In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Having come across The Words Of Bokeh whilst at a university open day, it inspired us to create an experimental film piece. We were inspired by the bokeh effect, and immediately wanted to learn more about it and how it is achieved. The film spells out a phrase "the time is now" using blurring of lights. This then became the narrative of our film, and we chose the phrase "not all those that wander are lost". A quote in which is personal to us. Finally we had an idea that we were passionate enough about, to put everything into. The shot below shows a screen grab from The Words of Bokeh (left) and a screen grab from our own film. As you can see, the blurring of the word 'now' inspired me to add a Gaussian blur, and a slight glow to our own use of the word 'lost'. The brighter the light, the clearer the image, brighter colours are more visually captivating, and it allows the audience to read the word accurately without any difficulties.

The Words of Bokeh takes this technique one step further to make it unique by blurring natural sunlight into words. We found this difficult to create as the brightness had to be prefect in order for it to blur into a distinguishable shape. Miranda captured the sunlight flickering on the waves (below right) and used a lens cap to create a bird shape. Filming during the day allowed the shot to be clear, creating a broad visual for the audience. The overall balance of night and day worked really well, creating a piece that flowed beautifully. 

Several YouTube tutorials helped us when creating something more unique. This one in particular shows you how to create the lens caps, set the aperture values and then goes on to show you some effective ways of using the bokeh effect. The merging of lights (below, left) inspired us to layer our footage not only in the filming stages but in the post production stages too. The colours did not clash, instead they creates something very visually pleasing, which our audience loved and the feedback we gained was outstanding. Our film does not have a conventional linear narrative and so it was important for us to capture them in other ways.

The last shot of our film, which features a pan of the pier- with simple bokeh lights was inspired by Bokeh Beautiful, which uses simple non manipulated bokeh blurs. The merging of colours and change in opacity, again became hugely inspirational for us. We wanted to use a simple shot for the ending to show that it is just as effective as those shots which have had effects added. The way it pans into the darkness was also a perfect way to introduce the credits (below right)

The opening of Love Bokeh (below left) shows a beautiful shot of a vehicle travelling in the rain. Bokeh lights shine through the window revealing rain drops. The main theme in our film is travel, so Miranda filmed journeys on various different vehicles and captured various lights on the way. The image on the right shows the raindrops on a train window, introducing another form of travel to our film. 

Our film challenged the forms and conventions of other Bokeh films through its cinematography. We decided we liked the effect of using the lens cap as a vignette. To achieve this Miranda zoomed right out so that the lens cap was visible (below). This became even more visually engaging as we captured a bird flying through the bird lens cap. Although we are very proud of this technique perhaps it would have been better if the lens cap appeared darker. We could have also cut out the shape to decrease the amount of smokiness in the centre. 

POSTER

Miranda came across the film poster for Martha Marcy May Marlene when researching into posters. We really liked how the image was only visible through the letter 'M'. We found this quirky and so applied it to our own images. Our audience like the use of colours, and they liked the use of different images, rather than just settling on the one. Martha Marcy May Marlene was a more mainstream film so it was important for us to combine this idea with posters from the art house genre. We looked at experimental film posters to see what kind of information was included. 

We found that most posters have who the film director/production team is, with no distribution or release information.  This is why we put little information on our poster.  If audience wanted to find our more about the project, they could look on our youtube/vimeo/twitter and facebook pages. 

If we were to improve our final poster we could put social networking and online distribution links at the bottom in smaller print.  This is so our audience knows exactly what website to go to instead of going through search engines like google or yahoo. 

REVIEW PAGE

Most magazines stick to the same layout and fonts because the reader will become use to this, and expect the same thing from each issue. Because of this, it was not necessary for us to change or challenge the conventions of the review page. We used Daze of Wonder because it came from the magazine Sight and Sound. Having researched into different review magazines, this was most suitable as others only focused on blockbuster, mainstream films. Sight and Sound promotes unique, experimental niche films. We liked the simple layout of the magazine and the fact that it was easy to read. the targets for our film were those who are passionate and share a deep interest of the genre. Adding a page number and date to the bottom of the screen would help make it feel more professional.