Initial start
We had initially started off with Alexander, Joe, Ella, Dean, and myself. Due to most in the group not really knowing each other and being a bit shy, we initially found communicating to be a bit difficult as we didn’t meet up the first week but once we got to know each other we ended up fine. We started off by watching our animation “Creature From The Lake” by ISART DIGITAL, and taking notes to attempt to find something different each time. Personally, I’m quite mixed on the short, I appreciate what they are trying to go for but the models of the two protagonists look very off to me. I found that sharing our ideas about the short with the group helped us develop our analysis a lot quicker as we have a range of personalities with different viewpoints to bounce off which gives us a wide range of interpretations, although we all placed it in the comedy horror genre. We tried looking online for different analyses of the short but found little interpretations different to our own. Our group started to look at different areas of film language together such as the editing and lighting before we decided to split it up between each person. These areas of film language were familiar to me as I studied Moving Image Arts for A level. At this stage Dean had dropped out of the course so we had to do a bit extra research to make up for a missing person. We had Alexander researching Cinematography, Ella researching editing, and Joe researched sound and monomyth. As I always enjoyed analysing mise en scene I decided to research the art direction of the animation.
I found that the animation was very surface level in terms of detail but I feel this ended up working in our favour as it gave us more space to focus on the important parts of the research. In a discussion with Dean we both agreed that the animation bears a lot of similarities with Steve Irwin and other late night monster hunter shows. I also noticed that it plays into the concept of the “final girl” which is seen in a lot of horror movies. The term was coined and expanded upon further in “Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film” (Carol J Clover(1992)). I also read the section on gender and representation in “The Media Student’s Book”(Gill Branston, Roy Stafford(2005)) to place Shelby in the ignored “conventionally unattractive” sidekick archetype. The art direction of the characters’ performance helped to reinforce this view as Shelby initially acts shyly in a very over exaggerated manner but Jack acts very narcissistic. After Jack dies, Shelby starts acting more confident in the face off against the monster. I also analysed the shape designs of the characters’ to show their personalities. I researched how shape designs influence character personality by referencing the Walt Disney Family Museum leaflets on character design. I noticed that these stereotypes of character designs are heavily contrasted with the characters’ actual personalities. I also read “The Power of Colour: A Comprehensive Animator’s Guide to Creating Impactful Animation”(Vlad Abramov(2023)) in order to help me further analyse the director’s decisions in colour of backgrounds and character outfits. I felt a lot of the information I already knew but it was good to refresh my past knowledge.
Developing the presentation
Since we decided which group member was analysing which film area, we thought it would be best for each person to design their own slide under one theme. We started off by putting our information into slides on a very basic draft of what would later become our final presentation. I feel putting the base information on first helped take away some of the pressure and made us realise which of our points were the most important to focus on. We all took screenshots that we thought were relevant to our talking points. As I was to talk about shape language in the character designs I went into krita and traced over the base shapes of the character designs to further back up my point. If I were to do this again I would also use the eyedropper tool to create the colour palette as I also talk about them. I would also leave more time to talk about the significance of the props more. I feel our actual presentation in front of the class could have gone a bit better as some of the members in the group were speaking for longer than two minutes but I understand that it came down to nerves. However as i was last this did leave me with only 30 seconds to run through my section and we didn’t even reach Joe’s second part. An area we definitely need to improve on is practicing performing it so we can see our timings and finding ways to calm nerves. We couldn’t really do it in the uni as it’s quite noisy with everyone talking but we should have done a discord call in our free time.
Peer assessment
I feel everyone in the group was pulling their weight and helped to get the presentation to the state its in now although our main problem is the timing of the presentation and a bit more communication in the group
Joe – 30%
Joe was very ambitious in terms of the amount of film areas he wanted to research, after Dean dropped out he offered to take his parts of the presentation leaving him to analyse sound and monomyth. His analysis was very in depth and varied. However I feel he talked for a bit too long on his part but I understand how it is with public speaking
Alexander – 30%
Alexander was very good for gathering references and his section on cinematography was very in depth. Although I feel he has the same problem as Joe in that he did go over the two minute mark in his speaking
Ella – 20%
Ella’s section on editing was very well paced and showed a clear knowledge of different editing techniques. She also designed the background of our presentation which works really well with the tones of the animation
Myself – 20%
I felt I could have read more of the references and utilised them more in my research. I feel my research into mise en scene was good but I could have been more in depth. I was mindful of the time limit and didn’t want to waste time. If I had more time to work with i would have went further with things that aren’t written on the slides. I also set up our discord server where we could communicate outside of uni.
Our presentation