Question five of the evaluation for the two min opening film

What kinds of audience pleasure are you trying to provide, and how confident are you that you have delivered on this promise?

I believe that the audience we are trying to target are the who likes thriller/horrors genre’s, this is mainly people of late teenagers to mid-thirties, depending on those who like this style. But the pleasure we are trying to provide is one that is hard hitting as the characters are young, what is being shown is a possibilty to reality, and so this is more likely to draw them in. I am pretty confident that we have succeeded this as ours could be a portrayal of reality, and because of the black and white contrast colour and the fast paced speed in the woods, it is most likely to be successful.

Question two of the evaluation of the two min opening film

How many mistakes did you make, and did you improve in the main task having made errors in the preliminary exercise?

The mistakes gained seemed to be greater in this main task compared to the prelimanry task with my previous group. The problems that occurred was that the original cast that we used were perfect but we could only get them on a certain day, so after we filmed one day and then uploaded it another, we came across that it could not up load due to the camera we used, so we had to use another camera and film. But we could not get the same actors, which then caused another problem that we then had to re-film everything, and find new actors within a short space of time before the deadline. Another problem was that because we filmed outside it was the weather, at certain periods of the day it rained, and because we could not film in one whole day, some days were darker than others, and when we tryed filming one day we couldn’t because it was to dark for the audience and camera to pick up anything. One other problem we came across was that we came across whilst filming was the battery life of the camera, and the problem as discussed as before with not being able to up-load, but due to the battery’s short life, this caused the filming to be done on seperate days, which lead to the weather changes. Being that the first camera wasn’t a school one, we now learnt that we should stick to the school’s handheld camera’s.

I have also learnt a way in which to capture a moment as i was the main camera-man in this task, whilst compared to the prelimanry task i was the main actor.

So i believe that for both tasks, there were more problems for this one, but both had separate problems.

Question 1 of evaluation for two minute opening of a film

At a micro, technical level, how well did you observe the conventions of continuity, the language of the film and the grammar of the edit?

When we found that we had to create an opening title of two minute for a film, already me, Whitney Mckerenan and Lauren Kirby instantly had similar ideas. We wanted to create a thriller/horror based in the woods including:

a victim-Karly-Whitney Mckernan,

a stalker-Simon-Kevin Smibert

a boyfriend of the victim-Sam-Nik Jones

and the friend of both boyfriend and victim-Dannii-Lauren Kirby.

With the micro aspect, to show the representation of our film about a girl being attacked by a stalker we decided that the perfect genre for this would be a horror/thriller.  So for the macro to work, we needed those vital micro elements. First being camera angles and movement.

The original idea for the first scene was for Karly to get drugged by the Simon at a house party, but this idea wasnt idealy possible to create so we ended up with the stalker sitting outside the pub away from both Karly and Dannii while they were having a chat and drinking. When both left for a short period of time, Simon grabbed the opportunity to spike her drink.  We used a few different camera angles, for example for this scene we used a close up to show the focus of the drug being placed in the drink, and then he leaves. So when Karly returns we see that she has an effect from this drug after she has the drink because we used a crane camera angle, then a close up of her face with the camera tilting from each side. This then follows up to both Karly and Simon running through the woods. This was an up-side as it was filmed in the woods because it gave us the opportunity to create even stronger camera angles through shrubery, and above/crane shots from the advantage of hills.

The next aspect for our opening to work was the song choice. We didn’t exactly want a typical tension music, where it starts quite and gets louder, and not to be classical. So ours was an up to date song which was Spitfire by The Prodigy. This song gave an eerie feel to it at the start and when it kicked in we went to a sudden scene change from the pub which was filmed in colour, to the woods which we edited into a black and white contrast. we done this so there was a greater impact, drama and tension between characters and the audience.

On our final edited film opening, we didn’t realise till it was too late that we did not include the title of the film, unless a member of the group added it, but the title of our piece was called Obsession. But the font of our writing i found to be more western, but we had to stick to it as it was the closest one to a horror opening title. We included all the names of the actors used and who done what in our group.

