Research Summary - What I have Learnt!

Short Films

I found a lot of things that I didn't know about in my research. Through my research into short films I have learnt how important professionalism is. A lot of time and effort and money is put in to make each frame of a short film to be perfect.  The make or break point in all the short films that I watched was how believable/ and in the diagesis I remained as a viewer. Films that had continuity errors/ bad acting and other things that weren't professional ruined for me what could have been a perfectly good short film. The films I like best can also be categorised as the ones I felt were the most professionally made (not taking into account if they were made by professionals or not).  When analysing student short films I learnt that there are a couple things that I must do if I want to make my film look professional. These include making audio a priority, colour correcting my footage, and getting the best performances from my actors. Professional shorts taught me the structure of films and how to put a whole storyline into a short space of time whilst refining it to make it even better. I also gained background knowledge into shot types, pacing, and genres whilst watching so many short films.

Film Posters

What I have found through my research is that film posters vary greatly in their style and content depending on what genre there film is. Thrillers and horrors use almost entirely dark colours, images, and fonts. Where as romance and comedy films always use bright colours, with pastel colours and often a lot of the colour white. This will help me create the right conventions when I make my own poster, to attract the right audience of my target market to watch the film. I have decided that I am going to create a poster that is the right size for a billboard or a double page in a magazine, instead of the portrait size that may fit a DVD cover. This is because I feel it would be best to promote my film to its target audience. As this is a short film it is unlikely that it would ever make it to DVD, and therefore a advertising appropriate size would be more effective. 

Film Reviews

From my research I have realised that there are many different formats of film review. Paper magazines look very different from online articles, which are also different from specialist websites, which differ from newspapers. This is something I had not considered before I started my research and I will be sure to think about these different types and styles before deciding what type of film review to write and make. Often, I found, paper based film reviews have a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio of pictures to text. For my own film review I will copy this ratio to make sure my review is in line with others like it. They also had 3 columns per page for easy reading and used the film's font very largely to attract prior fans to the article, so more people would be interested and read the review. 

Survey

My survey taught me a lot of deferent things about my target audience. I have elaborated on these points individually on the corresponding posts. The history of short films taught me about the context of the media product that I am making and where it came from and how to honour that thorough my own work. Through researching my chosen genre of thriller I learnt a great deal about the codes and conventions of existing media products that I will utilise within my own. This will make my media product even better and it will help it reach out to its target audience.

Overall I am happy with my research and I am confident that I am now able to create the best media product of a thriller short film that I can.