Utopia Case Study - Stylistic Influences & Post-production

Utopia utilises the notorious comic-book aesthetics throughout the series unlike any other TV series, this composition of colours creates an ambience of futuristic change. As this colour combination is unorthodox, people find the colours quite disturbing, unsettling especially within the context of Utopia.

 

 



The colour correction used in Utopia is extremely effective as it makes a clear contrast between the darker colours and the lighter colours.
Conventionally TV uses the colour palette of Technicolor's - greens, blues and reds but Utopia uses colours of magenta, cyan and yellows. Munden, the director of Utopia has been influenced by 1950 Doris Day films with the yellows and turquoises. The main influence was the elements of comic-book look. I believe they use the different colour palette to create a type of escapism, a visual representation of diversion.

Within the post-production they use the grading software Nucoda Film Master. “As lenses and equipment get more sophisticated, film-makers are getting closer to a very ‘real’ look – but I wanted to do the opposite of that,” says Marc Munden.
He says that "he wanted to create a world that felt recognisable in its issues and characters, but also heightened and delirious.”
It was shot in Autumnal England, quite a bland, bleak time. Nature looks extremely bleak, this gives the editors a 'blank canvas' to create the ideal look.

Preliminary Task: Scriptwriting

In the pre-production for our preliminary task, Jake, Emma and I decided to compose a script as we are using actors external from our media class, this will overall increase the realism of the film, however we are currently having issues with  communication and organising the times and dates of shooting.
We decided a script was essential, no matter how little dialogue we are having in our project - it will not only increase our scriptwriting skills but also improve the quality of performance of our actors.
I will print these out and hand them out to our actors so they know what to say, when we shoot I will direct to get the desired look.

 

Preliminary Project: Location Scout

In the task of making our short film we are still in  the pre-production section; Emma, Jake and I went on trip through our school. As I am new to this location we relied on Jake to give us a tour and take us to all possible locations.

The criteria was that the room had to be quite big to fit the table and could potentially be quite dark so that we could create a sinister feel to the scene. By having a darker room the mise-en-scene would be easier to create due to low-key lighting and by applying obvious conventions of thriller and horror.To do this we had to stay away from coloured rooms of Yellow and Green.

Preliminary Project: Story boarding

In the pre-production of every film, story boarding is key. We had been asked to story board our two minute clip, personally I found it difficult to plan what we would shoot in the future, especially as this is prior to the location scout.
We developed a narrative and some iconic shots to horror we could use to create an extremely tense Job Interview. 

Even though art isn't our strongest skill we made it as legible as possible however we used it to give us a strong overview of what to shoot, we gave it a quick description such as camera movement, diegetic and non-diegetic sounds and editing techniques.

We drew up some camera shots that we need to move the plot along and some shots that will create an extremely tense shot, we combined a variety of camera shots and editing styles such as a simple close up to a graphic match.

Chiefly, we will use the storyboards so we didn't forget what we was going to shoot and how we was going to shoot it, also, so we can shoot it all in one go and then move onto post-production without having to revisit the production of the film.