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Evaluation for Winner

My intentions with my short film titled ‘Winner’ was to individually create a comedic piece of film between four and five minutes which creates consistent humor and despite not having a positive ending for the protagonist can still be classified as ‘feel good’ due to the way the audience feels throughout. I didn’t intend for my film to be powerful or dramatic but light and entertaining. I wanted to have a simple style in which the viewer experiences a connected experience with the protagonist.

Winner is a short film about Jacob,  a young adult living far from his ideal life. He seems to be in a loving relationship with his girlfriend Amy and repeats his morning routine in a way in which we can see that while he isn’t having the time of his life, he accepts that it is how he continuously starts his morning. However on this specific morning he opens a letter stating he has won 50 million pounds in the lottery. Instantly he kicks out his girlfriend Amy and shows up to work dressed in casual attire and quits his job. We then see Jacob ‘making the most’ of the situation by choosing to shop at Waitrose instead of Sainsbury’s and choosing the slightly more expensive options of beer and crisps. I intended to entertain the viewer as we see a lottery winner making average daily decisions in which he spends only pounds extra on his lifestyle despite being a millionaire. In the final scene of Winner, Jacob is on the phone to the lottery head office and finds out that it was never him who won the lottery but the that the letter was intended for Amy his now ex-girlfriend instead.

I watched each of the short films on the list to help me to create Winner. While the films were all entirely different from the next, a large amount of the films sparked ideas for me to use in creating Winner (a film which bares little similarity to any of the short films listed).

The Short film wasp focused specifically on informing the audience of a different lifestyle and managed to control the viewer’s emotion creating sympathetic sadness for the children involved. Wasp showed the harsh effects of a lack of money to a family which had adapted to work around having very little to spend. While the lack of money forced the Mother in Wasp to become selfish, I wanted to show how an increase in money could have a similar effect. I showed this through entirely focusing on Jacob in the short film to the extent of which the characters around do not have even one line as the bare no significance to him. In Wasp and winner, the character whom the money is affecting comes to the realization at the end that if they paid attention to the characters around them, they personally would have been better off.

From watching the stutterer, I saw the impact on the viewer of a narrative structure in which the usual routine of the protagonist is broken.  I felt that it helped to keep the viewer interested in the film therefore I wanted to show Jacob before he won the lottery that day in order for the viewer to see the full change from Jacobs interactions with others and his surroundings.

The Gunfighter was the first of the short films I watched and instantly changed my initial thoughts about what my short film would be. Before watching the Gunfighter I was determined to make a thriller short film that was highly intense. However, after watching this I saw that the plot of the short film can be important for creating humor not just the dialogue as I had previously assumed. Winner is very different to the Gunfighter as whilst narrative and the building of tension drove the Gunfighter, the ending of Winner had not been expected or led up to.  Initially, the opening sequence of Winner had normal coloring, as I wanted the film to look natural. Pitch Black Heist was edited in black and white throughout and from this and the slow dialogue, the film felt purposely slow. I wanted to create the same effect for Jacobs’s morning routine and edited it into black and white. The transition from black and white to color gave a more powerful effect then I anticipated and made the atmosphere of the morning routine feel too sinister. This is why I took out the black and white effect and heavily unsaturated the bright colors of the mugs and bowels which I used as props. However I didn’t want this effect to last throughout the film as the atmosphere is supposed to suddenly feel overwhelming and bright. This is why used a black title screen which the cuts straight to a shot in which the viewer can see outside. For this shot I used editing to exaggerate the colors and to make the viewer and Jacob feel as if they have only just become entirely awake, this idea came from the use of color in curfew which transitions from dark to dark with bright neon overpowering colors.

I knew my short film needed music for the morning scene and title however finding a piece proved surprisingly difficult for me. I decided to take inspiration from connect by having a diegetic song play which becomes non-diegetic seamlessly. In Connect the music playing from her earphones increases in volume to suggest the music is empowering the scene and is not just there to show us what she is listening to. As Jacob leaves the room of the radio, the music continues at the same volume in an unnatural way and the music becomes diegetic. Furthermore, similar to connect, background noise can always be heard until finally a significant noise shuts off the music. In connect this happens with the stop button ding and takes the protagonist out of her trance. I used it in winner as a comedic drive to the story. As the door is slammed the romantic music instantly cuts off leaving the viewer shocked as it all took place in a matter of seconds.

Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead heavily influenced the creating of my film. Whilst the plots of the films bare no similarities, Wright’s style of comedy I found very inspiring. In Shaun of the Dead, viewers most likely have seen multiple apocalyptic zombie films due to the popularity of these films in the 21^st century. What Shaun of the Dead doe extremely differently is show unrealistically calm responses to a dire situation. I wanted this to be apparent in my short film and hence showed Jacob, post winning the lottery, choosing to shop at Waitrose instead of Sainsbury’s and feeling proud of the decision. Furthermore, the scenes also entirely depend around the central characters and any damage they cause is never show in more than the background of a shot.