Exploring Genre

Personally I find the best films are the ones that consider the narrative over the genre. I find I like the films that you can't really pin point the genre of but that have an extremely strong narrative. We took the same approach, although maybe some would say we pushed the genre aside too much. We developed our narrative letting the genre help shape the way in which we presented this narrative to the audience rather than it being the other way round. Over the course of making unspoken we had many influences, some rather vague from general things we'd remembered form films in the past but others using concrete examples... 

Inception (2010)

Inception is a movie we watched initially for our exam preparation case studies. However- as well as employing the use of a McGuffin, Inception shows use of interesting time structure. Note how the movie does not begin at the beginning of the narrative but rather before the ending. This is an excellent way to stimulate enigma forcing the audience to pose questions as to the significance of what they're seeing and how it will fit in with what has already happened. 

The Hunger Games (2012)

The lead protagonist in the film "The Hunger Games" is evidently of a female gender. Some may regard this as unusual due to the lack of female leads in a practically male dominated genre, something Unspoken has in common. In this way our film opening challenges the conventions of one of the genre's we've taken on. I think not only would this broaden the audience a film of this genre would appeal to, it also adds an aspect of uniqueness to our film, simply through the lack of action films with female leads. 

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

The Bourne Ultimatum is generally known for it's effective (although some disagree) use of shaky cam. This among other things brings the film a greater sense of realism, drawing the audience into the location on screen and maintaining their attention through the use of short cuts. I think we very much captured this same sense of realism i our opening- we used shaky cam, made use of natural lighting to help this effect and used tracking shots to move with the character rather than admire them from a distance. Furthermore Bourne was similarly shot in a popular London location- something we took into account in the early stages of production- a popular yet in this case non-cliché convention. 

                                                                                 Good Will Hunting (1997)  

In the early stages of story boarding, I wanted to make sure that we've maintained the attention of the audience and not simply stuck to simple and expected long, mid and close up shots. I remembered Gus Van Sant at this point because he always captures things differently and is a great source of inspiration I remembered from my Director's Study. There'll never be something normal about his shots, and I particularly like the one in the movie Good Will Hunting displayed to the right. We all thought it would be interesting to incorporate a similar over the head shot into our sequence- and I must say I think it worked effectively in terms of composition.

Love Actually

Both Love Actually and Forrest Gump introduced us to the possibility of using voice over in our final two minutes. There is no one definition for a successful voice over I would say due to the variety of ways you can be creative and produce a great VO using non-traditional methods. I think the main thing is what you reveal through your voice over- how much information. I've been told quite often and read about bad VO's that have been used as an exit to try an explain everything to the audience and they perhaps make the experience tedious and not thought-provoking, through an "information-overdose". I think we were very cautious of this before writing our script, and luckily we avoided it.