Day 2 was all about film making and creating a good and interesting story through story boarding.
In the morning we were shown films by Salvador Dali and Georges Méliès.
Méliès was a French illusionist and filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. He was famous for his innovative use of special effects and accidentally discovered the substitution stop trick in 1896. The use of the "stop trick" gave him the ability to seemingly manipulate and transform reality through cinematography. Through this technique he creates many illusions, seemingly making things disappear into thin air and what particularly appealed to me in his use of this technique was how it allowed him to make his films very comical and entertaining.
This is an example of one of his films entitled "Whimsical Illusions" (1909):
After the morning break we were split up into our subgroups, and one half of the group worked on story boarding whilst the other (including myself) took part in a film making workshop.
During this workshop we were instructed to split up into groups and within these make a short one minute film in the "stop trick" style of George Méliès. We were given strict guidelines that the film scenes had to be shot in chronological order, meaning we could not edit the film or play it back, we could only press the record button to start recording and press it again to pause it. This meant that each scene had to be carefully planned out and organised, and what made things harder was the fact that we had to base the story on something current.
For our story my group looked on news websites and the only interesting, however slightly disturbing, story was of a man whole killed his mother because she no longer wanted to live. We picked this story because it brought up the highly debated topic of euthanasia.
The film also could not have any dialogue which made it increasingly difficult to portray the story line as all the information had to by conveyed through the movement and actions of the characters and any additional sound affects that we thought were appropriate.
Overall I thought that our film turned out better than we expected and that the sound affects that we chose suited the mood of the scenes.
In the afternoon my group worked on the structure of stories and how to make a good and interesting storyline. We were taught that a story should always have a beginning where the audience are introduced to the main character, the setting and a problem. The middle of the story is about the main character's journey to overcome the problem, and the end usually concludes with the main character overcoming the problem.
To experiment with our new found knowledge of storytelling, we were split into groups of four and each group were given an A1 piece of paper on which each of us had to draw a character that we see around our local area that particularly stands out in our memory.
For my character I chose a not particularly nice individual and one that I often see causing havoc in my neighbourhood. She was my protagonist and for the antagonist I draw a character that very much contrasts to her, someone that is quite calm and peaceful, like my mother for example. The drawings of my characters can be seen bellow and I have also included some other people's work from my group and the characters they chose to illustrate.
We then had to choose one person in the group's character and sketch a short six picture story board about what might have happened to them in the past to make them the way they are and what might happen to them in the future.
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