When it came to using dialogue we did not want much as we thought this would create more tension for when there is dialougue.The main speech was at the beginning scene between Karly and Dannii about Sam. We used Me and Lauren mainly shouting “KARLY!” and towards the end we had Simon almost shouting why he is doing this to her, and how long he has wanted her. But over-all not much dialogue, we also covered the heavy breathing whilst running with the backing music.

The setting was easy for us, but it was finding the right spot within Mousehold Woods to film. First we started at the outside of a pub where the pace was slow and naturalistic, but as said before the pace we went along with was because of the music, when the music kicked in the pace got faster and the camera shots were sharper and faster. Once again this was to create the genre of a horror/thriller film.

Over-all these aspects created the macro of our film, and how we represented a possible modern day situation of teenagers lives within a horror/thriller based film opening.

Costume for two minute production:

In our two-minute film we only had two characters who were going to be filmed and therefore we did not need to do much thinking about the costume. We wanted the costume to be casual clothing and to look like something that would be worn to go on a walk through the park with a friend. Therefore we let the characters decide for themselves on the day to keep it simple and as realistic as if it was an actual situation. They wore a coat, boots, jeans, plain tops and scarves. This kept it very basic. The clothing was also made up with dark colours which looked really effective when the lights from the traffic lit up the characters when walking down the dark road. The darkness also made the atmosphere more mysterious as you were not able to see where they were in comparison to the person following them. We did not necessarily want the costume to give an impression as to the personalities of the characters as this was not what we were trying to focus on throughout the film.

Planning for 2 minute task

    In our two-minute task we needed to do a lot of planning in order to help us prepare for it. Here are some notes that we did as a group in our media books.

These notes were very simplistic and just basic ideas of what location we could film at. I feel that as a group we could have done a lot more planning in order to make sure the final outcome was a lot better than what we did do. However we struggled to sort it out and talk amongst ourselves which meant one person of the group would have to take control and dominate what was going to happen.

Storyboard for 2 minute task

 

Here is the storyboard that I created for my two-minute task. All of us in the group made an individual one which in turn were all very similar so we combined the ideas.

 

 The first section of the storyboard is the first shot that we would use in our film. This is to capture swings moving in the wind with the sound of the chains creaking, aswell as a round about spinning by itself. We could not use the idea of a round about because there wasnt one in the park that we filmed at, however we did use the idea of the swings and this worked really well as a result of creating tension and grabbing the audience.

The next camera shot is a zoom in on the swings, as the swing gets higher in the air and moves quicker, but it is unknown as to what is causing it. We simplified this idea as it was very hard to achieve it and make it look realistic without filming any unnecessary objects such as a person pushing the swing with force and getting in the video. We also wanted the swing to stop suddenly and for footprints to appear in the sand. This was very difficult to do and therefore we decided to leave it out but try to work with this idea as best we could.

This part was not then possible as we changed our idea when we were filming in order to improve the overall film. We originally wanted to follow the footprints across the sand and into the grass, soon followed by an establishing shot of the park. However we did this panning shot at the very beginning of the film which I felt looked a lot better than what it would have done if we had included it after the shots of the footprints in the sand.

The camera shot then disappears into some trees to create some mystery and anxiety. We did include this shot and it worked really well along some new ideas that we thought of whilst we were filming.

     This storyboard really helped us to plan our production as we found it difficult to gather our ideas and know what to do. Therefore by individually creating a storyboard we were all able to draw out our own ideas of what we felt would work well in a thriller film and then we were able to combine the best ones in order to make our film. It also helped us to figure out the type of shots we were going use and which ones would be more suitable. If we were to improve our storyboards we would make them a lot more detailed and make certain of the ideas. Although we changed our ideas when we were filming our storyboards still stayed relevant and were very useful.The ideas that we all had were included in the film as we found that they were the strongest ideas. It was very easy to adapt our original idea, this is because we had left plenty of room to improve on it and we were not definite on what we were to do until we went out and filmed. Our target audience is teenagers as we felt this film was perfectly suitable because of the suspense and tension that is built throughout it. This film is a 15 classification. We chose this because later on in the film there may be use of strong language and scenes of violence and a terrifying nature.