Question 1 of Evaluation - Naomi

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




We have produced a 5 minute short film called 'Alien', a film poster and a film review in which we have used, developed and challenged forms and conventions of real media products.

 

Before even thinking up ideas for our short film I researched multiple short films in order to gain inspiration as well as see various camera, editing and sound affects which I could possibly implement and improve on in my own film. In order to do this I used various websites such as YouTube, thesmalls.com and shortoftheweek.com, I looked on these websites find short films based on Social Realism because that was what our short films genre would be. Doing this gave me an opportunity to see how different film organisations went about to create short films.

 

 One short film that I got inspiration from was called 'A favour' which was a short film based on social realism that follows two men's mornings, one man was white and the other was Muslim, the two men do not know each other but the Muslim man is in his car in a car park and the white man comes up to him, and asked to borrow his phone after using it the white man then runs off and a couple of seconds later a huge bomb goes off.

 

 

 

 

 

I got a lot of inspiration from this film, 'Alien' that I studied, because it makes you think right at the end of the film and teaches you a lesson that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. You can tell very early on that the first male you see is Muslim and is praying and that the second protagonist may have no religion or in fact be a Christian. From the cuts of both of the families mornings, I thought this would work well within my short film because they are only quick shots and you can tell they are set at the same time frame. In the short film 'A Favour' when they show the mornings of the families, the Muslim family are much more family like in the way that they all sit down and have breakfast together and have conversations and debates together, compare to the other white family where the dad is on his phone and not really listening to anyone. Here we can see that the Muslim protagonist is much more interested in his family and is much more of a family man. We wanted to make our short film about social realism and therefore putting little hints in the film like the newspaper of the toddlers body on the beach, we thought this would be a good hint because we made it look as if we picked up any newspaper for our actor to read, this helps connect and link as a significant part for migrants in our short film.

In the short film 'A Favour' they used the bomb/explosion in the short film to end it powerfully, and we needed to have something big, and we needed to have something just like that. I suggested that we should have an anti- immigrant protest so that the twist of the film would come together when the protagonist Kazimir goes home and we find out that his family are migrants. The best way to end our short film was to show James not caring that he has graffiti on his property which says a racist saying on it, as James doesn't care anymore and probably never did.

For the costume we wanted our characters to wear something modern, as our film is set in this day and age. The short film 'A Favour' all of the characters wear smart clothing/costumes as they are going to work/ school ect. The age of our characters in 'Alien' are between the ages of 17-20, so we chose clothes which the characters would normally wear at college; Kazmirs was a black hoodie and jeans and James was a black and white tee-shirt and black jeans.




















When coming to choosing our short films name, we looked on the internet at different names for immigrant and terrorist, as this was linked to our film. We chose a couple of the names that we liked and decided to film people asking what their favourite name was, we thought this was a good idea of getting audience feedback as we get honest feedback; from this we got the name 'Alien'. I thought the short film 'A Favour' had a really good name as it was also linked with their film, because the male antagonist asked the man in the car for a favour. I thought this was cleaver and made me remember what it was called which obviously you want people to remember.