Elysian Productions - Eoin

For our film, I will be creating the music. One of the main things about the music for our film is that it has to be sombre and ominous, but not melodramatic. One of the main inspirations for the music is the Gregorian chant, Dies Irae. Translated from Latin into English, it means "Day of Wrath". It was originally a poem and then used as a hymn for a Requiem Mass (a mass for the dead or a funeral mass). Given that the general theme of our film is death and the afterlife, we thought it would be fitting to use the melody of this chant as a part of our music.  I feel this is a nice and subtle use of this chant as it would give some clues to any viewer who may recognise the tune as to what the film is about early on.  The instrumentation for this piece of music will be simple, just a piano playing the melody then a drone bass underneath to create a more ominous tone. I will be creating the music using the instruments that I have access to, namely a digital piano with MIDI fun...

While there are many short films out there that aim to portray a plethora of different themes, there are some conventions which generally these films adhere to, with a few edge case exceptions. As well as this, the structure and setting of short films are usually quite similar, due to the time and budget constraints that tend to affect short films. Once we scratch the surface of these films, we can determine a distinct set of conventions that most short films follow. Firstly, I am going to look at themes. There are so many themes that can be used in a short film. It may seem impossible to drill this area down into a convention or conventions. However when looking closer, we can see that a lot of films tend to use societal issues (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.) as a basis for the story. Apart from this, it could also be a universal issue or event - something that affects us all. The rest of the films are usually just original stories that do not deal with these issues. For examp...

I have already watched several short films and while the genre and tone of each film can vary wildly due to the differences in application of certain devices, there are some core concepts that control how short films are structured and how they flow. As well as this, there are some conventions that are applied to the characters, settings and themes of these films, and often these differences are noticeable when looking at more conventional, feature length films. Firstly, I am going to look at characters. Often in short films, characters are not really developed aside from what is important to the plot of the film. In the case of Clown Face, the characters are not developed past the issue that they are discussing, namely their family issues.  "CLOWN FACE" - SHORT FILM (2017) from Jason Jeffrey on Vimeo . The characters here just about brush over what their names are; as a matter of fact, the father's name is actually never said, and not much detail is revealed ...