Today's Lesson - 18/06/15 (Exam Side)

In today's lesson, we were given the following objectives:

• To clarify what is meant by a short film
• To identify producers, purpose and audience for short films
• To analyse and evaluate the quality of a short film

Short film: Any film that has a duration longer than one minute and shorter than 15 minutes.

Identifying producers, purpose and audience of a film is easier to do once you establish the genre and what kind of characters and narrative is used within the film. For example, if you have a horror genre of a film and the characters used are all adults with explicit features to narrative and action, you are able to identify that the purpose is to entertain and frighten and the audience is 15+ (depending on how explicit).

Analysis and evaluating a short film to assess its quality is also an aspect I find easy. For example, we analysed:

• Pong
• Valse
• Foolish
• Friday Tigers

I felt that Pong  was a high quality short film as it was imaginative, difficult to film and original. They used effects of a ping pong ball and a slinky moving, without the effect of being unrealistic, which created a very high quality short film.

Valse was also a brilliant short film (my favourite out of them all) as it had a very original and clever storyline of showing two snails trying to get to each other because they're in love, followed by a long shot of a chef then picking them up and putting them in boiling water, causing a shock factor. This was then continued by showing a shot of them holding onto each other in the water, which I felt was beautifully filmed and executed. The short film also contained perfect music for the feelings given and was very emotionally gripping, once again showing a high quality.

We then watched the music video Foolish, which contained bold colours and a themed storyline, however the actual quality was not great and you lost interest quickly.

Finally we analysed Friday Tigers, which again contained a very effective and gripping storyline, with some expletives and some jump scares, however the film in an entirety was very good quality, with a brilliant plot and filming techniques. 


Overall I found today's lesson very useful in establishing what is a quality film and what is not, as well as learning a more in depth understanding as to what a short film is.