To go about researching into Short Films I looked at a varied range of videos on the popular Video streaming site Youtube. I specifically used the channel Future Shorts has has a lot of shorts posted by users to the main site of the company, and then uploaded by them onto Youtube. I also watched a few on BBC which has a good range. I found out from watching the shorts that each video is around 5-11 minutes long. The longest one I watched was around 20. My film, One Step Back fits to this and is around 5 minutes long including the credits and the opening sequence. Since it is short, it also has to have a quirky story line which can start and end with an impact that wows the audience. However, since this is hard to do in a short amount of time it has to be very creative and generally, as I have seen, unusual. For example The Black Hole by 'Phil and Olly' is about a printer that to print a black hole. My film lives up to this convention as it is about time being screwed up and our Main Protagonists day isn't as normal as he expects it to be. Also, to leave more of an impact on the audience with the storyline there is generally a twist ending to keep them thinking or just shock them. The best one I saw would be Spider(Shown below). This is because i did not expect the ending at all, or even the event that lead up to the climax because there is no foreshadowing of any of the Protagonists future in the beginning.
Our movie ties in with this as it contains a twist at the end of which we hope the audience does not expect at the end. However, unlike Spider, we do give some subtle hints throughout the film such as subliminal shots of events going to happen in the future. This idea was taken from Sunshine by Danny Boyle, where on entering a space craft, subliminal shots are shown of a picture later found. These subliminal shots give Narrative Enigma to the audience as they do not know what they mean but they are sure it has importance to the story and therefore stays on their mind.
Most short films are generally very low budget and stay away from the usage of massive special effects such as huge explosions and CGI. This is generally because they try to stay away from the realm of the massive block busters made by the Conglomerates of todays Hollywood. They stick to being more of an art form, using tricky camera shots and cracking on issues which Hollywood generally wouldn't. Narratives also ending up being much more powerful and not the stereotypical generic, repeatedly used ones seen in today's films e.g. Good guy joins the bad team, infiltrates good side, falls in love, fights for good side. We stick to this being an art form by not including massive special effects, and trying to use framing to our advantage. An example of this is when our Main protagonist walks by benches, with the Blue Man in the distance. When the protagonist walks past the blue man, the blue man vanishes, all done in one take. We also do not take a repeated story line and reformat it to fit todays age, we just try think of something as original as we can, taking references from certain places.
The main intertexual reference in our film is the Blue Man. He were heavily influenced by Half Life. The 'G-Man' character. In half life, he is a master of time, and is invisible to everyone except for very special people. This is what our Blue Man is. He is a master of time, and is only noticed by out main protagonist Gordon Locke. We have dressed him in a suit, like The G-Man, however to give him more of a mysterious feel we made him all blue. This relates to the colour of the G-Mans suit, however also signifies that his life isnt the most pleasant and can be lonely ie Depression/Sad=Feeling Blue. Another intertextual reference from half life in our film was the main Protagonists name. We named him Gordon Locke. Gordon after the main character Gordon Freeman. Locke was taken from the TV show Lost 'John Locke'. We felt this character was most appropriate because he is a very spiritual man in the fact he believes in destiny and fate, and also the story of Lost is a very confusing one.For the parts that were using the rewind, we watched Red Dwarf to get ideas of how we could use going backwards to get a good effect. The episode of which this happens(referenced earlier) it is all set in a world which is similar to ours, and contains similar reactions from the main protagonists of what it is happening. We also looked into Twin Peaks. This had some elements of the world being backwards as well, however we decided that the parts that were used we would not take for our final cut, as we felt the Blue Man would be better mute, even if it does add a bit more of a weirdness to our film if he spoke backwards.
The protagonist is aimed to be relative to our audience (Mid teens). He is 17/18 just coming out of college and is distant from his parents (as seen by the leaving note). He is also doing what teenagers tend to do of that, being lazy and not really caring about his look as he just throws on a jumper from the banister, and jeans left hanging over his bed. However we decided we would give him a bit of something special which the audience might not get which can fit into Propps narrative arch types. We made it so that he has a little obsession over planes, shown at the beginning and also he carries an RAF medal around with him. This acts as the magical object. This is what the main twist/centre of the story is based around, as well as the Villain, the Blue man. However, we decided that he can also act as the magical helper/doner as he actually sets out Hero down the right path, setting everything straight which is what makes our narrative special. Todorovs Narrative Theory can come into our movie as well. It is mainly an equilibrium with a short dis-equilibrium and then a new equilibrium is solved when he is sent back to his childhood. However, the equilibrium at the beginning is a very distorted equilibrium as it is not all normal so it does not fit perfectly to his theory.
Like all the short films I watched, I do not think a teaser campaign would happen. This is because most short films, and British Films will go straight to DVD as they are not generally cinematic value for a nation wide audience unless they have tie-ins with big british companies such as Working Title.. However, if the creator is well loved and a great contributor to the Independent film industry then there may be a teaser campaign as their following will be very interested. All short films though are generally distributed Via the internet, especially of todays age of Social Networking where sharing anything is very simple. A distributor of which our film would probably go into would be future shorts. this is because they have a popular website of their own, but also a youtube channel. They also organise cinema events around the nation from time to time.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wVlE-ZkHW4&feature=related
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