Skip to main content

Short Film Research: Buried Treasure

 Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog!. I am continuing to research short films and their conventions. I am reviewing short films that follow my genre to learn about conventions I would need to use for my short film. As the genre I am using is mystery, I am going to be watching mystery short films. In this blog I am going to research the mystery short film, “Buried Treasure”. I was able to find this short film option on YouTube. When the film opens, the music is the first thing once again that I notice. This music is different though from the last movie I reviewed. The difference was that this music got louder progressively as the opening of the short film continued. The lighting is the same though. I notice the dark lighting. The dark lighting creates a very deep shadow and puts spotlights on certain aspects. This goes back to the point convention I’ve noticed in mystery films which is having the audience very focused on the little details. When watching, I continue to see the convention commonly used in mystery short films which is simplicity. This is even shown through the camera shots and angles. These are shots and angles such as aerial view, tracking shots, and close up shots. Furthermore, I can see this through the editing like I have seen is commonly used. I can see this in the editing by the use of simplistic editing with cross cutting being the main editing technique used. Another type of camera trick I've seen used as a contention in mystery films is by the focus of the camera. For example, it is commonly used that the camera would be focused on one thing but something else would be happening in the background. I’ve also noticed lots of wide shots. Another thing I have noticed is that the music tends to play mostly the entire time throughout mystery short films. But it is so subtle that it doesn’t distract you from what is going on, it also remains very low. In mystery short films, there was also a lack of dialogue which I think makes the audience be focused on what is going on and not words. The use of sound effects to build the darkness factor of mystery films is also very conventional and the music changes based on what is happening in the movie. After reviewing this short film, I continued to look at more long normal films that matched the mystery genres. Some other movies I found include Oppenheimer and Shutter Island. When reviewing this movie, something I found that I disliked is the receptiveness of the genre. This receptiveness comes from the shots used and the editing techniques. While it is simplistic, after reviewing multiple mystery films the receptiveness of things in this film is something I found I was not fond of. I did like the filter added in the editing process to these movies though. I liked the gray contrast to make the dark and spooky convention. But that’s it from me my group picked our genre, we researched our genre further, and next we are going to start planning. Be back for more!



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Production Blog: Editing Blog

 Hey guys and welcome back to my blog. In my last blog you heard how we finally filmed! Not everything went as we planned but we had to make do. Today I am going to be telling you about the editing process of our film. I actually edited the film on my phone for the most part. The editing process took a very long time, longer than I expected. If I had to give a number, I would say this process took a total of 2-3 hours. But, we knew we had to make up for our filming aspect so I did what I had to do. We edited our short film on this app called CapCut. CapCut is a very popular editing app which I have used in the past. What I mean by this is I love how you don't have to be the most experienced at editing and your edits can still come out great. When editing, the first thing I did was gather the clips. Once I did this, I started to think about all the titles needed. When editing this, I took inspiration from a previous movie I researched. What I did intentionally, I made sure the effec...

Production Blog: Filming Blog

 Hey guys and welcome back to my blog!  Guess what, we filmed! My group mate and I finally filmed. Mya and I filmed at Sawgrass Mall, a mall near both of our houses. Filming took about a two hours in total. We were on a time crunch so we had to hurry . The person we ended up using to play the kidnapper was both Mya and I's friend Joey. We picked Joey because  fit the type of person we wanted to play that character.  But, Joey ended up not being able to come last minute which we started to panic. The main problem we had when filming was finding a location. Specifically , it was hard for our group to find a family bathroom that fit how we wanted it to look. We wanted a family bathroom so that we can all go inside and film inside the bathroom with everyone helping out. We ended up not being able to find a family restroom. We looked all over the mall and couldn't find one and we all started to freak out. But, we couldn't make one appear so we just decided to scrap that s...

Genre Decision Blog

 Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog, today I wanted to share with you my group's decision on what genre our final task will be.  The first genre we considered was a comedic genre and this was a genre we spent a lot of time looking at. When looking at it, we liked how comedy and comedic decision is spread throughout the entire media,  for example, you have the comedic and goofy movements with the camera shaking and going upside down. As we reviewed it more, our thoughts changed about the props and we originally didn't like the use of props but as we reviewed we began to see the comedic purposes that props play and that purpose,  it can be the actor using it to do something silly or really anything, and we also liked how we would use diegetic sound like laughing to get the genre across even more. But, there was a really big dealbreaker when it came to part of this genre and that was the dialogue aspect. The reason this was a dealbreaker is because we thought it...