RESEARCH
Contextual Research Report
Similar Narratives / Themes
In this section of my Contextual Research Report, I am going to be looking at different narratives of different sources and noting the inspiration I am taking from it, and how I will adapt and use it in my Project.
Never Let Me Go by Andrew Mcdonald
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The main theme of this film is the value of human life, it shows the ethical implications of how they used clones for organ donations. It raises issues about the clones being treated like human beings, the moral responsibility. This is something I am taking inspiration from as I want to aware the audience of issues that people face in this world, showcasing how some people with certain conditions may not be treated the same as others.
“In the twentieth century many scholars, religions, and philosophical traditions deemed all human rights, including economic rights, equally rooted in and required by the dignity of the human person.”
This quote said in the book the ‘Handbook of Human Rights’ is something I couldn’t agree with more, and is a matter I really want to showcase in my Final Outcome, how treating people with equality and dignity really matters.
The Office by Ricky Gervias
The whole feel of the TV show, The Office, is something I may consider within my Film itself. 'The single-camera setup and talking-head interviews only make the situational comedy feel that much more authentic.'
I personally love how they present this show, something I want to do within my film is connect with the audience may be almost making them almost feel like they're a part of their narrative, which is something I think The Office does really well.
Getting your film to perceive the documentary style isn’t as easy as it sounds, there are multiple techniques involved within your Production to mimic this.
“Different characters react to the camera differently. Pam and Jim, for example, treat the camera as a friend and will share a look of disbelief or surprise.”
This is a technique I will have to keep in mind, especially when I move onto the Planning section, interacting with the camera will definitely give the audience the sense of a Realistic Documentary, which I think fits really well with the whole Real Life problems that people face with, from my first bit of inspiration. Something that seems more realistic to the audience, could help them take it more seriously and really create awareness about these problems.
Hal Emmerich, a video game character from the Metal Game Series, lived a life and said things that I think are important to take into consideration.
"The whole reason I got into science in the first place was because I was no good with people. I was scared of them. I was scared of life. I thought that I could never understand them because they're so illogical. But I've finally learned how to like people. I'm not afraid anymore."
I think something people need to think about, especially when dealing with issues, is you’re not alone. I completely agree, human beings can have tendencies to be so illogical and unthoughtful but, there are people out there that care, and not one person in this world deserves to go through life dealing with things on their own. This is a message I would like to convey in my Final Film.
The Miracle Worker (1969)
The Miracle Worker is a film that portrays challenges faced by people with disabilities and the importance of treating them with empathy and understanding. However Helen Keeler, a deaf and blind woman in this film, overcomes her problems with the help of her teacher. I think the main message I’m taking inspiration from this film is, to never give up even in the most extreme situations. Being able to communicate with someone that is deaf and blind at first seems almost impossible but this film proves the seemingly impossible to not be true at all.
The musical score in the film "Schindler's List" directed by Steven Spielberg features a melancholic theme played on a solo violin. The music enhances the emotional impact of the film and helps to convey the sadness and tragedy of the events depicted on screen. I think it creates a great sense of empathy between the characters and the audience as well as heightens the emotional sonority of the story.
Knowing I am creating a Sad Drama, I will take inspiration from this to make sure the music I choose deeply connects with the audience and really gives them a sense of what's going on, almost making them feel as if they were characters in the film. I personally think the music you use is just as important as the visuals on screen. Without the right choice of music, the viewer may be misled about the meaning of the ongoing events.
Lost in Translation
From the cinematography aspect of films, I really like the use of wide-angle shots in the film Lost In Translation”
This shot of Harris stays static for quite a while and it gives the audience the impression of the character’s loneliness within such an immense room.
The use of this wide-angle shot here will be something I am definitely thinking of including in my Project, as it will help indicate the sense of helplessness and sadness to show the audience how someone alone feels. Backing up the part of showing the audience how someone alone feels, close-up shots are a great way of proving the pure emotion that someone is feeling.
At Eternity's Gate
In the film, At Eternity’s Gate, this close-up of Willem Dafoe really captures the intensely dramatic moment of how he is feeling at that current moment, I feel extreme close-ups really capture the rawest detail of what someone is feeling, which really sets the tone here well. These shots are definitely something I will be trying to work on in my Project, as I need the audience to really get the full picture of how the characters are feeling and how this changes throughout the film.
This image was something I saw and at first glance, you would genuinely always relate it to sadness, which influenced me a lot to look into why you would think such a thing. The most noticeable thing in this image that tells us he is sad is the lighting.
“The light is one of the most important languages when we talk about a conversation between the viewer, the creator, and the world.”
I completely agree with this statement said in Wedio’s YouTube Video as without light, the viewers could be very misunderstood with the whole sensation the film is trying to convey.
The creator here used very low-key lighting also side-lit, side lighting can be as intense as you like it and here I feel they used it very harshly. The dark shadows on the particular side of the subject create a sense of sorrow but also unease. These are two things I would love to follow within my film. I want people to feel sorry for the characters, understand their pain, and feel remorse, but too also feel unalerted with what their next actions could be, creating a sensation of mystery.
