Aaron's A2 Media Blog

Paul Machliss is an Australian film editor, who is most known for editing films directed by Edgar Wright. These films include, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and Baby Driver, these films are known for their fast pace and fluid transitions. He won the BAFTA award for Best Editing for Baby driver. Here is some of his work

When producing a film, it is important to understand who the audience for the film is, the audience are the main consumer. To understand the demographic of our audience, we constructed a survey that would ask questions about short films in general and questions that relate to the themes we want to convey in our short film RIVER. We sent this survey out over social media to friends and family in order for it to reach a large variety in age groups. This is the result of our survey. From these statistics we can see that people from the ages 15-21 are interested in low budget films and films that present death in a different way. These people usually find out about films by watching youtube, youtube advertisements and TV. Most people favour surrealism and symbolism within a short film, this is great as we can display these attributes within RIVER due to its story concept. We should target RIVER to 15-21 year olds as they consume most media online and RIVER will appear online....

THE FERRYMAN KEVIN

In Greek mythology, Charon or Kharon is the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. Some authors say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. This is the basic premise for our new short film and it will create a modern version of this mythological tale. Here are some interpretations of the Ferryman, Charon.

The production team that we are in is called Elysian Productions. The word Elysian means  relating to or characteristic of heaven or paradise, we chose this word as heaven or a paradise is something that we all strive towards, it is a place so perfect that we go through hard times just to get to it. The paradise that we strive towards would be our perfect film and to get that perfect film we might have to go through hard times in the process of making it but that passion is still shown and that's why we are Elysian Productions. We wanted to create a logo that was simple yet recognisable. We decided we wanted to make a text based logo as most production companies made these. This was the first attempt at the logo. We wanted the logo to be a window into the film but the colours shown and the gradient applied to the logo made the logo hard to see on a busy background. We needed to make the logo more simple. This was one of the refine...

Ex Machina aesthetically, is a very simple yet effective film. The visuals in the film are clean and get the message across, this simplistic style can be seen all the way back in the storyboards for the film. Here are some panels from the storyboards, these storyboards don't use colour but they focus more on perspective and lighting. These panels are made by Keith Weir.

My favourite storyboard of a film would be the storyboard of Star Wars Episode IV. The art direction within Star Wars is amazing and this extends to it's storyboards. These storyboards provide so much detail and this allows the film's style and tone to come across. Each panel has very little colour but they show a lot of small details which would help the set designers and animators recreate this image.

Before we came to a final idea, we went through some other options we were considering. At first, we wanted to make something darker to what we did last year. With a darker atmosphere, we could create a better mise en scene which would generate a much more interesting image. Creating a darker atmosphere would give us more experience in filmmaking as we would tackle different and new ideas in all areas of production. THE FIRST IDEAS We wanted to create a film around a character that was mute. This brought up many ideas as to how the character would perceive and communicate with the world around him. The character was going to use sign language to communicate and the story was centred around his school life. We went through many different interpretations of this idea, such as a love story and comedy but we ended up going with a thriller. The thriller version of the film about a mute character was the most exciting for us as it had a dark premise that was very different to wh...