Thursday 24 January 2013

Animatic


Genre: Psychological Thriller
Narrative: Put simply our narrative involves a girl who's older brother went missing when she was 11. At that age she couldn't understand what had happened, or why he left and this distorted her mentality. Therefore when she's older being reminded of what happened (through a flashback) makes her angry and agitated causing her to do all the actions in our opening sequence such as looking through old newspapers, photographs, photo albums, drawing pictures etc. As the tension of the scene builds through our use of intercutting and non-diegetic score, we then cut to the title, and then shoot our antagonist looking a lot calmer to show the juxtaposition between the two characters.
Camera: We start by using a long shot to establish the fact that our protagonist is alone in an empty room therefore she is being portrayed as a lonely character. We also use a zoom (or a cut, depending on whether the zoom works or not) into the protagonists eyes which leads into a point of view shot of her in a flashback where she was told her brother went missing. We will be using a low angle P.O.V to give a weak representation of our protagonist at this time. As a group we have decided to attempt a zoom out from the protagonists eyes too, back into the scene. The pace of the scene will start to increase and we will intercut between lots of mid shots and close ups of different angles to give a chaotic and distorted representation of whats going inside our protagonists head. As well as restricting the audience from seeing everything to give a more ambiguous tone to our final product. After the title appears, we shoot our antagonist male character who will as a whole be shot at an eyeline level. We plan to film our protagonist at this level to in order to show an equal social status. 
Lighting: We plan to use low-key lighting for the first scene with our protagonist in order to create a sinister atmosphere, and then juxtapose this with the natural or high-key lighting of the flashback and our final scene with our antagonist. The use of juxtaposition will reinforce the darkness and agitation of our protagonist compared to the more positive and relaxed atmosphere in the other scenes. 
Sound: We have always planned to have a non-diegetic parallel score but we have decided as a group to look into different types of contrapuntal sound to use instead because this might add to our final piece making it more ambiguous and go against some of the typical conventions of a thriller film. We won't be using any ambient sound but, we will be using lots of diegetic sound, however, if the quality of this sound isn't good then we will use foley sound instead to ensure it's noticeable to the audience. 
Editing: The pace of our editing is important because it will change the mood of our whole product. We are starting with a slow pace through the use of cross-fades, the slow pace continues into the flashback where only one continuous P.O.V shot is used. After the flashback, the pace will gradually start to increase through the use of less fades and more intercutting as well as a non-diegetic score increasing in volume and pace to suddenly come to a climax where our title will be shown. The pace will then slow right down for our final scene with only a few long/mid shots. Our titles will appear on their own screen in white writing with a black backdrop. This is inspired by Se7en and will act as transitions between some of the shots. 
Representations: Our protagonist will be wearing dark clothing consisting of a black leather skirt and a dark coloured shirt. This gives the impression she is a dangerous character but still very feminine. Our antagonist will wear a suit connoting the idea of a business man and both will be represented as formal characters. The female protagonist will have much more prevalence and therefore be the most dominant of the two characters portraying an atypical representation of gender. However, her actions will contradict this representation making her look weak and fragile and therefore more stereotypical of a woman. 
Audience: We shall relate to our audience by giving them something that they can relate to by repeating some of the conventions found in thriller films. However, we will provide something different so that the audience engages with our product through challenging some of the conventions too. For example, we intend to look into using contrapuntal sound as a non-diegetic score, and we are providing both stereotypical and atypical representations of our female protagonist to keep the audience interested in what she is actually like as a character. 

Tuesday 22 January 2013

Shoot One

On Sunday my group and I completed our first shoot for our final product. The severe weather conditions of snow and ice meant that our antagonist was unable to reach our filming location so we decided to postpone filming his scenes until the forthcoming weekend. The weather also gave us some problems when it came to our lighting. This was due to the fact that all the snow outside made the natural light shining through the windows a lot brighter than it would have been otherwise. However, we worked with the situation and thought of ways to overcome this problem, for example, we decided it would be best to close one of the curtains and only use the natural light shining through one of the windows so the room didn't seem to bright. 

Regardless of this, we completed filming all of our protagonists scenes which shall take up at least 3/4's of our opening title sequence. In addition, it was also a very experimental day because we decided to vary some of the shots we planned to use in our storyboard. Although we had our storyboard accessible and used it as a guideline, we found that some of the shots we had planned to use wouldn't necessarily work or look good in our final piece. Therefore, many of the shots we took were similar but varied in length and angle in order to give us the widest range of choice when it comes to editing. 

On the other hand due to a number of reasons our timing for filming was also cut short which meant we didn't have enough time to experiment as much as we might have wanted but this didn't prevent us from filming everything we needed in one way or another. Furthermore, if we find that some of our shots don't work or we are missing something then we shall allow some time to re-shoot some aspects to ensure our final piece is as good as we can make it.  



















Overall though I am pleased with my groups progress because even though we didn't have enough time as we might have wanted in order to be experimental, we did manage to have good communication and co-operation from all the group and our actress. This meant that we filmed what we wanted fairly quickly. We also allowed time for setting up the mise-en-scene and our actresses costume which didn't interfere with our filming time and presented our good organisational skills and preparation.  

