Influences

At the beginning of this project I looked at a wide variety of short films and analysed them. The short films that got my attention and made me look into them more personally were the ones that had a small interesting narrative and were British. Although the short film I created was very different to the ones I had researched it was similar in the way it was structured and the way it was filmed. For example, the shots I used in my short film were very similar to the ones I had studied in the way we used close-ups and the mix of close-ups with continuity. Whilst planning the shots for my short films I was constantly thinking of shots that would be interesting to the eye to make it more visually attractive and more interesting to watch. Even though titles were only a short part of my short film I got influences from other short films I had watched that were similar to mine, the titles were very basic and didn’t exactly give much away about the short film. I watched a short film on the channel 4 shorts website which followed a story about a girl; I was attracted to this short film because I liked the way in which the camera went in and out of focus. In our short film we used this effect a number of times and it worked well. At first I was unsure as to wither it would be a good idea to not have any dialogue at all, but after watching a previous students work which I thought worked exceptionally well with only the use of a voice over it gave me the confidence to peruse this in my short film.

Although I got influences from famous shorts film, short films on the internet and other students work I had to find my own influences to come up with a narrative. My short film works around an issue which is largely spoke about in society today. On the news and in magazines especially body image is spoken about a lot and there are often documentaries about girls dealing with body issues and things such as anorexia. It would have been hard to make a documentary (another form of short film) to talk about this issue so it made me get creative and think of a way this issue can be shown in an indirect way. For example, in our short film the girl herself is never shown upset or her “issue” is never shown as out of the ordinary. Inspiration week also helped us come up with the main concept and feel of our short film as we across a poem called “Barbie Jail” which we re-wrote and used as the voice over in our short film. We could have just used the poem to help us with our narrative but we felt the use of the poem actually in the short film was effective. Before we across the poem we used in our final short, we also looked at other poems and even song lyrics that spoke about body image and obsession (these are posted on my blog). By researching poems and song lyrics this helped us build up our idea and narrative.