Welcome!

Welcome to my blog for my A-Level film project. This year Knock-Off Productions, which I am one third of, is creating a short film called ‘Gnome Life’, which needs to be no longer than five minutes. ‘Gnome Life’ tells the story of a real life gnome living in a world which doesn’t understand him, and we show him trying to find his way in life questioning himself along the way.

At first, we wanted to create a drama-thriller including a love interest. However, this was before our survey results, and after analysing these we swiftly changed our mind. We understand the importance of our audience, and we would not want to create something that people wouldn’t find interesting, and did not reflect our personalities and points of view.

‘Gnome Life’ is a comedy, however still holds a strong message about society and outcasts within it. We created a similar film last year, however we intend to take it a step further this year, making it more funny and delivering a stronger message. Including a fictional character, like a gnome, means that he can represent all outcasts in society and can be someone who some of our audience can relate to stronger than others, however I feel most people have felt like an outcast at some point in their life.

I hope my blog gives you a good insight into the concept of our film and shows you the layers which we intend to create for our audience.

What is a Gnome?

A gnome is a mythical creature characterised by its extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle. Reports of people claiming to have seen real, living gnomes have surfaced in several countries, with major media outlets carrying stories about gnome sightings. Garden gnomes are small ceramic bearded characters (usually male) that are used as decoration in gardens and lawns. The first garden gnomes were made in Grafenroda, a town known for its ceramics in Thuringia, Germany in the mid-1800s. The garden gnome quickly spread across Germany and into France and England, and wherever gardening was a serious hobby. Currently, there are an estimated 25 million garden gnomes in Germany.

Group Communication

Good communication is a key skill when working in a group of three. It is very important that everyone knows what is going on, and each member can communicate to the others about ideas. I also feel it is important to be able to communicate to each other in between meetings, this way things are not forgotten, and more time can be spent discussing the ideas.

In our group we use different methods of communication, depending on the information we wish to share with each other. One method is by telephone, which allows us to communicate very quickly. If we want to share an idea by simply discussing it with another member of the group, the telephone is the quickest way to do this. Another method is by e-mail; however this is much slower method of communication and is only used if we wish to share a lot of information, which could include videos, pictures, or music.  

The most used method of communication in our group is facebook. This social networking site allows us to either send messages, which are like e-mails, or use facebook chat which is like a much quicker version of texting. However, both these methods on facebook allow you to send video, picture, or music links; therefore much more information can be shared between members of our group. This is invaluable to our group as we are constantly watching videos on YouTube or listening to music, which can trigger ideas about things such as Intertextuality, or representation.

The last piece of communication we use is our blogs, which is not a direct method of communication. We can put things on our blogs knowing that other members of our group will read it; therefore we can share information which we do not urgently need to share with the other members. Therefore, we can take information from each other when we need it. This stresses the importance of our group roles, where we can take important information on each other’s specialities when talking about the film as a whole.

Script or No Script?

We have decided that for this short film we will not be using a script, as we believe that the characters will not need to say any lines. We didn’t have a script in our previous project, which was the first two minutes of a film, and we felt this was very successful. We understand that this is a different prospect as we are doing a short film, making this film three minutes longer, however we still believe we can carry a storyline and make the film funny without a script.

After watching some short films, in particular some of the Pixar animations, this has proved that short films without narrative can work extremely well. Our main character will not be getting himself involved in much interaction therefore if we were to have a script it would be extremely limited, this has led us to the decision to have no script at all.

We recognise the challenge, however feel this would add to our short film not take anything away. We don’t want to be lazy in the way we get messages across, and if we were to have a script this could give us an easy way out. With no script we know we have no other way to tell the story other than by the visual, which we think we can achieve, and achieve well. This should hopefully keep the audience engaged in the film, as they will have to extract information from the visual, music, and sounds.

We also feel this will give us greater opportunity to include music, and experiment with sound. Last year we made our own soundtrack for our film, which we were extremely proud of, and we look to do the same thing this year.

Fonts For Title