Multimedia hits Broadway....

Today most of the students on our Multimedia course converged at Broadway cinema to attend the first ever screening of all of the narrative coursework films. I was very excited to have my film shown to such a large audience and in a real cinema and was very much looking forward to seeing what my coursemates had produced.

As a whole i thought the standard was very good, i must admit i was expecting a few shockers but i was pleasantly suprised when pretty much every film was of good quality. There were some that stood out more than others of course but i dont think anyone can be dissapointed with how any of them turned out.

A total of 15 films were shown and a variety of different styles were showcased, i found it really interesting to see how each group had decided to portray their narrative story. A few groups used the technique of tracing over photos and animating them in flash which was a very visually pleasing style and made an immediate impact with the audience. A prevalent theme seemed to be death or alcohol/drug abuse, incidentally i thought that whilst they were well crafted, in terms of narrative and making a connection with the audience these films didnt do so well. I beleive its quite easy to take that route of doing a dark,sad themed story but i just thought they concentrated on the images rather than the narrative.

I really enjoyed the films which used flash to trace over photos and animate them. The film about a man falling asleep at work and having a dream about university, this was done in the form of a comic strip, we followed the scenes frame by frame moving across as if it was us the audience reading the comic. This was a powerfull effect and it was very vibrant and colourful. There was another film using this technique but they used an effect to make it look like each shot was a turn of a page, initially this was impressive but i felt that by about halfway i was getting bored with the continuous page turning and the noise was annoying me, it was too repetetive and in my opinion brought down the overall quality of the film.

One group chose to animate their entire film, using flash i presume, and it looked extremely impressive. However their film was pretty much ruined by the fact that the sound didnt work. This left the images looking impressive but was very difficult for it to feel like a completed narrative. This is an important lesson in the perils of not being completly prepared. All their hard work throughout this project has pretty much been for nothing as when they came to showcase there film it failed to work properly and just didnt come across as they intended, a great shame but i will use there misery as a reminder to always be 110% prepared in the future.

Two films that stood out in particular were films that came at the idea of narrative from a totally different perspective. They were more informative documentarys rather than short films. This instantly made me stop and think because i never once considered doing anything like this. When we got the brief i was just thinking about making a traditional film and making it as 'cool' as possible. One of these was about the history of french lounge chairs, it was interesting because it was totally out of left field but i feel they could have made it a lot better by having more images instead of just a moving timeline and a french voice over.

The other was about Discrimination. Instantly this hit home with me, it was strong message delivered excellently. Part of its appeal was the authenticism of it, the people in the film being discriminated have most probably experienced the situations depicted on the screen in real life. This gave the film a strong feeling of realism and made me appreciate what they were saying much more. It also showed that with no sound effects, no animations or any of that stuff they were able to gain everyones attention and produce a great story. Simple is better, i'm learning that more and more as i discover things within this course and this was just another example.

I enjoyed the film about the trainers and loved the way they used the trainers laces as its hands, i also enjoyed the brief moments of stop motion animation in this film. I would have liked to see them use more of it but i imagine its very hard and time consuming. In some ways this film was similar to my own groups film which gave me a different kind of appreciation for what they had done.

There was one film which included photos interacting with animated drawings, entitled ' Cinderella does it again' i loved the idea of what they were trying to do here but i think they didnt really pull it off. Perphaps with more time they wouldve made it a lot better and they did mention that they had plans to use blue screen but had to abandon them. If the drawings were of better quality and more care was taken over the way the photo interacted with them i think this would have been really really good, but still i thought it was a good effort.

A few words now about my own groups film 'Post It'. I was delighted with the reception it got, we had people laughing along enthusiastically. Upon watching this with a large audience, i feel maybe we could have made the ending a bit more dramatic particularly as it follows a humourous sequence of music which everyone laughed at then it fell slightly flat. Saying that though we did receive feedback from one audience member who said they felt really sad for the post it when it died. This is exactly what we intended to and made me feel proud that people connected with our work and understood how we wanted them to feel. Check previous posts to view our film in its entirety.


Thats just about all my thoughts and feelings on todays events, to end heres my top 3 favorite films from today.

1). 9 to 5

This film's use of an animated comic book strip was extremely effective. The sounds and moving camera within the comic books frames combined with the overall colour and style to make for a superb end result.The story actually is very similar to what happened to me and why i came to uni so i liked it because of that too. Well done to Kam,Adam,Gavin and Mia for this, i loved it.







2). Discrimination

Ive commented on this earlier in the post, but once again i must say how impressed i was with this. It was a simple idea executed very well. It left a lasting impression on me about the effects of discrimination and has given me food for thought when attempting similar projects in the future, narrative does not have to be just about making short movies, documentary style pieces can be just as effective as shown here. Well done to Les,Hannah,Rimante and David.



3). The story of the Trainers

I liked the use of stop motion animation in this film, i thought the story was strong and came across very well. The romance seen was superb, loved the way the trainer used its laces as hands and clung onto the high heels, funny stuff! The use of photoshop was also impressive, the way certain elements of objects were coloured in and some were greyed out, i liked that. Overall an entertaining and well produced story. Well done to Paul,Sophie and Neil.


Thats all for today folks

Farewell and Have A Nice Day