Lauren Edwards A2 Media Studies
For my project I worked with Kyle, we produced a short film "Misplaced" with a poster and a review page.
I researched the technical side of 'Lost' at http.//sky1.sky.com/lost-behind-the-scenes. I have also made a power point presentation from this comparing how ABC studies did it for 'Lost' to how we will do it for 'Misplaced'. I discovered that the location is similar although ‘Lost’ is filmed on a Hawaiian island and ‘Misplaced’ was filmed in Mousehold Heath, but it was the same basic principle of trees and grass. We didn’t use any artificial lighting or professional cameras and sound equipment because with us only being students we couldn’t afford all of that professional equipment like in ‘Lost’. We used natural lighting and took advantage of this by filming at midday when the sun is at its highest in the sky.
Our choice of using Hello Kitty may have been a last resort but it was very effective to the audience. Hello Kitty is a very recognisable innocent Japanese character that is more popular with young girls. We made Hello Kitty into a killer cat, which is the total opposite to what she is and those who know her will be shocked but amused by her new personality. I researched on http://www.pfma.org.uk/overall/pet-population-figures-.htm that cats are the second most popular pet in the United Kingdom. Cats are friendly, curious creatures that are owned in 5.2 million households in Britain, so even if some of the audience haven’t heard of Hello Kitty they will still be affected by this innocent looking killer kitten.
We searched and listened to all sorts of different sound tracks from http://freeplaymusic.com/ to use in our short film. We needed some stereotypical dramatic music for the intense scene with the killer Hello Kitty. We searched through genres; “adventure/action”, “dramatic”, “Climatic/Explosive” and “intense” and the ones we chose I felt improved the short film greatly. The music intensify the feelings and emotions of the short film, like towards the end, where you here a young woman screaming, there is dramatic music that kicks in to make the audience feel tense and frightened. During the flash back we wanted happy “sea side” music and the song we chose fit perfectly, we got the reaction that we wanted from the audience and that is laughter.
Lost
We wanted our film to parody ‘Lost’ more than everything else that we parodied and we did this by basing the story on the same similar lines as ‘Lost’.
The characters that stand out in ‘Lost’ are the male ones because they are strong and “manly” so for our film we chose to just have male characters. Although the men in ‘Lost’ are tough, the ones in our film are weak and geekish, you can tell that they are the type of people who will go home and play computer games (like the actors themselves) rather than go work out in a gym. We did this to mock not only the characters in ‘Lost’ but to also mock males in general and to show that they aren’t all “manly” and tough.
Lost is almost entirely filmed on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu and we wanted to have the same feeling as that. We had the choice of two places to film, we chose Mousehold Heath because it is actually a big woodland with a wide range of places to film in where as the other Catton Park has a small woodland area surrounding a path where people tend to walk their dogs.
Heroes
To add a bonus to our film we decided to give our characters powers, like the ones in Heroes. We picked the powers that fitted in with the plot; We had Jack have a flash back to show how he got into the woods, but it didn’t show any relevance to how he got stuck in the middle of the woods, this goes back to ‘Lost’ and how it never seems to answer or explain events; We had Matt communicate with the Hello Kitty using his mind because we needed a reason for the Hello Kitty to attack him and that is because someone disturbed the communication and angered the cat; And we had John who could transport using his magic 8 ball because we needed a explanation for him and Matt to turn up in the woods and a possibility of getting out of the woods. We gave the magic 8 ball a bit of a personality so it got upset when it was called stupid and it refused to transport them anywhere, without this there would have been no story.
Characters
Matt can communicate with animals using his mind, sort of like Matt Parkman from 'Heroes' who can read minds. He’s also winey, which is the opposite of Matt Parkman
We named Jack after the main character, Jack Shephard from ‘Lost’ because Sheppard has taken on a leader role in that group yet Jack from Misplaced is confused and “lost” and just asks a lot of questions.
John is in a way like John Locke from ‘Lost’, Locke is melodramatic and adventurous and John from ‘Misplaced’ is overdramatic and his emotions are all over the place. He is also a bit like Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings’ because Gollum is obsessed with the ring and John is obsessed with the magic 8 ball.
The screaming teenager who runs into the group in one scene is based on the female characters in 'The Blaire Witch Project' where in the film there is alot of screaming and running, it's mostly filmed by the characters hand held cameras and we took advantage of that and had her enter the scene with a point of view shot of her running towards the group.
The review page was created by Kyle Bamford as well, he designed it for a magazine called ‘Empire’ and used the same layout that is inside the magazine. The audience will recognise the similarities and may think it is a real review.
I think the review is very effective combination with the film because it briefly explains the story, so those who have never seen it can get interested in it and want to watch it, and those who have seen can understand what the review is talking about.
This brilliant poster was created and designed by Kyle Bamford. He had made a couple but this on was his best because of the layout and the photo chosen. He had edited the photo to be darker, this was to make it look similar to the 'Lost' Poster. When we took this photo we were lucky that there were some council workers burning things behind them and it gave a great effect.
The poster shows the three main characters and their actor names, the title, who it's by and our studio names we thought of; 'CBA Studios' and 'Bad Reboot Productions'. We chose these studio names because they are similar to ones who made 'Lost', where there is; 'ABC Studios' and 'Bad Robot Productions'. We did this for a comedy effect and for the audience to notice that we had pushed our parody even further for humour.
I have learnt that our film does have the response from our audience that we aimed for. I asked on www.yahoo.co.uk/answers for the publics opinion on all my 3 films I have made for my Media Studies A levels and this is one of the responses I got about ‘Misplaced’
"I did find amusing if a bit disjointed. I loved the ambulance chasing lawyers skit, and was laughing at the 'gag reel'. A nice touch that."
- Mr_R_Swipe's
This response shows that he was confused and that’s what we wanted to do, we wanted the audience to feel “lost” like in ‘Lost’ where nothing really makes sense. This also shows that his favourite scene is the flash back scene, which is a great response because we wanted to make the audience laugh and to have this scene as some ones favourite just shows how effectively humorous it is.
I asked the rest of my Media Studies class to watch ‘Misplaced’, I got them to fill out a questionnaire and to write a few words afterwards. I didn’t want to film them whilst they were watching our short film because I didn’t want them to feel pressured, so I watched them myself. I got a great response from them, they all burst out laughing during the lawyer scene which made me feel impressed with myself because we wanted to make the audience laugh in this scene, they understood that we were parodying lawyer and gold for money adverts and that’s why they laughed and the cheesy music helped too. A few of them commented that they were confused, this is good because we wanted to confuse people because the plot in ‘Lost’ is very confusing.