Post-Mortem (evaluation)

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

I used YouTube and the website TvTropes website extensively - I looked for short films and radio shows that mimicked my idea in either tone or scope, and as detailed in previous posts, I found several videos that fit what I was looking for. I didn't use many traditional media technology sources, as the ability to search for my oddly specific genre outweighs any other sources.

In the planning phase I relied heavily on the website TvTropes to construct the genre of the short film - this particular style isn't well defined enough to have garnered a title, so I looked at short films similar to my idea, and using the tropes from their individual pages, I discovered the common features they all share and incorporated them into my piece.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I feel that my film poster works well with my main piece, as I said in the post about it. However, I did not manage to complete the radio advert, so I can't comment on it's effectiveness.

A film, at last

https://youtu.be/ZG445Qizq0k


It's late, but it's here.

Film Poster

So I'm not completely happy with this as a poster - I like the font I used for the heading, title and subheading, although nothing about my film is Art Deco (which the font definitely is, I can practically feel the Gatsby) the font still seems to fit, though I can't explain how other than just the "Feeling" of it. I tried to find the font used in real film posters for credits, and although I couldn't find one actually used, I did find that the font has "ultra condensed" in it's name, and so I used a font with a similar tag, and I think that any "ultra condensed" font would have worked.

I'm also happy with my choice of picture. I feel like the lighting looks really good and lends an air of mystery, and Cai's posture and expression adds more to the character. (Cai is "The Reader" and although he never speaks, I personally think of the character as a reporter type, "The Watcher" having written a letter to  the reporter, who is researching it).

What I'm not happy with is the empty space - the problem is that I feel like filling the space would be equally bad. I tried it out, changing the font size and changing some of the words of it was longer, but this looked wrong also. On the one hand the negative space says something about the film, which isn't big on action - it's kind of minimalist. On the other, there's a fine line between "minimalist" and "bland".

I have to hope that from the outside perspective the poster remains on the right side of the minimalist/bland line, because I feel that knowing my intent effects my judgement of it.

Radio Advert Script

Speaker: I was there when you crawled from the ocean, with flippers and fins that could not yet be called arms or legs. I held witness to the five great extinctions. First an ice age, a swift and frigid ending for the Ordovician period.
Narrator (although they'll both be me): From director George Fish, a brief look at the history of Earth, from an ethereal perspective - "The Speaker" - coming this April.
Speaker: Kings were born and kings died, Gods fell in and out of favour, civilisations rose and fell, and all the while I watched you struggle.


The narration won't feature any music, since it would have to match the soundtrack used in the two clips.


I think that should be enough for this particular piece, as radio adverts are typically about 30 seconds long.

Radio Trailer conventions

Given the medium, radio trailers are all pretty similar - they include a few clips from the piece of work itself, usually the most interesting or action-packed pieces of dialogue or sound to punctuate the advert, which usually follows the following formula:




-piece of dialogue that catches the audience's attention (stabbing noises and a scream)
-voiceover tells you something about the film, the director, the genre ("the new experimental thriller from visionary director Stanley Kubrick")
-dialogue that reveals something about the plot (The killer... its... one of us!!)
-release date (coming to you in selected cinemas on the 27th of January)




There are some variations, dependent on the genre. Comedies will share a joke instead of a plot point and tell you something about the subgenre - is it dark, lewd, "teen" etc. - and the narrator will joke as well. Horror will have a narrator try to scare you, and "Marley and Me" style tragedies will start off with a happy couple vibe before changing the music to a minor key, telling the audience that the dog died or the husband goes to war.


Even then this just adds to formula the caveat that the narrator matches the tone of the piece they're advertising - which seems straightforward. I don't know how this works for me (since my genre is kind of difficult to define). I'm going to go with simply informative - I'll use something from the start of my piece, the say something along the lines of "from director George Fish, a look at the history of Earth from an ethereal perspective". Then I'll use a couple of seconds from near the end, perhaps the part where the Speaker talks about kings and gods rising and falling, since it's quite dramatic but not so near the end that it spoils the tension when listened to.

List of the problems I've been facing, and subsequently overcome (or not)

Location, Location, Location

So the first issue I had was finding a location - finding an actor wasn't hard as they didn't need to speak, just scroll through google images while at a desk.

