Styles and Conventions of Silent Films

A silent film convention, in this case, would be the soundtrack. This helps to explain the characters intentions in the film. This means that the film is a clearly a comedy for example, or even perhaps a horror - this can be determined by the type of music used. The main feature in most films is the music but because there are no lines for the characters to say and that means the soundtrack is the only thing you hear making it really important. In my film, I used a comedic style of music that is fast paced and funny within itself. This was the reason I chose it since the film I made is a comedy so it added that extra bit of emphasis to make the audience laugh. I prefer this track over something like having Charlie Chaplin's theme because that was his selection and it clearly worked for him. For me, I had to be different, I then chose to use this track and it does (in my opinion) what it is supposed to do with any silent film.

The way that you could add extra comedy would be to use Foley sound effects to express the characters movements and intentions. But another convention to silent films is the camera angle and how that can influence the meaning of the character's intentions. For example, a low angle facing up is intimidating for the recipient character and a high angle facing down which is intimidating for the provider of the argument. Camera angles have always been a massive influence of how the story is told because it helps explain but emphasise the director's point in which he/she is trying to get across to provide the audience with as much entertainment at the same time as well.

Then for the visual effects, I inputted a black and white filter and a letterbox on the sides like Charlie Chaplin's films have. The black and white filter has not been his choice, I thought that it was needed to make the film realistic in this case. This was always the case for those films because it was the way it was edited and it wouldn't have exactly been their choice back then in the 1920's so I did what he did to help emphasise the point in showing the audience my intentions to match Charlie Chaplin's qualities in my comedic silent film.