editing is low paced and Jack seems to be alright getting on with his life
• Seeing Rachel again sparks another disequilibrium as we can tell from his facial expression that something is wrong
• We watch the next scene with the knowledge that there is a problem, even though there is no disequilibrium in this scene. This juxtaposition makes the viewer uncomfortable and builds the tension towards what has really happened between them.
• We return to the disequilibrium we felt before the scene outside the station in the next scene with Jack and Alfie. Disequilibrium is fully established, as the problems of the relationship are explained through this conversation.
• Disequilibrium continues and builds as we see Jack and Rachel meet again after all this time.
• The ending establishes equilibrium as Rachel moves away out of Jack's life. But there is still a  feeling of an open ending as we never really know why she left him.