I imagined the actor of the piece as a journalist type, a young professional of some sort - so I needed a desk where my actor (Cai) could sit and look focused. I also needed a space where I could control the lighting enough to make it seem like a different time of day - I wanted it to seem like Cai was reading a transcript of what the speaker says, and doing research on what he hears, and ends up working into the night. We spent ages looking around the school for an room we could use, but I kept finding that areas with good lighting weren't open enough for me to film in various angles, or it wasn't quiet enough to get anything done.

In the end, Mr Brodie let me use his office, which was actually perfect - he has blinds, as well as one of those sunlamps with two hinges on it so I could change which angle the light came in from. I had to take down some of his posters, as they were teacher related and I didn't want to mess up the background with something that didn't make sense with the narrative.

Angles

After I'd done my first round of filming, I showed Mr Brodie what I had so far and we agreed that the shots I had were kind of basic - all mid or close up pans from eye height. So I waited until the next time Cai came in wearing the jacket/hoodie combo he had on, and I took some more interesting shots - some from over the shoulder, some from very low to get a good shot of Cai's "This is interesting and I'm concentrating" face. The hardest shot was the one from above, for which I had one foot on a chair and the other just on the desk, and I had to spend the whole time making sure I: A) didn't fall off, and B) kept my foot out of the shot.

Audio

So, in hindsight, this was a really obvious one to fix, and I don't see why it didn't occur to me sooner.

I couldn't get the speech to overlap in tone with the tune I wanted to go underneath - to go from mild, then something like fascination, then to something vaguely sinister. My speech wasn't long enough to match with the song, and I couldn't speed the song up without it sounding silly - I spent about a fortnight agonising over how to fix it, thinking of finding different songs that worked better, begging a musically inclined friend to play what I wanted on the piano.

It wasn't until I was complaining about this to someone that they suggested I cut the track and use the relevant sections.

Script

The speech will speed up as we move forward, becoming more and more accusatory as in gets to the end.

Open on my actor/"the reader" sitting at a computer, reading something on a laptop - exactly what is obscured by their body.

 

The Speaker: When you first formed, a Prokaryote bacteria in a primordial soup, created from 24 Amino Acids and a flash of lightning,

Play a short clip from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKKDfynx4ZY

Speaker: I was there.

When it first occurred to you that your sibling bacteria might be nutritious, I was there.

Play this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cuaS2QKobA&spfreload=10

Speaker: I watched the frantic scramble as you, the larger blob of undifferentiated cells, absorbed a much smaller blob. And so you were Cain.

Back to the Actor

Speaker: I saw the Cambrian Explosion, your blob of cells becoming eyes and brains and teeth and fins and lungs, a billion species spread across the planet in the blink of a cosmic eye.

Play this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJshsQT2Q6Q (40s to 44s)

Speaker: I was there when you crawled from the ocean, with flippers and fins that could not yet be called arms or legs.

 

Speaker: I held witness to the five great extinctions. First an ice age, a swift and frigid ending for the Ordovician period.

A shot of ice sheering away from a cliff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU

Back to the Reader, who will be looking at pictures relevant to the specific sentence - ancient sea creatures at first, then pictures of meteors

Speaker: Then Carbon Dioxide devastated marine life while the creatures of the land flourished, and the Devonian period ended. Next you faced the greatest extinction, a combination of volcanoes, meteors and methane vents conspired to take 83 percent of all life on the planet, a catastrophe that took 10 million years to recover from.

Play this clip next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVBn8R4qzYQ

Speaker: Then volcanoes burned the sky and their ash blanketed the earth, burning away the Triassic.

Back to the Reader, looking at this image: http://gambassa.com/gambassafiles/images/images/1979/lastdino_yale_500_event_14_v1.jpg

Speaker: A meteor brought a swift end to the Cretaceous and with it the dinosaurs. I saw you crawl from your holes, scampering rodents diversifying to fill the ecological niches left by your Silurian cousins.

 

This, sped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSHOQ6gv5Y

Speaker: All the while Tectonic plates shifted over the earths surface, their crashing building mountains, their departure filling oceans.

Back to the Reader, the screen obscured by their body

Speaker: I saw you leave the trees, no weapons bar your brain and thumbs until Homo

habilis picked up a rock.

A part from that 2001: A Space Odyssey scene, the apes fighting the other tribe

Speaker: By the time Homo Erectus was born, the size of your brain had doubled, you discovered fire and built tools. At 200,000 BCE you had invented culture, religion, language,

Infection map, spreading humanity across the world - like the one used here: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5r7Ay3zvRD8/maxresdefault.jpg

Speaker: and Homo Sapiens spread from Africa across the world: Europe first, then Asia. I saw you cross the Beringia land bridge and colonise the Americas 20,000 years before Columbus was even born.

