Deonstruction of Actors in Social Realism Films

FISHTANK

Connor- Michael Fassbender

- Middle Class

- Innocent but becomes the antagonist

- Charming

Mia- Katie Jarvis

- Aggressive

- Working Class

- Isolated

- Young teenage girl

- Criminal

-  Has no future

- Audience feels sympathetic for her

- Lonely

 Joanne- Keirston Wareing

- Emotional

- Single mum

- Not a maternal mother

JUNO

Juno- Ellen Page
- 16 year old girl
- Quirky
- Innocent
- Independent
- Middle class
- Emotional
- Pregnant
- Confident
- Feminist
Paulie- Michael Cera
- Admires Juno
- Innocent
- Middle class
- Naive













LONDON TO BRIGHTON

Joanne- Georgia Groome
- Young girl
- Innocent
- Immature
- Smokes
- Homeless
- Runaway child
Kelly- Lorraine Stanley
- Maternal figure
- Working class/homeless
- Caring
Stuart- Sam Spruell
- Middle class
- Middle aged man
- Bully
- Violent
- Rich













KIDULTHOOD

Sam- Noel Clarke
- Mixed raced
- 15 years old
- Violent
- Bully
- Antagonist
- Abusive to girls
Becky- Jaime Winstone
- Underage drinking
- Abused
- Innocent

Narrative Theories

• Bordwell and Thompson (1980) state that narrative is defined as “a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occurring in time”. American screenwriter, Syd Field suggests a good film must, in the first ten minutes, engage the target audience whilst introducing the genre and narrative.  In our group, we have conformed to this theory in just a small fraction of this time to create a successful sixty second teaser trailer using restricted narration to force enigmas and offer minimal information about the urban teen drama film through mise-en-scene such as drugs and cigarettes but enough to engage our target audience. By using subjective character identification we have given the audience a view into the main characters life from the outside – creating further enigma towards the cause of her being alone.  

•  Vladimir Propp’ Theory of Narrative suggests the narrative “spheres of action” apply to most films. This theory introduces seven character types; hero, villain, donor, helper, princess, dispatcher and false hero. From out teaser trailer, the audience can assume the main character, Rose, plays the part of the princess and the villain due to her underlying battles with depression and isolation highlighted in the titles.  From these titles the audience can tell Rose is her own villain as she is a victim of her own self-destructive mind and chooses to take harmful drugs seen in shots of her injecting heroin- this also makes her the princess. As our film is a social realist film, Rose being two opposite character types conforms to real life situations where realistically, there is not always a hero character and there is not always a happy ending which we have highlighted in our trailer by closing the trailer with an enigmatic shot of Rose wearing old, dirty clothes outside.

• Aristotle studied the narrative of plays and found that the narrative should be created within a ‘unity of time’. With the entire plot based in the same location in real time with all action leading towards a conclusion. Our trailer subverts this idea as it shows a number of different locations and times without conclusion. Continuous montage of footage shows jump cuts between different locations including a flashback and unresolved issues including homelessness.
• Todorov presented a theory of narrative that suggests five stages of narrative in mainstream films; equilibrium, disruption, recognition, repaid and new equilibrium. Our film however subverts this idea as the trailer opens with the upmost point of disequilibrium with close up shots of cooking and injecting heroin as well as ending the trailer with a fast mid shot of Rose sitting alone outside, homeless.  This creates further enigma as the first stage or equilibrium and how disruption occurred are not clear.

• Allan Cameron’s Modular Narrative’s “articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation”. Of the four types of modular narrative; anachronic, forking paths, episodic and split screens – our trailer has an anachronic narrative, as there is no clear dominance between and of the narrative threads. Our character has physical flashbacks near the end of the trailer, which show her life before she turned to drugs. This flashback cements the narrative to show calm and happiness before she became an adult. The flashbacks are also the only time you see Rose with other people, which highlights her isolation in real time.
• Levi-Strauss’ Binary Oppositions theory states that narrative tension is based on opposition or conflict. Our trailer conforms to this theory as Rose is in conflict with herself. Her drug and alcohol abuse shown in he trailer along with evidence of depression shows her inner turmoil and conflict with her own mind and habits. There is also a transition and clear opposition between her current situation and her past where she was much happier shown through mid shots of her laughing with friends in comparison to mid shots of her in real time alone and isolated with nobody around her.

Poster Production

I used the image I manipulated on Photoshop to create a draft poster shown below. 

• The first thing I did was upload the image I had manipulated on Photoshop and opened all of the reviews, awards and billings block as new layers.
• I then dragged the components onto the background image and set the layer mode to lighten so that the text was visible without a black background.
• I then took a screenshot of our title from the trailer and erased the background to create a house style across all of our production pieces as the website, trailer and poster all use the same typography and colours.

