Gaining Experience...

During my study leave break, I became involved in a local film project to create a short film about how cinema used to be.

I became part of a team of volunteers from Robert Kett Court, Robert Kett Infant School and Wymondham High School pupils among other volunteers from Creative Arts East itself to create the doumentary.

I was heavily involved in the behind camera work and I spent a lot of time teaching the children how to do stopmotion animation, creating plasticine and knitted figures and planning interviews with the residents of Robert Kett Court. I also helped the main organisers plan how to structure the film and we came up with the idea of the documentary encompassing the stopmotion animation that the children from Robert Kett Infant School had done and I think it works rather well.

We were lucky enough to have the short film shown at The Regal cinema in Wymondham in front of about 150 people and we were happy to hear people laughing and having a good time.

Being part of this documentary has given me a feel of how to create a short film and the amount of work you need to put in. However, I am not daunted by the task, but rather inspired and I think that doing a short film documentary would be a really interesting thing to do. I have one idea, but will have to check whether it would be allowed and whether it would be possible.

Looking at Mime

As it's the summer holidays, I thought that I would be able to think about ideas for a short film and while I've been trying to come up with some original ideas, I've been so busy that I haven't been able to sit down and think about short film properly.

However, when thinking about short film I considered 'mime' as a possible approach as a short film. Looking at Charlie Chaplin mimes was an obvious choice to look at and while I watched a few, I tried to see whether there were any other short film mimes that have been done in recent years and I stumbled across this short film from the Vancouver Film School.

 

I really love this short film as it manages to really capture the emotions of both of the main characters. Also, from the title, you are aware that there is some form of battle in the film but it's not until you watch the film that you see the two supposed enemies become a union. I love the clear storyline and while a romance film is not one I would typically go for, this film manages to capture the viewer's attention. The camera shots are fairly simple and there are quite a few long shots which means that filming a mime would be possible for my short film for A2 and the black and white means that the viewer is not distracted from the characters as they always take up the majority of the frame. Obviously, with mime, focus is put on the facial expressions of your actors as they cannot express themselves with words so I think that mime would be an interesting genre to work in.