The Speaker will become lightly accusatory, show pictures of clothing made of rough fur and the carcasses of certain animals

Speaker:You hunted species to the brink extinction, a feat previously only achieved

by global catastrophe. You hunted beasts that could crush you underfoot and

you won. I saw it all.

Back to the Reader

Speaker: I saw the first seed planted by a person, saw you create Eden for

yourselves, villages grew around your farms, you taught yourselves

irrigation, agriculture. Children no longer had to fight to live, they

could learn, they could strive for knowledge.

 

Speaker: Then walls grew around the larger villages, and their farms melted away.

You became Mesopotamia, you became Egypt, you became Harappa and Yang Shao.

 

Speaker: Kings were born and kings died, Gods fell in and out of favour,

civilisations rose and fell, and all the while I watched you struggle,

surviving wars and plagues, inquisitions and conquerors.

Actor is scrolling through images of ancient rulers, marble busts mixed with sarcophagi

 

Speaker:Harappa was lost to the sea, Carthage fell, Rome burned and was reborn, the

Mongols swept across the Europe and Asia, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the

Sengoku Jidai, Leif Erikson rediscovered Greenland and the Americas, there

were crusades and wars and your great thinkers were executed because of

your fear.  

Roman fire, mongol horde, samurai battle, Viking longboat on waves, flash of renaissance scientists and painters one by one

 

Speaker: Your need for iron and coal fuelled the industrial revolution, and I

witnessed children working in cramped, torturous conditions, saw wars with

death tolls in the millions, First the Boer war, then World War One, then

World War Two, with it coming the atom bomb, turning Oppenheimer

into Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Train, soldiers on horseback, then WW1 tanks, then that first atomic bomb, reeeeaaallllyyyy slow

 

Speaker: I saw his invention almost destroy the world in 1962, two lines of

battleships facing each other in steely silence for 13 days, the futile

posturing of two global superpowers.

Footage of this exact thing

 

Speaker: The internet was invented in a lab in Copenhagen, and so came the digital

revolution. You were an informed populace, you found each other through the

words on a message board, the words of a politician would never be covered

up again, but neither would yours. Every action and reaction recorded

forever, all at the inconvenience of billions and trillions of electrons.

There's a thing called "hacker typer" that makes random key presses look like actual code, get a shot of the actor using that

 

Speaker:And now, here I am, watching you read this. Reading it back to myself.

 

 

"No Intelligent Life Here" Examination of tropes present in the genre I am using

Tv Tropes was considerably less helpful than usual, I think owing to the weirdness of "They're made of meat" but I did have some luck by looking under the examples page on the trope "No Intelligent Life Here" - which describes the cliché joke of Aliens coming to Earth, and after a brief exploration, deciding that there's, as mentioned above, "No Intelligent Life Here" which isn't exactly what I'm going for, but the idea of an outside judge is a helpful comparison.

So here are my examples:

http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html

This is the original "They're made of meat"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE

This is a version done in film, although it isn't what I'm going with, it's still helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

This is a pretty amazing song, and the way it describes life and our place in the universe is pretty helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

This is, unfortunately the extent of my list - there are some other things from which I'm drawing inspiration: The way aliens and gods usually treat humans in media (dismissive/judgemental), the idea used in a few films (like the Disney short "Peace on Earth") that once humans die out animals will be left to reinterpret our works (I include it here because this type of story is usually used in "message" films - it'll show up to denounce war or pollution, and judgement is definitely a theme in my piece)

I QUIT (and other overdramatic reactions)

So my actor wrangling issue and my hatred for writing and character that uses a human "voice" (not it terms of sound, I mean in the fancy writing way) have come to a head, and it seems like I won't be able to produce the trailer for "gay Romeo and Juliet".

So here's the plan:

Scrap it.

I'm going to instead produce "A short film in its entirety" as per task 6, and the film will require only one actor, sitting down, not talking, and a voiceover. I'm going to take inspiration from the radio play "They're made of meat" by Terry Bisson, and create a kind of ethereal review of humanity/life on Earth. I'm going to post a link to "They're made of meat", as well as some examples of similar pieces of work (as I've said before, TvTropes is the best)