Brandon's Film Studies Blog

Talk by former Film Studies A Level Student In class we were fortunate enough to have been visited by a former A level film studies student, Neil, to give us some advice on the process of creating a short film. Neil was formerly in the year above us and hence he had made his short film as part of his A level film studies coursework just under a year prior to us. This meant that his experience of creating his own short film was relatively fresh. Neil's film was called 'Reflection', it was a horror film that was very enjoyable. Neil gave some very useful advice about coming up with ideas for a short film including watching more short films online outside of the set short films we have looked at in class which is an idea I pursued. Neil also said it was a good idea to base a short film on some kind of universal situatuion which is relatable to everyone. He also emphasised the importance of writing, planning and filming your short film based on the resources you alread...

Creative Ideas   One of the possible ways of coming up with an idea for my screenplay and digital storyboard include basing it on a novel or short story. This would require adapting older novels and short stories which have come into the public domain. The issue with these older stories is that they would be harder to adapt as they are products of their time and although it would be possible to put a modern spin on these stories and make for an interesting adaption it still seems more restrictive and less practical than coming up with a new idea and story. If I was to pursue this approach to creating my screenplay then I think I would of possibly adapted some older sci-fi stories that have been very influential to the genre such as the works of H.P. Lovecraft or H.G. Wells and attempted to update them and combine them with themes that are important in the 21st century. Another possibility would be to adapt a news story such as Jorn Threlfall did with 'Over', one of the...

Film Brief The options for this component of the course is to either make a five minute long (roughly) short film or to write ten pages of screenplay which would amount to roughly ten minutes of film and a digital story board for one key scene from the screenplay. I have decided to choose the latter and to write a ten page long screenplay with a digital storyboard. I made this decision because my favourites of the short films we have studied in class, 'Slap' and 'Echo' were considerably longer in duration than five minutes long and I feel as if this longer runtime gives more room for character development and a narrative with more depth.  

Welcome I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to my A level Film Studies blog. Throughout this blog I will be documenting my progress in creating a Short film of my own. I will begin by talking about the short films I have watched and analyse them using the knowledge I have gathered in the past academic year about film language including mise en scene, aesthetics, shot types and other micro elements. By the end of this blog I hope that I will be ready to begin production on my short film.