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.

Prezi evaluation

http://prezi.com/ho1sjguwmca7/#103

This is my prezi presentation of the opening scene task.

Evaluation

For our task we wanted to create the opening scene of a thriller movie. We think our target audience will be older teenagers and adults who enjoy watching thriller movies and also people who are interest about the Steve Wright murders. For part of our movie we used snapshots of pictures that we took, we wanted this to create a scene and image in our audiences mind. Our interviews took place in one of our houses as we wanted to create the effect that we were interviewing people from their houses. This was because they were scared of the murders and grieving. Our short scene of a person running took place outside on the grass. We did research however about our ideas, and looked at films such as sweeney todd and from hell which were based on murders and jack the ripper, which Steve Wright is to be thought of as a modern day version.

I think we would choose a  production company like Lions Gate Entertainment if we wanted to distribute our film because although this isn’t the most well known company, it has produced a lot of horror and thriller movies before.

We did however have many problems when doing our task. For a start we found it difficult to come up with an idea that we all liked, and that we all thought was achievable. We then had problems when actually filming. One of the group members was always hard to contact as she had no phone or email address. This made it hard for us to organize a time when we could all get together. Work was also an issue so the time we had was limited. Also when editing we realized we didn’t really have enough filing but it was too late to film some more, obviously time was a major issue here and we should have checked our filming before we began to edit. when editing as well there were only 2 of us that knew how to actually use the software, as we were used to using a different one, and even then we still found it difficult and could only do the basics. Our task could be seen as more of a documentary then a film, this was because we included the interview, if we had longer than 2 minutes then maybe it would become clear it was a film.

Therefore in our task there are a number of things we could have done better, we should have put a lot more effort into our task, and planned more thoroughly. We also needed to work better as a team and communicate more.

In conclusion I am not really pleased with our final task. I don’t feel all group members tried their hardest and we didn’t work to the best of our ability.

PLANNING: Costumes and Props for the Main task.

Costume:

Karly – hair up,
bright make up that stands out,
slim fitting grey printed teeshirt,
black skinny jeans or shorts and long black socks,
trainers,
hoody.

Sam– skinny jeans/ dark jeans,
white or printed teeshirt,
trainers,
black hoody.

Dannii– Skinny jeans,
long top,
cardigan,
hair down.

Simon – Baggy teeshirt,
dirty baggy jeans,
cap,
old hoody or jumper,
roughed shoes.

Props:

Fake knife
Fake blood
Strobe lights
Car
Music system
Alcohol bottles
Neon paint?
Glow sticks?
Smoke machine?
Lazers
Fake spiking drug
Fake drugs

Newest Task

Romance-love – always a happy ending, usually a short book and easy to read, obstacles get in the way of the guy and girl getting together.

A rough outline plan for the opening 2 minutes of a film.

– Marcus on piano opening.

– Marcus closes piano, then gets into bed…looks at a picture of me on his phone then puts his phone down, then switches off the light (everything goes black)

– The dream begins…

– Introducing the dream with ‘wheel, 4 spokes’ (windows movie maker transition)

– Marcus is dreaming about life with me…

The dream has a mixture of flashing still and moving images.

 – Alex’s picture of a rose in a pool

– Marcus at a bus stop he see’s me walking past. I don’t notice him.

– Flash up of my face

– Me laughing

– Me and Marcus dancing together… him in suit, me in a long dress.

– Ending with me and Marcus sitting at the bus stop bundled up, and then I kiss him on the cheek and walk away…

– Fade out transition

– Fade in transition to show Marcus waking up

– Flash to me and Marcus being at school, I finally say ‘hi Marcus’ and then walk away…

– End on Marcus’s face smiling.

THE END.

Credits:  Marcus Wiseman as Luke Armstrong. Teri Squire as Leading Girl. Filmed and Produced by Holly Smith and Teri Squire.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

For our preliminary task, we had to create a short film with just a few lines of dialogue. Someone would have to enter the room and with another character and say the dialogue. Our genre for this short film was a ’spoof’ about a woman (me) being followed by a stranger. a young man/ teenager(Robbie Khun). The woman misreads this as him stalking her but infact he is just trying to give her phone she dropped.

We had to plan out the mise-en-scene (location, props, costume) for the costume we decided to have the stranger wear a hoodie because that way you don’t see all his face at the start to make the audience nervous but also the other character, also we decided to have a hoodie because the character is a young adult/ teenager and so we based it on a sterotypical teenager, they often wear hoodies. For the woman we decided to have her wear orginally a dress but decided that would make the character seem younger in age also we had a problem with continuity so just decided to create a whole new outfit to jeans, top and high heeled shoes. The location was a problem with planning also, it was difficult trying to find a quiet place to shoot the footage, originally we were going to film in the sixth form block at sewell park college but then changed to the hallway in in sewell park college and entered a cookery room. We only used a few props in the footage, which was a mobile phone and table and chairs.

The equipment we used for recording the footage was simply a camera and tripod so it was easy to manage. We did include many shots, we did include shot reverse shot and 180 degree shot, we also used a low, medium and high shot. When film editing we had to cut a lot of the footage and we re-arranged some of the cuts and we cut out all the footage that was not useful to us. Then I edited the colour to black and white colour because we wanted it to seem fictional and then turn into reality by changing the colour back to original colour at the end, I also used a video transition to change it from one colour to the other. I used this transition because we wanted to make it obvious we had edited it.  I decided to change the volume of the footage because of sound in the background, that was a problem and we could learn from this problem, we should of found a more quiet location, we made the volume loud when the two actors ran and during the dialogue because it is important to have the digetic sound. We added music (non-digetic sound) to build the tension to the film but also to fill in the clips without sound.

Our aim was to get a reaction out of the audience, at the start of the film our aim was to get the audience anticipated about what the film is about and what is going to happen and when the stranger is following the woman we wanted the audience to get nervous. Finally we wanted the audience to have to be relieved but find the end of the film funny because there is a comedy ending. I am mainly confident we have achieved at least a few of these reactions from the audience.

Health and safety is important when filming, so it does not endanger film crew or the actors. When filming the running down the hallway scene, we made sure there was nothing on the floor that could endanger the actors (me and Robbie Khun) and the group so when running no one would fall over while running.

Managing human resources was mainly fine, when filming everyone was part of the production, each person got to film, act or make decisions about filming for example when we would use certain shots. When editing, each person got to do editing because we wanted everyone to have experience with editing, not just filming.

Overall the the preliminary task had a few problems but we managed to overcome these problems and finish the task.

Production Log

Brief: Our film is a ‘spoof’ type film and it is about a woman being followed by a man in a hoody. We had to redo our film because of the change in continuty because one of our character’s Robbie changed his clothing (the colour of the hoody) so we had to start a new film. At the end of our film we will have a comedy ending which the audience does not see coming, our aim is to grip and reel in the audience by using tension between the characters and the long pause at the last scene should make the audience hesistate. Having a comedy ending will relieve the audience but also it is a contrast from the thriller theme at the start.