Short Film Examples
Before we can make our film from scratch, I thought it'd be a good idea to have a little look at some other people who have created action films on YouTube. This way I can get a rough idea of some of the plotlines that go on, character models and the general conventions used within them. I decided I'd look at three in total so I could get a fairly good mixture but without showing myself so many plots that I end up sub-consciously stealing ideas. The following is what I found:
film #1 - error
Director (Creators): Mad Planet Productions (YouTube channel), directed by Jake Saker.
Length: 3:33 minutes.
Character Models: Woman boss leading assailants (breaks stereotypical conventions); rest are dark clothed, armoured men with guns and masks (pretty typical of action films).
Plot: The story appears to be about an organisation trying to take down one man. It opens with the woman, who appears to be the boss, ordering her men to enter the house and dispose of the target but it quickly ends up on the reversal; the target takes out all the men one by one in a series of action sequences until he ends up back where he start (watching TV!). It's a very simple story but already I can see the focus on the action itself, something that perhaps our film will look to rely on too when we come to making it.
Conventions: There are a lot of jump cuts and the editing moves at a fast pace at mostly all times except for the duration of the opening scenes. There's a twist near the middle where the target disguises himself as one of the assailants in order to sneak into the car and take out the woman (perhaps my group and I could incorporate some kind of clever narrative twist into our film too). It feels like a lot of the sounds in the film are foley sounds (edited in after the fact) especially during the action sequences, perhaps this is something we need to take into consideration when we think about how we come to planning out any of our potential sequences. A lot of the shots are fairly standard; there are a lot of close-ups during the action sequences and a lot of mid-shots elsewhere. This is evidently somewhere that we'll have to do better in because we don't want to keep re-using the same shots in case it gets boring for the audience. Lastly, the music is intense throughout and it says in the description of the video that someone composed it for the film. We'll have to choose our music carefully and make sure it suits the intensity of our film.
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film #2 - The Job
Director (Creators): Sidney Robert (YouTube channel), directed by Sidney McWood & Ivery Barel.
Length: 5:00 minutes.
Character Models: Main character in fairly casual clothing but with a dark jacket to add to the suspicion - only character!
Plot: Main character is a man who gets hired for suspicious "jobs" and gets a mysterious phone call beckoning him to a (mostly) empty car park. I particularly like this setting because it really adds to the tension and I think I'd quite like our film to have an isolated feel so that the audience feels like there are big stakes. From there, he gets another phone call telling him to get into a car where he then drives off to a private location to deliver something but then he is turned on and the film surprisingly (but excellently) ends with the main character being executed.
Conventions: This is perhaps my favourite of the films I've watched and mainly because of the way it almost defies usual conventions. The editing and choice of music is very slow and tension building at the start up to the point of the character reaching his destination by car. This is in contrast to the other two films which used constant fast music and quick cuts to add to the action. Of course, this film did include this too but right near the end and didn't need to rely on quick editing the whole time. There's a high usage of shaky cam shots (perhaps not always on purpose by the seems of it) which, for us, will hopefully be somewhat different because our school intends on letting us borrow a tripod. I really like the way the actor uses his voice and the way the editing makes the antagonist's voice add to the tension and I'm hoping any potential actors we obtain for our film can be as good as this acting! The sound quality is really very good too. Like the other two films, this film also has a twist which makes me think that maybe our film is in need of having a twist when we get to it (either that or we try and break the usual conventions with something that's really out there which could end up being a fun challenge too).
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film #3 - REC
Director (Creators): JamieDugganFilms (YouTube channel), directed by Jamie Duggan & Josiah Jirgens.
Length: 5:01 minutes.
Character Models: Lead male dressed in casual clothing (but still somewhat dark), rest is an all male cast except the one secondary male character who wears deceivingly bright clothing considering the personality and nature of the character (maybe done on purpose?).
Plot: The story is once again heavily action driven but this plot is a little bit more twisted. It appears to be either a war-torn country or a dystopian World where an evil organisation/government/group of soldiers have taken over and our lead male is just trying to survive. Along the way he meets another survivor whom he believes is a friend but later turns out to be an enemy as well. This is where this story is a little more complicated than, say, ERROR.
Conventions: Once again, the editing is at a quick pace the further into the film we get. In this one, though, there is a consistent backdrop of gunfire and explosions in the distance which further exemplifies the dystopian/war-torn atmosphere that the story is grounded in. We need to think about this background noise when we come to our film if we end up wanting to go with a storyline that's based in a particular setting or time. There's also muzzle flare and bullet sparks coming out of the guns in this story unlike in ERROR and the director left behind a tutorial on how to do this in the video description so perhaps we could look to that for our film should we decide to go with firearms in our action sequences. In terms of narrative, in this film there is a narrator who is the main character as well as taking on the role of the expositional device for the audience. This is an avenue we could consider for ourselves although it's sometimes difficult to make this not seem boring but I think the director has done well with this film to prevent it from doing so. The only other main convention here that we haven't seen in the last two videos is the severe shaky cam shots which serve as realism devices. Essentially, by using shaky cam footage, there is a feeling of verisimilitude because it gives the audience a view as if they were there running along with the action and I think this is something we will definitely be looking to have within our film.
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