Sunday 13 January 2013

Shooting Schedule

All of our filming is due for Monday 28th January and in order to meet this deadline I have been delegated the role of creating our shooting schedule.



Saturday 12 January 2013

Actors/Actresses and Costume

Due to the fact that we had originally planned to create a Bollywood thriller, we had chosen to use an Indians actress. However, we did not fulfill this desire but have chosen to keep our chosen actress for a number of reasons. 

Our chosen actress for our female protagonist is Cindy Sidhu. She is exactly what we've been looking for because we are searching to create a dark and sinister mood in the opening of our coursework therefore, we wanted to find someone with dark hair because we'll be using low-key lighting and this will make her face and tone of the opening, darker. 



 

Her costume shall consist of a darkly coloured shirt/top and a black leather skirt. We want the costume to be darkly coloured to add to the sinister tone, however we also want to portray our protagonist in a very feminine and stereotypical way. I feel the overall outfit achieves this and will give the exact representation we planned. Below are two pictures that give a rough idea of what our actress will be wearing and the photo on the right shows Cindy before we started filming. We decided to back comb her hair to give it a 'rougher' look and added to her eye make-up after this to make it darker and give her a more 'distressed' look. 







We have also cast a young Indian girl called Sharon in the lower part of the school to act as the our 'young protagonist' in the flashback scene. As well as Evelyn Stafford-Allen, a drama teacher at our school to act as our teacher in the flashback scene. The girl shall wear her school uniform and the teacher shall wear smart/casual clothing in order to keep verisimilitude within our opening. 

Friday 11 January 2013

Props

I have been delegated the role of creating the props list. This focuses on the props we will need to either make or bring with us when we start filming. It is essential this is sorted out as soon as possible in order to enable us to start filming in order to meet our filming deadline.

This is the prop list we have created:

  • A shot glass/Whsikey glass, (We shall decide on the day we are filming which we feel looks better and fits our narrative the best.)
  • A water filled vodka bottle/Apple Juice filled whiskey bottle, (Again this will be chosen on the day we film for the same reasons as above.)
  • Desk,
  • Chair,
  • Stack of newspapers,
  • 'Missing' article,
  • Sketch drawing of a boy in an empty room,
  • Photographs of our protagonist and antagonist actors as children,
  • Pencil,
  • Black marker pen,
  • Mirror.
Now I have created this list, it shall allow my group and I to be organised and ready to film in order to meet the deadline we have been set for our filming.

Deadlines for 2012

In order to complete our coursework on time we have been given some deadlines of the different parts of our coursework.

  1. Storyboards and anamatic presentation: Tuesday 15th January
  2. All of our filming: Monday 28th January
  3. Post-Production, Rough cut: Friday 15th February 4pm
  4. Final Deadline: Friday 8th March
  5. Individual Evaluations: Friday 29th March 4pm
In order to ensure we meet some of these deadlines in the near future, and keep the project moving forward, as a group we have delegated roles to eachother:

  • Callum is in charge of creating the anamatic presentation
  • Jess is in charge of choosing locations, costume, actors/actresses
  • I am in charge of props, shot list and creating our shooting schedule.
Overall, this will be crucial for my for my group, and prove extremely helpful becasue it means we eah have our own section of the coursework to focus and work on. This should meant that our work will get done more qucikly and efficiently in order for us to keep up with the workload and meet the deadlines that have been set.

Wednesday 9 January 2013

How has the Continuity Task aided my understanding of the film-making process?

Overall the continuity task has helped increase my knowledge of the film-making process a lot becasue it has given me a practical, hands on experience of what it is like to plan, storyboard, film and edit a short film. This will significantly help me and my group when it comes to creating our final product becasue we will already have had some experiencing in the film-making process.

We planned our ideas very quickly because we wanted to finish our shot list and storyboard as soon as possible in order to give us more time to film and edit. This worked well but provided a few consequences. For example, because we rushed our planning our storyboard wasn't detailed enough which gave us problems when it came to filming becasue we had not been specific enough. However, once we had filmed we then had lots of time to edit which was very helpful because we ended up having to make a lot of changes to our final piece. 

The filming and editing process have also been extremely helpful in adding to my understanding of the film-making process becasue it allowed all of us to gain practical experience with using a camera. This will help us when we have to film our final product because we have now had experience in the different things we can do with a camera and what does and doesn't look good. For example, we attempted to include a zoom in our continuity task but the quality of our equipment was not the highest which meant it looked very amature and caused us to simply discard the shot. Due to this, we have decided as a group that we will do everything possible to ensure we do not include a zoom in our final product because we believe it will decrease the overall quality and continuity of it. 

Finally, from doing the continuity task I have learnt the importance of researching and planning because, as I mentioned earlier, due to the fact, we rushed our planning, when it came to filming and editing, it was much harder. This was because we had nothing to use as a guideline which therefore, meant it took a lot more time than we had previously expected to both film and edit our piece. However, this means that as a group we will be able to ensure we don't make this mistake again and take our time with our planning and continue our research right the way through our whole project. This should ensure that we have a more detailed guideline to use when we are filming and editing which should improve the overall quality of our final product.