Lovefield a Short Film

Lovefield A Short Film.
This film is set in a modern day, American farmers field (the diegesis). The scene is set out at the beginning to look like a farmer is killing a person in the cornfields, there is a crow on a fence squawking making the scene look intense, the farmer goes back to his car and get a blanket. As he goes to put it over this person he picks up a baby and there is a pregnant woman laid in the field.

At the beginning of the film the ambient sound track is really quiet music, it’s a violin and the tempo is extremely slow, it’s a very high pitched but quite sound making a scary or intense scene. There is a crow on a sign making some noise, which makes the scene look more terrifying. The sign is also blowing in a calm wind making a loud squeaking sound, which also makes a suspicious noise. The camera is panning over a cornfield and getting closer to a gap where you can tell someone is laid, and there is a phone bleeping this is denotation (the phone bleeping) and the connotation is that someone has tried to phone for help and has been stopped by someone or something, this is Roland Barthes theory. The sound of the phone is getting louder and louder which shows you are getting closer to main scene. As the scene goes on a woman starts crying and screaming, the camera slowly pans onto the woman’s lower leg, by looking at her foot and movement you can tell she is struggling, and there is a loud violin sound, and she stops moving and the scene goes quiet. A man stands up in the field and a quick tempo piece of music comes on, as he runs to his car, I think it is attempting to illustrate that he’s done something wrong. Suddenly there is a change of mood. As he reaches down with a blanket and picks up a baby, a very light and cheerful music track comes on and they are both smiling and the man says, “it’s a boy” which eases the intensity of the mood, making it more cheerful. A car arrives in the distance with sirens on which helps you know that it is an ambulance. Also when the man says it a boy he is signifying that there is a child, and then the baby is brought onto the shot, which is the signified, this is Ferdinand de Saussures theory.

At the beginning the camera is slowly tracking and arcing through the cornfield, the angles make it look like you the person watching is trying to look for something. It slowly swings down through the corn and shows a mobile phone, the focus on the phone is really clear showing what you are supposed to be looking at, the focus is changed to some money, then changed again to a bloody cloth and once more to a woman’s foot. I think they have make the camera move slowly to make a more ironic scene, after the woman stops moving (trying to show she has died) a knife is stabbed into the floor, and with the mood changing the shots become a lot shorter and there is lots more movement and quicker movement, which I think makes the scene look more intense. The camera tilts up from the mans knees to his shoulders which shows a very suspicious character, the focus is on the back of his head and jumps to a crow in the back ground, I think this is the show what he is looking at.
There are lots of good shots, for example there is a medium close up, of him when he is looking at the crow, a good reaction shot as it shows him looking down and then suddenly looking up past the camera and then showing the crow. Finally, there is an establishing shot of the field, a ambulance, a tractor and the road, and many close ups throughout the film. There is one of the knife that he stabs into the floor and one of the mobile phone ringing.

The lighting in the film is constant throughout, as there is only one scene and it is all outdoors, making it easier to light. I think they would have used all 3 (key, fill and back) lighting processes during all the film, because they are in the middle of a field so there wouldn’t be any shadows or dark areas in the scene, if there was this would ruin the verisimilitude.

The mise-en-scene within the film was very good. All the characters’ costumes helped portray real life, you could see on the mans shoulder that there was a small tattoo of a love heart, which at first I thought showed irony, as I was lead to believe he was the killer, whereas in the end he was helping a woman have a baby which shows he isn’t “bad or evil”. The whole film looked very real and there wasn’t any signs of it being fake, making the verisimilitude of the film brilliant. This was done by following the rules of continuity, temporal and spatial coherence.