Key Concepts

The film I chose to analyse is Titanic, because although it isn’t a short film, we got most of our ideas from part of the film. For example, the love between two people from different classes; the girl being of the higher class. Also, the idea of forbidden love because the girl is engaged to someone else, but someone she doesn’t love.

Class representation is a major thing in our short film, as well as in titanic. For example, class different is very obvious from the start in Titanic, the higher class people are swooning around, and getting straight onto the ship with no luggage checks or anything, however the lower class people are being checked, both their luggage and their person, i.e. we see a man having his beard combed through, to make sure they weren’t dirty or carrying anything onto the ship that they shouldn’t be.

The fact that the upper class are represented as the better class, means that this is the audience the film is more likely to appeal to; older, middle class people.

Another social group being represented here is men. They all seem to think they are superior and they are all the businessmen, the women are just there to look pretty. For example in one of the scenes, a man says to Jack “well you don’t want to stay here with the women do you?” and then laughs, as if they are not good enough company compared to fellow men.

However, this doesn’t mean that men are more likely to watch it because I feel that genre will overrule this, and seems romance is a more feminine genre, it results in a larger proportion of the audience being female.

Thesis: Titanic begins with loads of people gathered around the ship, it then focuses on a family of upper class people, there is some dialogue and then they leave, the next people it focuses on are a group of guys playing poker in the hope to win tickets on board the ship.

Antithesis: The conflict in Titanic starts pretty early, as after Jack saves Rose, they begin to see each other more and more, eventually falling in love.

The ship then hits an iceberg, meaning that Jack and Rose find it harder to spend time alone together; yet another crisis.

Synthesis: The story does not have a typical romance, happy ending. In the end, Jack actually dies, which is very unconventional of a romance. Basically, the ship has sunk and Rose and Jack are together in the sea, they are both incredibly cold and trying to talk to each other to help keep awake, however as Jack is in the water and Rose is on a piece of wood, Jack slips away and dies from being too cold.

Overall, the trying to be created by Titanic, I think is a mix of happiness and sadness, for example at the end it is a massive wave of sadness, however

throughout the film there are constant happy moments. There is also a very dramatic feel about the film, because there always seems to be something dramatic going on.

There are parts of mise-en-scene here that we would find very useful in our short film, for example, the music changes with the mood – dramatic mood means upbeat, fast paced very jumpy music, whereas a sad mood is very slow, and in ‘Titanic’ sad parts seem to have the same song playing in them.

This is a common thing with romance I think, where there is one genre, but many different moods being brought in, and this is what we aim to create with our short film, we also have thought of using music to help display mood, as they do in titanic, this will help us even more though, as our film is silent.