206B Evaluation Question One

1. 206B Evaluation Question One By Chris Anscombe

2. Characters Our character Lily is a conventional character as she is a boxer. Like a typical Social realism film something happens in her life which makes things for her difficult and in her case she is adopted and her step mother dies. Lily had never had a easy life as she was bullied at school and never had any close friends. Lily uses boxing to channel all her anger into, which like in a typical social realism film the main character starts a new hobby or meets someone who keeps them from turning to crime or drugs and alcohol. Lily meets the character Tom who helps her through her tough time by becoming her trainer for boxing and also a good friend. This is typical of a social realism film for example Million dollar baby, the main character has trouble at first but through the story she soon get a trainer which she wanted and also a friend. In both the trailers you see the main characters getting a stronger relationship we the other character. In social realism it is typical for the main character to have something to work forward to and in our case she has a competition in boxing.

3. Narrative Our narrative is about a girl called Lily who has is adopted and when you join her in the film her adoption mother has just passed away. This is typical social realism that the main character hits a problem which messes with there life. Lily cannot handle what has happened and this is when Tom is introduced, he meets Lily in the corridor and tells her about boxing which she doesn’t consider until later in the film. Lily decides to take up the boxing and Tom trains her, she soon becomes good enough to enter an amateur competition which her and Tom work towards. Lily is then asked to clear out her old house so she can move into another home, when she is clearing her foster mothers room she finds letters addressed to her. In the letters there are pictures of her and her birth mother from when she was baby. She is left with a phone number which belongs to her birth mother. She calls her birth mother but hangs the phone up because she doesn’t know what to say to her. She soon finds that her mother wants to meet up with her and apologise because she didn’t want to give Lily away. The film finishes with Lily being in her final fight and her chances are not looking good and she sees her mother in the crowd cheering her on, she then goes on to win the competition and meet her mum after the last fight.

4. Sound We chose to at the beginning of our trailer use cuts of Lily’s mum talking on the phone to Lily. These cuts would be from the original film. Our original soundtrack wasn’t what you would expect from a usual social realism film, we chose a soul track but this is similar to the music in Million dollar baby. It’s not as inspirational or upbeat especially for a boxing film. The one in Million dollar baby has bagpipes in it, where as the one from The Fighter has a strings section in it and is inspiring. We then lost our original soundtrack and had to use another. We wanted to use the first soundtrack because it was different like our film. As our film had a female boxer in which isn’t typical which is different we felt having different music would suit the trailer. We found from our research that our soundtrack we wanted to use wasn’t typical but the one we used on our final cut is typical.

5. Camera shots In social realism films it is conventional to use close ups to show emotion in the characters, we also used close ups to increase the intensity of a scene especially the boxing. Here is example of one of the shots we used to show the intensity of the boxing. We also had to use close ups to cover that our actor couldn’t actually do boxing. We also found that fast cuts helped cover that our actor couldn’t box.

6. Editing When shooting action scenes to make them look more intense usually a lot of fast cutting is used to make it look better. We had to do this a lot as our actor didn’t actually know how to do boxing. We used match on action shots when showing Lily training for her competition, this made short sequences of boxing look as if Lily was a professional boxer. We added effects called ‘Dip to black’ which fades out the image on the screen to a black background, this was useful when adding in the titles and a lot of social realism films use this effect. The fighter uses a lot of this cut to show a change in scene, and add emotion. From my research we found that the editing we used was typical of social realism films, we found many social realism films had used the same or similar editing techniques as our trailer.

7. Mise-En-Scene In social realism films usually the settings are quite gritty to show that the character is a normal person, they don’t have a lot of money which makes the audience connect and have something in common with the character. They also don’t usually dress in posh and expensive clothes in social realism films. This is done to stay with the locations and show what type of character they are. Our character is a typical social realism character, she lives in a normal house and doesn’t wear expensive clothes. We used a school hall to film some of the boxing scenes in, this hall was quite small and had flickering lights which showed it wasn’t the best quality which told the audience more about the film.