Critical Evaluation

For my individual research project, I chose to study ‘Fantasy Film’. I started by reading ‘Fantasy film a critical introduction’ by J. Walters. By reading this I was hoping to find a definition of the term ‘Fantasy’, what I found out, was that the term fantasy is so broad that it cannot accurately be defined and it can be applied to a majority of Hollywood films. This is because ‘Fantasy’ depends on the individual’s perception of their own fantasies. For example: One person might watch an action film about secret agents and see it as a fantasy film, where as someone else might watch a swords and sandals film and see that as fantasy instead. The book also stated that to really understand fantasy we should do away with the term fantasy and focus on things that wouldn't happen within our reality.

The process of coming up with my idea was very hard. Mainly because it was very difficult to try and come up with something truly original. A lot of the ideas I had could be strongly linked to obvious fantasy films. The first thing that came to my mind was to show a sort of ‘Utopia’. A land that is very beautiful and lush, but then I came across an episode of ‘ Torch wood’ called ‘Small Worlds’, which featured ‘Fairies’, however these fairies were not the stereotypical, friendly magical creatures we might see in ‘Disney’s Peter Pan’ these fairies were evil and caused harm to humans. This triggered an idea, I realised that instead of showing a straight up beautiful, fantasy world full of wonderful creatures, and I could twist the story and show fantasy and nightmare together.

I started looking into folklore, starting with Fairies. I found out that in folklore, fairies were perceived as “a non-human yet material being with magical powers”. They were friendly for the most part but very mischievous and their antics had been known to cause harm to humans. These findings got me intrigued so I decided to look at other mythical, folkloric creatures appear in Hollywood films, the ones I found were ‘Faun’ and ‘Troll’.

The Faun, like the fairy appears and is shown in many literary and Hollywood examples as friendly and caring, when folklore describes them as mischievous and potentially harmful. Whereas trolls were straight up evil.
However all this was still not serving to help find me an idea, looking back I should probably have gone back to my original research and found out more about the genre, I think that digressing so much from the topic may have slowed me down a lot.

I came up with my idea at a live ‘Nightwish’ concert where they were touring their latest album ‘Imaginaerum’ which is about the dreams and nightmares you experience as a child. While at the concert I saw the back of somebodies T-shirt that said “innocence will save the world” this was when I came up with the idea, I thought I would show the worlds of fantasy and nightmare through the eyes of a child.

I came up with the idea of a girl walking through a forest. The forest starts sprouting beautiful flowers and mythical creatures, all from the child’s imagination. However she does something that triggers her imagination to turn evil and start attacking her, she is chased by the creatures and the beautiful forest around her starts to die and decay. And then only by true will power can she vanquish the evil in her mind and restore everything back to how it was before.

The next stage was working out how I would manage the effects I had included in my idea.
The list of effects I came up with was:

·         Grass growing

·         Flowers growing

·         Paper flowers

·         Sky changing colour

·         Lightning and black clouds forming

·         Grass turning to oil

·         Oil sprouting arms

·         Tree roots coming alive

·         Balls of white light

·         Light exploding from girl

·         Creatures turning to dust

·         The creatures

·         Blood flying from fauns mouth

It took me a long time to find all the different ways I could do these effects, most of my search was based on trying to find online tutorials. Eventually I managed to find what I was looking for.
A lot of the effects I had chosen would be done using special effects software such as: Adobe after Effects, Blender and Maya. These effects include: grass growing, sky changing colour, black clouds forming and lightning. Tree roots coming alive, balls of white light, light exploding from the girl and all the oil effects. Everything else would be done on set. The creatures would be mostly done with actors in costume. A good example for the use of costumes to show mythical creatures is Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ where the main creature shown is a Faun and some green screen was used to get rid of the actors legs that could be seen.
The effect where the creatures turn to dust, could be done using camera and editing tricks, a similar effect was achieved using coins on Edgar Wrights ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the world’ by filming a static shot, pausing, removing the actor from the shot, starting again and then throwing coins into shot and then editing it all in the right place.

I concluded that the fairy would probably be easier to do using an effects program, this is because using actors to play fairies requires a lot of green screen time and extra filming which would increase the budget.

After I had found all the tutorials I needed, I decided to get some art work done so that it would easier to understand the look and feel of the piece. I put an Advert up on Blackboard and received many responses. I chose two people to help: one to do the landscape drawings (Charlotte Taylor) and one to do the creature designs (Bethan Roberts). I also got Luke Robinson (Music student at Huddersfield) to compose a 2 minute musical piece. I was very happy with what these three produced for me and I think they have really helped show the overall feel for the project.
However it would have been better if I would’ve gotten them to do the art and music earlier. This is because once they had finished I had little time to do much else other than some location scouting, perhaps if I had done it earlier I may have been able to look deeper into character development or made some models of the creatures.

Overall I think the idea I came up with was strong and well thought out, as it included a lot of planning such as: concept art, location scouting and even some music composition. I feel that I have engaged well with the project and I have learnt a lot about the planning that goes into a film, no matter how small the production. I’ve realised how important it is to think deeper about something’s for example, I did some research into colour and it’s uses in film to trigger emotion, although the source was not reliable (a website I found on Google) it got me thinking that there are more things done in Hollywood films than simply because it might look good.
However the main weakness with my project was that I drifted away from the original research topic and moved onto other things without realising. Had I revisited the Original topic, I could have learnt more and the idea could have potentially been stronger. If I had the chance to do the project again I would start everything a lot earlier than I did, I think I fell into the trap of thinking I had all the time in the world so I didn’t start straight away which probably put me behind in the long run, even though I think I came up with a strong idea and I engaged with the project, I can’t help wondering whether it may have suffered because of my initially hesitation to get started.