Evaluation

• This poster isn't being used for the final production as it is quite basic and there is a lot of blank space as the composition and positioning of the text and layers don't look placed correctly on the image.
• All of the components look good on the poster - the billings block, title and reviews look professional however the layout is not entirely professional.

Website Production

•  I altered the website to make is more user friendly and have the landing page fit on one screen.
• We came across a problem when we first published our site as the layout on a mac was different to a windows monitor so we now have to adjust the size and layout of the page to fit on one screen to look more user friendly.
• I added the orange gradient title by removing the background on Photoshop and saving the image as a .png file. I then imported it onto the website and selected 'No Frame' on the Wix design feature. This removed the background and made the typography on all of our promotional pieces have the same house style (seen below)

• I deleted the bottom bar as it meant the user had to scroll down which wasn't conventional or user friendly. As I was removing this, I moved the social media icons to the top right of the page on the menu bar and checked on our published site that all of the links led to a new window.

Our website is published at www.invictamedia8.wix/eighteen8

Final Storyboard

Final Draft of Storyboard

Below is the final copy of the storyboard for our trailer. Each box represents a different shot used. Below the box is a small description of the shot if it is unclear. The storyboard can be compared to our final trailer.

Last minute, we added a title before the first shot of the character smoking saying "Can she fight to take back her life" and after the close up shot of the character breathing out smoke saying "From the depths of depression and addiction?" 

To conclude, I think that the storyboard represents the trailer well. 

Mise-en-scene and Lighting Evaluation

Mise-en-scene:
- Lighter
- Teaspoon
- Golden syrup
- Sugar
- Rucksack

- Syringe and oil
- Mascara, eyeliner and water
- Hoodie

 - The shots of the preparing of the heroin worker really well with the lighting. We used a black reflective chopping board which created a professional finish. However it was difficult to avoid the reflection of the camera and our group in the background of the chopping board so it took many attempts to complete.
- We filmed the teaspoon shots in many different angles however we thought that this angle and extreme close up shot really showed the creativity of using golden syrup and sugar to represent the drug.

 - In the shot the hand flicking the syringe we decided to use olive oil to portray the drug 'heroine'.  We were going to use golden syrup like we did on the teaspoon however we found it difficult to insert into the syringe so we decided to use olive oil instead which was the closest resemblance.
- In the shot of the girl running through the subway we used a rucksack for the miss-en-scene so portray the idea of her running away.

- In this shot we had the character wear a dark hoodie, this portrays the stereotype of the clothing teenagers wear which we wanted to convey in our trailer. The stereotypes of teenagers wearing hoodies is that they are in to crime and are unsociable. This use of mise-en-scene subverts common representations as this character is female and has a innocent appearance.
- This next shot shows low-key lighting, this lighting tends to heighten the sense of alienation felt by the viewer which is why we used it in the flashback shots of the girl looking back on happy memories.

- In these next shots we used high-key lighting this is because high-key lighting is free from dark shadows and is used to suggest an upbeat mood, we used it in these shots because this is when the girl looks back on her happy memories through the mirror.

Final poster

Final poster

Process

This is the original image that I started off with. I thought that this image was effective due to the brick wall behind her; conforming to conventions in urban films. I also liked how we took the golden rule into consideration when we took this photo so that the majority of the writing could go on the left hand side.

I took the feedback I got from my first draft into account and made the walls darker by using the burn tool on Photoshop as well as duplicating another layer of our actress to give the appearance of a shadow behind her. To make this appropriate for our genre, I also found some photos of graffiti on google images then layering this on top and lowering the opacity. I rubbed some parts of the graffiti out using the eraser tool to give it a more realistic, faded appearance.

I then added our title and billing block created by Chloe onto our poster. We decided to use the title from our teaser trailer with the orange background instead of a plain white or black title because we wanted to ensure that our fonts were the same throughout our trailer, poster and website. Due to the black background on the billing block, I had to use the effect 'divide' to get rid of the black background but keep the white text. 

The star ratings/reviews were created by finding an image of a 5 star rating on google then writing the review using the text tool on Photoshop. These reviews were taken from our previous poster deconstructions. This was repeated three times vertically to give us 3 reviews. I also included images of the awards received for this film on the side of our poster but making them white to follow the colour scheme.

Lastly, I added our age rating by our billing block and "From the producer of Fishtank" so that those who enjoyed Fishtank may also enjoy our film. We then added our tagline "Freedom comes with responsibility. Consciousness comes with pain" ensuring that it was smaller than our title.