Aston's Film Studies NEA Blog

What's the point? The point in short films is not to make money, that is the point of feature films. Short films are typically an art movement, either to provide a message, a short burst of entertainment, or to promote the creator so they could be possibly provided with a budget to create a full feature film. To provide entertainment, art or a lesson. Who makes them? Who is in them? Anyone can make a film, as long as multiple images are provided through all sorts of mediums, ranging from filming with a camera, placing images in order to make "frames" or animation. Normally the people in the film are either actors that have been hired for small amounts of money or friends / family of the creator of the film. How and where are they exhibited? Typically short films are either exhibited through either short film competitions usually hosted by award ceremonies or film companies. Other ways of exhibition is through the creator uploading the film to YouTube for anyo...

In this task, we had to pick two numbers between 1 and 6 after certain letters, for example mine were: C33 L16 S42 O56 W66 At first we didn't know what the letters meant but shortly afterwards we were given a sheet which displayed what the letters stood for and a table underneath them. This 6x6 table had different descriptions of items within them. C stood for Characters, L for Locations, S for Situations, O for Objects and W for When. As I got C33, I had to go 3 across and 3 down the table and resulted in "Two large spiders." for a character. L16 resulted in "A very deep well." as a location, S42 in "A mummy comes to life." as a situation, O56 an "Unexploded mine" and W66 as "Next year." C33, Two large spiders L16, A very deep well S42, A mummy comes to life O56, An unexploded mine W66, Next year  The point of this is so that we get these features and put them together to create a ...

Genre A genre is a particular type of literature , painting, music, film, or other art form which people consider as a class because it has special characteristics. Genre Theory   A film genre is a motion picture category based on similarities in either the emotional response to the film (namely, tragic, comic, etc.) or the narrative elements. Most theories of film genre are borrowed from the literary world. The basic genres include fiction and documentary, from which subgenres have emerged, such as docudrama. Other subgenres include the courtroom and trial-focused drama known as the legal drama. Types of fiction which may seem unrelated can also be combined to form hybrid subgenres, such as the melding of horror and comedy such as in the Shaun of the Dead. Other popular combinations are the romantic comedy and the action comedy film. Genre can be guessed or told through the film's techniques, for example mise en scene, cinematography and editing. If...

Vladimir Propp Vladimir Propp was a soviet folklorist and folk lore analyst and he also concluded that all the characters could be resolved into 7 broad character functions in the 100 tales he analysed.    The villain — an evil character that creates struggles for the hero. The dispatcher — any character who illustrates the need for the hero's quest and sends the hero off. This often overlaps with the princess's father. The helper — a typically magical entity that comes to help the hero in their quest. The princess or prize, and often her father — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her as a consequence of some evil or injustice, perhaps the work of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, which constitutes the villain's defeat. The donor — a character that prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object, sometimes after testing them. The hero — the character who reacts to the dis...

The three-act structure is a model used in narrative fiction that divides a story into three parts (acts), often called the Setup, the Confrontation and the Resolution. This is essentially the "beginning, middle and end" of a story, a conventional narrative. For example, in "The Arrival", the introduction is the woman sitting down and ordering a coffee, the confrontation is her establishing to the audience that she is pregnant and then debating with herself through self narrative in that if she want's to keep the baby or not, while also wondering where the man she conceived with is. And the resolution is her, not explicitly saying that she want's to keep the baby, but heavily suggests it while her date arrives.