Social Realism is the most popular genre of film in We decided that our film would reflect the works of other British Social Realism films. We did many a research into British Social realist’s films, the film itself and the conventions of British Realism to the directors and actors.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1037898/index.html
Mise en scene
- Naturalistic lighting
- Exterior settings, recognisable and mostly real (On Location)
- Props used need to reflect what the film is about for example if it is about working class you would want see stereotypical working class items in the background.
- Desaturated colour
- Costume appropriate to time and era the film is supposed to be for example A Sixties style film you would expect to see the clothes and styles of the Sixties.
- Not well known actors, though this can be challenged in the form of Danny Dyer who is relatively famous but appears in quite few social realism films.
Themes and Issues
· Stereotypical representations on age, gender, ethnicity, class and so on.
· However challenging these stereotypes as well.
· Gritty issues that aren’t showing in big British films like Love Actually, Notting Hill etc.
· Typical everyday problems for example family, relationships and stereotypes
· Using different time periods that were relevant of our history.
Camerawork and Editing
- Eye level shots
- Close up detail of characters
- Handheld camerawork
- Establishing shots, that show real locations that we can relate to as the audience
Sound
- Environmental or Diegetic
- Use of sound being repeated
- Accents (Particularly Northern)
And finally a convention of a British social realist film is that it is low budget.
British Social Realist theorist Samantha Lay (2002) summed up social realism to be: ‘Life is represented as it is really lived, grounded on social issues and its settings.
To support the above here is a clip from a
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj9yvVDwhX0
Social Realism Directors ( to name a few)
- Ken Loach
- Shane Meadows
- Mike Leigh
- Andrea Arnold
- Stephen Daldry
They are all unique in the way the work.
Andrea Arnold
· Fish Tank http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1yMOdjyp0
· Red Road http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfy6UpAXKQ
· Wasp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN6BSVl1zQY
I did my own personal research into Fish Tank as it has had a lot of press lately as its been screened at film festivals all over the world. I also researched into the director Andrea Arnold, as she is one of few female directors (who has done extremely well) in a very patriarchy area of work.
Fish tank conformed to the conventions of the social realism genre, but what was unique was how
Mike Leigh (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005139/ ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsA-ZrY8cOY In this clip he discusses his film Happy-Go-Lucky, and how he doesn’t have a script when he films.
- Happy-Go Lucky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMwD7Zy6Vno
- Vera Drake http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5L3hGxHumY
- Secrets and Lies http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuCHPnpNHYk
In class we did a lot of research on Happy-Go-Lucky as it introduced us to the social realism genre. It has the conventions of a British Social Realism film;
· Relationships between friends, co-worked and a love interest.
· The thin line nowadays between femininity and masculinity.
· Shows traditional roles of women/men and non- traditional roles of women/men.
· Deals with social issues
· Recognisable landmarks, it is mainly based in London, we have one shot that shows us ‘Camden Lock’.
· Costume is modern, and not unusual to what we see today.
· Characters are relatable.
· Multi-culturalism
· Mise en Scene – red buses, graffiti, street names, pubs, drinking tea etc.
· Sounds used are mainly diegetic and ambient. Use of popular British song from a popular British Band (Common People – Pulp).
· It is low budget, funded by Film4 and the UK Film Council.
- Looking for Eric http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVGyXOvhPj4
- Kes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRYvUpsrqmg
Shane Meadows (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0276349/) We also researched on ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ directed by Shane Meadows. As it is a British film that has the subject of death and a ghostly character, although ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ is a different genre entirely to our film ‘Remember me’, it was good to shows us how to use our two characters in a similar to the way the two characters are in ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’. It also shows emotion and how Richard (Paddy Considine, the main character) deals with his ghostly brother always around him. It also followed the similar conventions of a British Social Realist film which I have listed above. Not only did we study featured length fils. we also researched in to short films as well; It was useful to research into short films, because it showed us what we could achieve in 5 minutes; it helped us to be able to start writing our plot as it sowed us how to do the beginning middle and end. Collection of Shane Meadows short films: 
Above is our film poster designed by Priya Ahluwalia in Photoshop and Indesign, we all discussed what need to be put on to the poster and made the decisions together on the layout, style, font used and so on.
Before deciding who should design the poster we all done individual ideas that have been posted earlier on in the blog http://advancedportfolioahluwalia.blogspot.com/2010/03/poster-ideas-by-maiken-davidson.html
We only have a female characters in 'Remember Me' and this is shown through our poster as we just have Kate - making it quite clear that a main audience is female.
- Location
Park (seen in Film).
- Themes and Issues
- Colour
- Font
- Other conventions
- Female (shows who is the target audience).
