TH
TALEN HAMILTON
MEDIA STUDIES A LEVEL
8098
Lovefield
Ratthe Productions
This is the first shot of the short film and as well as being an establishing shot it’s also the title of the film. The title then disintegrates and the camera slowly lowers and a tracking shot emerges and tracks throughout the cornfield. These are all mid-shots and the positioning and movement if the camera cranes meaning as the camera slowly creeps up the sign to show a black crow sitting on top of the sign. The conative meaning of the black crow is death and this gives the audience the impression that the film is a horror genre.
The next extreme close up is of a blood splattered rag and this appears instantly after the audience see someone’s hand sporadically grab the straw as if they were in pain and then you hear screaming which not only confirms the person is in pain but that the audience think that this is a horror. The camera then pans from right to left and we as an audience are able to see a person’s foot clenching with pain, the sound is currently diegetic of someone screaming suggesting that they are in a tremendous amount of pain and that they’re struggling. This shot is a narrow depth of field shot showing the main character and the crow. This shot shows the link between both characters and that the crow is the main focus showing by the focus pull, the point of this shot is to accentuate the meaning of a crow considering their physical appearance and their stereotypical personality’s which is death. This over the shoulder shot does not strictly follow Todorvs theory of the rule of thirds, as half of the shot on the left is the back of suspected murders, and the right side of the shot is of an open field which suggests to the audience that escape is inevitable and would be very difficult in a very isolated place.
The three screen grabs show aspects of the mise en scene e.g. costumes. The costumes are one of the main factors when trying to represent a character correctly and from the shots show above this character is portrayed as a potentially violent person which is suggested from the blood on his hands in the first shot, intimidating from the second shot from the tattoo’s which are actually misleading as they represent someone balanced and loving as he has scales and below ‘mom’ with a heart. The final image is a recognisable character from quite a few horror films, the middle aged sweaty long haired hill billy, in the sense that this is a stereotypical generic horror character.