Real Life
In this section of my Contextual Research Report, I am going to be looking at the Real Life elements that will help develop my Final Project.
The History
The 20th Century
“deaf people had neither produced their own histories themselves nor attracted the attention
of hearing scholars. Deafness for too long had been viewed from the perspective of pathology. In this view, deaf people are diseased or disabled they lack the attributes of full humanity”
This quote, that was told from back in the 1980s was a view where Deaf people really lacked a need to care for, someone would hear of a person that was unable to hear, and they would be labeled as disabled or even diseased.
The 21st Century
“A simple yet pivotal argument often used by Deaf advocates is that since Deaf people can communicate easily and fluently amongst one another using American Sign Language”
From studies, they show that sign language has been around since as early as the 16th century. However, people never deemed this to be a way to almost revive the deaf. By this I mean, people never treated it as a sufficient way to consider deaf people normal humans containing “the attributes of full humanity”. However, as time progressed into the Current Times especially, deaf people promote a viewpoint labeled by themself called the “Cultural model”. This is opposed to the typical method they referred to deaf people as in the 1980s known as the “Medical / Pathological model”. The model I believe and want to showcase in my film that we should all follow moving forward with time is the Cultural one as I feel everyone deserves equality, and deaf people have just as many rights as a hearing-abled person does too.
“In understanding these subtle cultural processes, the concept of symbolic violence will be particularly important. Although we must not ignore the overt and far from invisible violence that people who are deaf and people labeled “disabled” have suffered and continue to suffer”
This is an issue of something I want to aware people of in my films, I either want to go down the route of showing Deaf people are no different to a hearingable person and how they don't deserve to be treated differently. Or, show the horrific experiences these people have to deal with, I mean it doesn’t all have to be violence, deaf people can have mentally challenging times too eg: Being alone, being alone is something no one should have to face within this world. “We know that, for some, feelings of loneliness go deeper than one’s social network and that addressing the deeper roots of loneliness stemming from trauma and early childhood may take some time and professional help.”
This is why my film, will be a message to be who are not aware of these issues and see it as something that is not an issue in the world and also to show that seeking help isn’t wrong it's absolutely the right thing to do.
Sound of Metal
The film, Sound of Metal received a lot of criticism for its casting of a Deaf character being played by an able-hearing actor. ‘its impact on the Deaf and hard of hearing community has been ignored, with responses varied, but largely negative, particularly regarding casting a hearing actor as Ruben’
Where the film did have a few deaf actors playing deaf roles, these seemed to be very minor characters lacking a story or name. People only felt ‘I felt they were in the movie as a crutch to support a story about the main character’.
I feel all of this seems to be rather ethically challenging. I’m sure everyone has different views on this, whether or not its right to give the Main character role to a person who hasn’t experienced such things as a deaf person could’ve. However, I feel it all comes down to the fact it is acting at the end of the day. Also to note I do not have the connections to find a Deaf Actor for my film, so wether people believe its ethically right or not I will be using a Hearing-Abled person for my film but, to sort out the other ethical implications I will be listening to what deaf people feel and their views on the moral way to go with how they believe, they should be communicating with others! 'Another issue people had with the film was that the conversation about the Deaf community felt simplistic because it was catering to hearing audiences who don’t know much about Deaf culture or discourse.’
The Locations
The musical score in the film "Schindler's List" directed by Steven Spielberg features a melancholic theme played on a solo violin. The music enhances the emotional impact of the film and helps to convey the sadness and tragedy of the events depicted on screen. I think it creates a great sense of empathy between the characters and the audience as well as heightens the emotional sonority of the story.
Theories and Techniques
In the final section of my Contextual Research Report, I am going to be talking about one planning method and two practical methods and different ways to achieve these methods within my FMP.
Practical Methods
Color Grading: One technique I will definitely be using within my FMP is Colour Grading. I personally think Colour Grading is absolutely necessary to obtain the feeling of a certain emotion within a film. 'Certain colour palettes draw the viewer in and create a sense of comfort, while others isolate the viewer and make them feel disoriented. Just as some create a nostalgic atmosphere while others evoke tension and grit.'
It is absolutely essential within Colour Grading that you do it correctly. Providing your film with an incorrectly done Grade will mislead viewers about how you want to present your film to feel for the audience.
One way I am going to achieve this is by using the Lumetri Colour panel in Premiere Pro. 'Premiere is one of the best programs you can use to colour grade footage as it has a wide range of colour tools available for this purpose.'
This quote said by Kayla Dube is something I completely agree with and the main reason why I always choose to use Premiere Pro to grade my clips over Davinci Resolve. Davinci Resolve is known to be the industry-leading in Colour Grading but I feel for my Projects, I will always favour using Premiere due to its basic and easy-to-navigate controls to grade my projects to my Standards in a matter of no time.
Lumetri features basic colour wheels, curves and LUT’s to adjust the look of your image to your liking. I think all these features combined are more than enough for me to create a pleasing colour adjustment to my footage.
In the past, I was pretty interested in learning DaVinci Resolve especially for colour grading, as it is known to be one of the best out there, especially for big Hollywood productions and such. However, when watching this video and ones alike, I came to realise that this wasn’t gonna be an easy learning process especially just from a few YouTube Videos. The layout is completely different and if I wanted to implement Colour Grading from Davinci within my films, I’m gonna need to improve my workflow fast as I was very slow when first starting out.