- Doesn't look at camera suggesting alienation and sadness.
- Its in an urban setting, what we would stereotypically think an inside of a council flat looks like.
- It is working class, by the costume she is wearing and the ripped wall paper.
- The colours used pink and baby blue suggest femininity along with the hand drawn pink heart which again suggests that this film is targeted towards women.
- Film Review
A film review is a written evaluation by a critic, in t
his case a fi
lm critic, they are usually found in;
- Broadsheet newspapers
- Magazines (Total Film, Little White Lies specify in the film area)
- Internet
- Television (Jonathan Ross)
A review is extremely important to the producers of the film because a review helps people to decide whether to go see a film or not. By researching film reviews, you can see a trend that mass-marketed films are not affected by critics reviews, it is the smaller, independent films that are affected more by such reviews.
For the film review, we studied Little White Lies a film magazine.
- Each issue is themed around a single cover film, inspiring the design and content of that issue.
- The magazine not only covers small independent films and
- Its target audience from as far as we can tell is for young, middle class males. We have worked this out by the language used his humour ( from studies of magazines this is what you would particularly get in a lads mag) but language used is articulate and of middle-class language.
- The magazine itself is distributed by The Church of London
http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_White_Lies_(magazine)
http://www.thechurchoflondon.com/
We studied past issues of Little White lies on how the presented a review;
- Layout
- Language Used
- Positive
- Negative
- 4 columns
- Screenshot from film
- 3 boxes with the 'Film Name', 'Released date' and 'Directors and actors' - and that they weren't in align of the columns
- LWL's rating system 'Anticipation', 'Enjoyment' and 'In Retrospect'
- The first line of the review in bold and the who the review was written by in bold
- When the name of our film was mentioned in the film it was put into italics.
- Page number
- A drawing of some sort to reference the cover film
- The columns are to short and wide than the ones that you see in LWL.
- Many people complimented on our opening shots and that they were very well used. When filming we had decided to film a variety of different angles so when it came to editing we would have a lot to play with. Much of the feedback agreed that the way we used different angles throughout gave our film an edge and was an improvement from our Foundation Portfolios.
- The order of the scenes. They were in an order that could be understood.
- The sound, where the narrative was a little off putting as there wasn’t much emotion, they way the backing sound continued throughout helped established the mood, especially near the end when Kate realises Ashleigh is missing, however many did say that it would have flowed better if the sounds faded into the next sound than just direct cuts.
- The end shot, when two people on swings fade away to reveal Kate sitting by herself on the swings and then zooming in, it concluded the story of the film and Kates voiceover was extremely good at that point.
- Most of our cons was about the voiceover and how there wasn’t much emotion, so didn’t fit right with the film itself.
- When Kate is searching for Ashleigh, many people didn’t like the camera at a low angle when Kate looks over the bed, they believe it wasn’t needed and was a waste of film time.
- At the beginning when Kate is late, we don’t know how late Kate is as there is not shot of a clock or her hitting the alarm clock a couple of times and falling back to sleep.
- Could have reshot a few shots, the green screen was obvious and the Ashleigh was cut of a couple of times. And the lighting of one of the scenes with Ashleigh in it wasn’t very good.
using a variety of angles and shooting the scenes several times gave us more to play with in the editing suite. Though there are things I have learned from doing this, the fact that when filming we should concentrate more on the frame and lighting, we had to re-shoot a few times the house scenes as are framing wasn’t very good as we had empty space next to a character who should have been more centre in the frame. We also had trouble with the lighting the first time, it was very silhouette so we couldn't see our characters very well, this was because we didn't use red heads and relied on the natural light of our internal set, to overcome this decided to shoot in a different location that could give us more natural light and use red heads to give us even more light, however because of this we had very little time to edit it in so was rushed in the end which was something we didn’t want to do.
I personally believe other weaknesses of our product was firstly the town scene, it was extremely busy when we came to film so it was very hard to film with people walking in to shots and trying to talk to you when in the middle of filming. I felts that the shots were to overcrowded but couldn't be helped because of the location we chose, the only way we could get a reasonably good shot was to keep re-shooting when it seemed quieter to get the shot we wanted. We could have improved this by going to a quieter shopping centre or at a time when it wouldn't be to busy. We also had the problem with some of the locations as we wanted to film inside the County Mall and inside a shop to show our two characters laughing and joking trying on clothes in shops that were recognisable to Britian for social realism, however because of security risks at the time we were un-able to do so, but was given permission to film outside.
