Lecture 2 - Examples

In this lecture; our lecturer showed us some examples of non-narrative work made by the previous year of students who participated in this module. There was a lot of variety and a lot to learn from, but only one student followed the sound bites brief, and that student chose the kitchen to do it.

My lecturer then proceeded to show videos of B&Q adverts and such where it was basically what I had intended to do for my film, which made me doubt myself.

I was struggling to think of a new idea for sound bites, of a new location to get a wide variety of noises, but just as I was trying to think, I was inspired by the reflection of light within a bottle of water! I was watching the way the light shimmers on the surface of the water and how it moves in many different directions and thought of ways I could maybe manipulate it to follow the brief of "colour flow".

As soon as I got home that day, I had received a new camera I had ordered and wanted to test it, so as soon as it went dark outside; I put a quick test together, which involved a glass bowl full of water on a black shirt under a light. Here is my test:

This is in it's early stages at the moment, but I would really like to pursue this idea.

Lecture 1 - Non-Narrative

Module Brief

The other half of the brief is to make a short 2-4 minute long non-narrative film, meaning it doesn't strictly speaking have to make sense. There were 3 briefs to choose from:

- Colour Flow

This would involve the use of colour and/our fluid movement of a substance sound tracked to a piece of music of my choice.

- Move Me

This would be about objects and other things that are moved by either other objects or forces.

- Sound Bites

Tight editing of different household things using a multi-screen approach to create a musical piece.
Immediately I was drawn to the "sound bites" brief, as I had recently been introduced to a famous 25 year old YouTuber known as "Pogo", who makes songs made up of clips from films, TV shows and every-day occurrences. Here is an example of his work:



This is a song using clips from Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction".

After leaving the lecture, I decided to have a quick go at seeing if I could get some sort of rhythm going using things I could find in the kitchen. Here's how I did:




As you can see, it's nowhere near the standard of Pogo's work, but I didn't expect it to be as I did this within an hour, I just wanted to test if I was on to something. After conducting this test; I began to see how difficult how difficult this may actually be.

Lecture 1 - Narrative Film

Module Brief

In today's lecture; we were set our brief for this module. Each student is required to make two short films: A narrative film (4-8 minutes long) and a non-narrative film (2-4 minutes long).

Each film must be made following the instructions of any one given subject. One of the narrative film topics in particular caught my eye; the "Back to the Front" film. One of the examples my lecturer used for this topic was a film called "Pulp Fiction", written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Having seen "Pulp Fiction" prior to this lecture, and it being one of my personal favourite films, I understood immediately what the idea of this topic was. This film starts right where the film ends, but when watching it for the first time; the audience is unaware that it is the end of the film. Throughout the film, it jumps between stories of different characters at different points in time, but by the time it finishes; everything makes sense. This is called a "disrupted narrative".

Another example of this sort of brief was a short film a famous director named "Brian Percival" made during his student years called "About a Girl", which is about a girl telling a story about her life in the present day, with flashbacks to the parts of her life that she is talking about. 

I really like this style of film making as I think it tests just how well a film can tell a story, as in order for the viewer to understand it; everything has to work. The script has to be well written and well planned out, the actors have to give believable performances, it has to be able to keep an audiences attention for the entire film, and most importantly (I think), it must be edited PERFECTLY.

I have chosen to follow this brief as I want to test my film making ability, and with only 8 minutes to do it; a difficult challenge it will be.