So out of these two, Premiere is the one in favour of me due to its simplicity for my project needs. Having a good workflow is known for 'minimising room for errors and increasing overall efficiency.' which is something I’m more capable of on Premiere Pro.
Which is something I'm really interested in potentially doing for my FMP. Creating a look that makes my film a lot more cinematic is what I want to achieve to please the audience. Using Magic Bullet Looks also takes colour grading to another level of simplicity in a way. You can of course, really go in-depth with this program using all the tools from scratch. However, built inside of the plugin are preset Looks, such a wide range of film looks, different genres and so on to use to grade your Footage.
I think I am considering combining a basic adjustment correction with Lumetri Colour to get my clips out of Log and fix the Shadows and Highlights then, adding a Magic Bullet Looks plugin over the top of that to finalise the real colouring I want to set, for the visual emotion of my Final Major Project.
However, something I have noticed in the past with a few different LUT’s in the Magic Bullet Library, is that some of them tend to tear your footage apart. What I have found is that if you shoot in LOG on your Camera you can help prevent this rather than shooting in a Standard Picture Profile. 'It’s much flatter, it has a lot more dynamic range which means that you get a lot more detail in the highlights and the shadows'
Basically, this means, that some of the LUTs really heavily require intense shadows they try to darken the footage so much that it falls apart, and starts banding.
As you can see from the video I made here, With the Non-LOG Clip when I was trying to extract all that detail from the shadows and highlights it was creating some awful noise in those areas, and completely changing around the color making the image look totally unnatural. However, when I was grading the LOG Clip all that detail was kept in the shadows and highlights and I could pretty much drag the slider of these two values to whatever I wanted, without losing any unnatural color and generating any noticeable noise.
Stabilisation: Another practical technique I will be using within my FMP is stabilisation. Stabilsation is 'the process of making something physically more secure or stable'.
Paperback Oxford English Dictionary
by Oxford Languages
Which, In my case is to make my Camera’s footage more stable and less shaky. Stabilisation is something that will be key within my FMP, not all shots will require dead still smooth-moving shots. For example, If I was to have a shot of someone running it could be nice to have a smooth tracking shot unless I wanted to build suspense and make the audience feel like they're actually apart of the action if let’s say he was running away from somewhere.
Good stablisation can be achieved in many ways, some being whilst filming the Production itself - so to do with how you film the footage in the first place, and some within the Post-Production aspect - when editing the footage inside of your desired editor.
The first way of Stablisation I could do is by using camera stabilisers such as Steadicams, Sliders, and Tracks. I think this is one of the best ways to really acquire those smooth-moving shots, whether they are long or short ones.
However, sadly it isn’t easy as just purchasing a Camera Stabiliser, putting it on your camera, and hitting record. There are several techniques with each different one that helps you to actually achieve that nice stable image you desire. The stabiliser I will most likely be using the most is my Ronin RS3 Gimbal, 'Try to walk as smoothly as you can, that means basically like keeping your knees bent and walking heel to toe' is something Peter Lindgren stated in his tutorial of How to Get Good Gimbal Shots. Using this technique he was talking about will really help me out to achieve that certain cinematic style shot, I want to execute in my Final Major Project.
I can definitely see myself using a lot of Gimbal shots, as its the best choice I have to get those long and multiple-angled shots whereas, the other options I have such as the Rhino Slider is only 42” long so it can be used to get those slow but short cinematic shots.
A film I really take inspiration from, for its unique cinematography style, is Wes Andersons’: The Grand Budapest Hotel. I love how Wes Anderson creates his visuals, from his planimetric composition where he only moves the camera a long the X and Y axis to his symmetry, how he keeps all his characters symmetrical within the Rule of Thirds.
This shot is something I really want to use from Wes Andersons’ film, which would work perfectly with either a Rhino Slider or Tracks as it’s perfectly moving a long the X axis, and Rhino Sliders move straight in one direction.
5:22 Timestamp
Another form of Stablisation I could, and will also most likely use, is within the post-production side to my Final Project. Stabilisation here tends to be done to perfect your footage as it’s something I would, and will do alongside the Camera stablisers as well.
Planning Methods
Storyboards: One technique I will definitely be using within my FMP is Storyboards. Storyboards are one of the most useful forms of Planning, without them you'll get to Production Days and spend so much time figuring out the shots you want, but Storyboards make your life so much easier and more efficient.
For the most efficiency, the first way I picked out to Storyboard was Hand-Drawn ones. These provided a basic sketch, including potential lighting, angle, and sound details below. They are super helpful to give you a solid understanding of what shot you wanted to acquire and were fast too. These could literally be drawn with stickmen, they were just a quick form of Planning to get all your ideas down on paper quickly, but effectively.
As a whole, I will definitely be considering using these within my FMP, either as just a draft of the Final Thing, I haven't decided yet. I need to watch some more videos on how to improve my drawings within Storyboards, to make sure their actually going to be useful when it comes to Production Days!