Another weakness I found in our film was the green screen, it was our first time using it so weren't sure exactly how it would turn out, I think it turned out reasonably well, but would have liked to experiment more using it and trying it in other scenes, however we told from the start that it ber ver very hard too, but if we had more time I think it would have been a challenge that we would of accepted. To research green screen we looked at one of teachers websites ( www.tuffhamster.co.uk ) who had used green screen so we could gain ideas on how we would use ours.
I also believe we could have done better in the terms os Mise en Scene, we could of made it more like a british social realist film if we had the time by using a more well known location like Brighton and using props that would portray Britishness.
A postive that I liked about this product was the variety of shots we done, we got as many as we could at different angles and found while editing that they were really useful and believe it gave our product more interesting.
- 4. How successfully have you used new technologies? How did you use new media technologies in the construction, and research, planning and evaluation stages?
- A new technology we did try was green screen, none of us had used it before so it was an entirely new but something we wanted to try. There was a lot of work that had to go into it when filming which was a huge challenge. When it came to editing the green screen into our main film it was hard, we had to try and make her body stay within the frame the whole time, but at a point during our film her bottom half her body is cut off as she walks away, other than that it was interesting trying to use green screen and having the ghost character fade away and disappear gave a real effect which was what we wanted.
- When it came to editing our product we used Final Cut Pro – which is a piece of Apple software, which has been used for many major films out there, small independent British ones and Hollywood blockbusters, here is a list of some of the films that were edited by Final Cut Pro - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Cut_Pro
We used Final Cut Pro as you are given more to play with when it comes to editing. There is more video and sound transition and filters and fonts, resulting in a much smoother product than we would have had if we used imovie. We also had more experience using Final Cut Pro, as we all used it last year for our Foundation Portfolio, I had used it for Video production, so we could all put in our own input and discuss different ways with each other. It also gave us the opportunity to use green screen as editing green screen was much easier then it would have been on any other piece of software, we also had more ways of editing the green screen piece and being able to move the shot and characters in shot to different positions within the original shot. It also gave us a more variety of fonts, special effects, transitions and edits to use within our film, for example the shot of when Ashleigh disappears we used a special effect, that made her go into a blinding of light, to give the affect that she has now passed entirely.
When it came to deciding the font that we wanted to use for our film, we tried every one on Final Cut pro to see which fitted well with the mood of our piece. We already had an idea of what we wanted, a style on font that looked hand written but in calligraphy as it would look personal yet feminine, as females are our targeted audience, we didn't quite find exactly what we wanted, but chose a calligraphy font that I personally believed worked well. We chose to use a light faded pink colour to fit in with the femininity of the font and are demographic.
Final Cut Pro is also much better when it comes to editing our piece together, to link scenes together we used fades and a dissolve as it suited the transition to each scene but was simple so it didn't look to over done. 
- To edit the rest of the sound we used Garage band, as our film is made up of entirely non-diegetic sound. We used continuous music throughout, hoping that this would keep
up with continuity and making our film flow better. Are main character Kate (Fredaylne King) was the narrator throughout the entire film. We thought this could give our film a more unique edge, we get inspiration from films such as ‘The Lovely Bones’( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUWKi0W5_g)and the ‘Twilight Saga’ as they both have female narrations. To get the narration we used a Dictaphone, we had problems with recording at first, not recording properly and then to much echo in the background on another, we had to do several recordings before we could have one that we could used. Here is a tutorial on using Garageband http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpUUKJeP7jE&feature=player_embedded - When it came to doing research for our film we used the internet to find films sources, film articles and watch other short film clips. As we needed to know a lot about British social realism, I looked for news articles on www.guardian.co.uk and www.totalfilm.com and posted them as links onto the blog, these was so the entire group could then go on to read them and help with each of us with the different and individual aspects of our products it also gave as an idea of the film business.
We also had done research into similar films for inspiration on the genre, plot and characters, by using www.film4.com/videos/film4-shorts, www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/ and www.virginmediashorts.co.uk/ , not only using this but watching DVDs like Meadows ‘Dead Mans Shoes’ as it deals on the idea of a ghost haunting the main character .
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We also watched other British social realism films like Leigh’s ‘Happy-go-lucky’ and Arnolds ‘Fish Tank’ so we could reflect similarity into our product 'Remember Me'.
- To do our Poster and review we needed to use Photoshop and In design, however this was our groups weakest point as none of us are very pro at using them, we had all used them for our Foundation Portfolio last year so we did have some knowledge on tools and how to use them. We decided to split up and each do a poster using both of the programmes and then choose whose we thought was best, we also asked our peers to choose as well. Here is mine: http://advancedportfolioahluwalia.blogspot.com/2010/03/poster-ideas-by-Maiken-Davidson.html
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