Reflective analysis
I have made a low budget
experimental film; the film is titled Vitae. While making the film I have
attempted to incorporate as many techniques from my influences as I could. This
is because I thought that this would make my film more appropriate for my target
audience, which is channel 4's 3 minute wonders. This is a programme for
budding new directors to make films to be broadcast. This is why I have chosen
the viewers of this program as my target audience. A lot of the 3 minute
wonders were experimental films making my film appropriate for this target
audience.
When planning what
I was going to do with my film I decided that I was going to have a simple car
journey in which it shows different destinations that I believe are important
in life, I decided to do this to
show the life cycle and the order that people are expected live in, almost like
a continuous loop with repeated destinations. Although life is supposed to be
beautiful my intention was to show that no matter what you do in life
everyone lives through the same things, you're born, you learn,
you reproduce and you die.
This relates to my
target audience as perhaps they prefer films that aren’t mainstream
because of their interest in channel 4's 3-minute wonder festival. Because of
this I think that they would prefer avant-garde films, because my
film has no linear narrative and isn't conventional to mainstream
cinema then the audience may understand the reasoning of my piece and
appreciate the meaning behind it better.
One of my main
influences is film maker Godfrey Reggio, I have watched many of his films, one
of which influenced me the most, that film is Naqoyqatsi, and I was mostly
influenced by how he took different everyday images and incorporated them into
his work, this is what I tried to do with my piece but instead of piecing
together the images to make a narrative I decided to have a montage sequence in
the background in different points in time/ different points in life.
The setting of my
piece would be different destinations that I believed important or almost
cliché to human life. The destinations I chose were a maternity ward, primary
and secondary schools, college, the justice centre, a work place, a place for a
date, a church and then the first 3 are repeated and finally a funeral parlour.
I chose these places because I thought the mise- en-scene would portray to the
target audience the meaning of the piece. Godfrey Reggio also
influenced this. In a lot of his films he uses past, present and future, this
idea helped me to understand the meaning of his films so I wanted to
incorporate it into my own so that my target audience could interpret my piece
better. I planned my film like this as it is very specific to my own life,
my piece is the things I have done, the things I am doing and the things that I
could potentially do one day.
In the background
of each destination was an event that could happen, I took different moving
images from the Internet and incorporated them into the film, I did this
because I was able to show more explicit things, like childbirth. The main
influence for this idea was Simon Pummel's Body song, this is a montage film
which uses found footage from the last 100 years of film to show the different
stages of life. I decided to incorporate this idea into my own film by having
life events in the background of each destination, I changed the opacity of the
images so that the audience could see the destination and the event at the same
time to show that the images corresponded.
Another thing that I have used in my film is the use of black and white, some sections of my piece are in black and white and some are in colour. I believe that some parts of life are more important than others and therefore they are in colour, whereas others aren’t as important or they are things that people don’t consider really relevant, therefore these images are in black and white. This is a technique commonly used by Godfrey Reggio, I found it very effective in his films and thought I would apply it to my own.
In all of Godfrey Reggio`s films
the music comes from a composer called Phillip Glass, this music is very dramatic
but can also be very ambient. I didn’t want to use Phillip Glass’ work in my
piece because his work is very specific to Godfrey Reggio`s films and emphasise
his films, however I was inspired by his work and I still wanted to use the
dramatic and ambient themes, so I decided to use the music piece Sudden Throw
by Ólafur Arnolds, This piece is very ambient but dramatic at
the end, I chose it because it wouldn’t distract attention from the images but
will engage the target audience, I found that this piece corresponded very well
with the montage sequence making it more interesting to watch.
Although the concept of the film
was good I think that I could have made the film considerably better, for me
there could have been more images so that it was more interesting to watch. I
also think that the cinematography should have been improved to be more
visually pleasing, I think that I should have used a tripod or driven slower to
make the footage smoother, Because the quality of
footage isn't a very high standard I think that it makes the
film appear very rushed and amateurish and
not aesthetically pleasing, which I don’t think would appealed to the
target audience
