Jelly baby activity

This task was to create a story board for the opening of a film using jelly babies as actors. We did this to cement our knowledge of what different genres require to be succesful. It was also a good exercise to help us start thinking about framing and where actors fit within a frame. It also was a good way to make us start thinking about our openings as a whole and not just the narrative. We have to think about which shots should be used and what shots fit certain genres, for example independent social realism films often have a low budget so have to use simple shots like two shots and close ups to establish the mood and setting where as a high budget action film can use fancier shots like crane shots.

In this task I learnt about the importance of framing, I realised that not only do we have to think about the narrative of the opening but also where actors need to appear in the shot, they cant always be in the center of the screen because then it will be very boring and won't entice the audience to watch the rest of the film. I also learnt that there are very specific conventions when it comes to different genres, A sci-fi film will usually have one lone protagonist at the start to establish isolation as a theme. This was the first time our group really worked together on something creative. It was interesting to find out what people would be good ideas for various genres, this then gave me personally an idea of how ideas I have and how I work would go with how others in my group work and their ideas.

At first I found it hard to understand how we will be able to represent actors and the opening of a film better with jelly babies than with drawings. Once we started though I understood that it was important to use something physical rather than drawings to make things more realistic, by using the jelly babies we could start to understand the limitations we had as we are using real people that have physical limitations not drawings that can do what ever is in our imaginations, we need to learn to adapt.

We were given some story briefs which gave us a genre and what characters to include (one male protagonist, a female progatonist and antagonist) we decided as a group to look at a social realism film. We did this because its a genre we haven't looked at very much but they are known to be made mostly by independent institutes with small budgets. We decided as a group that it would be best to try to see what we could come up within this genre as it is likely we will be making a social realism film opening or a similar genre as we obviously don't have a big budget. It was better to spend time practising and becoming confident whith these genres because we would rather make a top quality low budget film than attempt an action film, for example, which requires the big budget we don't have.