LAFTAS: Research Into Similar Products

Before beginning the planning process of our LAFTAs entry, I watched a lot of existing short films and also a few other LAFTA entries that I found on YouTube. I’d watched the BAFTAs a few months prior to the project, so I already had a list of short films that were nominated I wanted to watch. At this point we didn’t know what genre we wanted to make our film or what the storyline would be about, so we were really just looking for aspects that made a good short film. We were aware that we didn’t want to try force an entire story with a beginning, middle and end into our film, but we wanted to focus on creating a scene that was visually impressive and left the audience with an idea.

The first short film that I’d been wanting to watch for ages was ‘Room 8’, which won best short film at the 2014 BAFTAs. I thought the storyline was brilliant and it really worked because there was one seemingly irrelevant but confusing shot of a moving matchbox, which opened up a whole new interpretation to the film at the end. I also liked how the scene portrayed a fantasy feel despite being set in a prison cell and then had a slightly darker ending which worked really well in many of the short films I saw and worked well for the length of time that there was to tell a story. Following this sort of structure, I felt could allow us to display two kinds of filming and editing and incorporate two contrasting scenes that were visually impressive when put together. Here are two videos that I watched, one with a darker ending and one with a lighter ending than the bulk of the film.

One short film came to mind, that we saw earlier on in the year in class, when watching a few of these films because it also followed the same structure of having a dark and visually appealing scene which was then contrasted against a light ending. The scene shows a body being dragged through the snow close up, which looks good because of how gritty and rough the shots are, particularly in the icy environment that it was filmed in. To then go to a stereotypical scene where the killer held a gun to his hostage’s head, the audience was surprised to see the two characters start singing. A scene like this most likely wouldn’t work given the context of a full film, however as a short it works because the viewer is left to interpret what happened before and after the event for themselves and therefore it doesn’t matter how obscene the storyline may be. Of course there are other ways to go about making a short film with an effective storyline, however of the few that I watched, this is a feature that I really enjoyed about them because of the contrast and how it lead me to believe the scene was going in one direction but in fact took a completely different turn. The most successful films I felt needed to be visually impressive and have a unsuspecting storyline in order to create an impact on the audience in the 5-10 minutes that is available.

As well as looking at professionally produced shorts, I also had a look at a few other LAFTA entries that people had uploaded to youtube. This gave me a good idea about what we were expected to achieve, however there weren’t a great variety to look through, and none with a theme that I could see our group creating. Although I was unable to find anything that could give me inspiration or ideas, I was able to pick up on certain aspects that either made their projects look great or let them down. A number of them clearly were unable to find a suitable location to shoot their film, for example one film I found was about a couple of friends who were shopping, however the group, unable to find a shop to film in were forced to use a plain white room. This, as well as looking fairly boring, also took away from the narrative of the scene as everything had to be shown through dialogue as opposed to being able to successfully show the story visually. Some lacked a good storyline that would have potentially lead into a really well filmed scene. For example, another I watched showed two foreign tourists struggling to find the train station and were shown asking random pedestrians for directions. However, this meant that the two actors seemed not to interact with their environment and props enough as the shots simply showed too much dialogue with subtitles, which lacked variety. As well as noticing the negatives, there also were a number of really good shots that were framed perfectly. Including a few extreme close-ups and wide shots which looked really good.

Watching movies that are not professionally made helps to create a mental list of do’s and don’ts when planning a short film and I feel that this will help us to create a successful short film.