Final Film Opening

Shot List

Today in lesson I made a list of the shots that we will hopefully be using when we film, these are just some of the basic ones we hope to use for the opening sequence:




Production Diary

Production Diary11/11/2014 - Today we got ready our film ideas so they were ready to present for Thursdays lesson to the rest of the group. We all created PowerPoint's as this was the most suitable format. On our presentations we collected different inspirations and ideas and talked about what we would include in our opening scene.

13/11/2014 - Today we pitched our different film ideas to each other to decide what film idea we were going to go with. Jack pitched a drama film to do with a man being convicted of a murder and the film was to ponder on if he committed the murder or not. Tom's idea was a teen drama evolved around drugs and crime which he gained his influences from Noel Clarke's Kidulthood and Adulthood. Then the final idea came from Connor which was a horror which based around a couple who are not able to have children. From this the couple went to take other children to be theirs. We agreed finally that Connor's idea was the best and we decided to go for that for our concept.

14/11/2014 - Today not in our groups we started to do our Title Tasks. This involved watching many different clips and reviewing them. This included a history of film openings and a interview with a man who is very big in the film industry. Our final task was to take screenshots from three film openings and annotate them for every title that appeared such as actors and production companies.

17/11/2014 - Today we adapted the film concept and slightly changed the main story of the film. We took the concept away from the couple who were not able to have children and changed it too a boy who went missing on a winter evening in a park. We then went on too reviewing different film openings as a group to gain inspiration from a number of different films. (In the Picture we reviewed the opening of Casino Royale)

 
18/11/2014 - Today Connor was creating our marketing ideas to promote our film in a PowerPoint presentation which you can see him doing below. In the presentation he included how he would advertise our film and what he would do to promote it in the best way. Meanwhile Tom looking at our target audience which he was doing by reviewing films in our category and our style of film and comparing them with what audience the films were most popular with.

 
19/11/2014 - Today we made sure everything was up to date on our blogs so we could get everything out of the way and start with the planning for our film, although we made no progress on the film for the next lessons we can now focus on that.

20/11/2014 - Today as a group we all came up with separate mood boards to compare with each others to gain inspiration to create the different scenes to go on to our story board which we would create in Friday and Mondays lesson. The mood boards for each of us have now been uploaded onto our blogs.

21/11/2014 - Today we began to create our story board going through scene by scene with what type of shots they will be and where the different titles would be located around the frame of the shot. In this lesson the storyboard was nearly completed and would me finished and finalized in Mondays lesson.

24/11/2014 - Today we also worked on the story board for our film. The story board a very long process and is looking to take us one more lesson as we have to cover every shot we have in or opening scene including just slight different frames and where the different titles are involved. During this process we separately evaluated our LAP charts to make sure everything is up to date and correct.

Marketing Campaign



Audience Research

The target audience for our film is going to be aged between 15-40, the ceritifcate of the film is going to be from 15-40. From looking at previous horror films which have a similar sense to ours, I gathered some information from films this year which have appealed to the similar target audience which we are trying to gather.  I started looking at a website which showed the 25 top Netflix horror's which are frequently shown.  As netflix has become a much larger network this year for younger a younger audince of around 17-18 this would fit perfectly for some key statistics which may help our film. 

5. The Cabin In The Woods
Year: 2011Director: Drew Goddard
For a movie chock-full of twists, perhaps the biggest is that despite all appearances to the contrary, The Cabin in the Woods is a heartfelt love story. Mind you, not between any of the young and pretty college students who tempt fate at the cabin in question. No, this romance is between creators Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, and the scary-movie genre as a whole. A ménage à terror, if you will. Like Scream before it, the film is a simultaneous dissection and celebration of all the tropes to which it pays homage, while also managing to be a superb example of the genre in its own right. The script is vintage Whedon—smart, funny and surprising. Thanks to Goddard’s direction and staging, and despite the film’s very focus on the formulaic nature of horror, it still manages to be tense, atmospheric and jump-out-of-your-seat scary. The Cabin in the Woods may very well be the ultimate schlocky little horror movie.—Dan Kaufman

4. Nosferatu
Year: 1929Director: F. W. Marnau
F.W. Murnau’s sublimely peculiar riff on Dracula has been a fixture of the genre for so long that to justify its place on this list seems like a waste of time. Magnificent in its freakish, dour mood and visual eccentricities, the movie invented much of modern vampire lore as we know it. It’s once-a-year required viewing of the most rewarding kind.—Sean Gandert
3.Let the right one in
 Year: 2008
Director: Tomas Alfredson
Vampire stories are plastered all over American pop culture these days (True Blood, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries), but leave it to the Swedes to produce a vampire film that manages to be both sweet and frightening. The friendship between Oskar, a scrawny, 12-year-old outcast, and Eli, a centuries-old vampire frozen in the body of a child, is a chilling but beautiful story to behold.—Jeremy Medina
 
2. The Silence of the LambsYear: 1991
Director: Jonathan Demme
In the face of grotesque sequels, lesser prequels and numerous parodies, The Silence of the Lambs still stands as a cinematic work of art among crime dramas. Winning the five gold rings of Oscar-dom (best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, best screenplay) Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the murderous Hannibal Lecter proves the worth of surrounding one of cinema’s greatest thespians with a stellar supporting team. Director Jonathan Demme deftly wields the brush of that talent to bring audiences into the dark, sadistic world of Dr. Lecter while leaving them gasping at the twists and turns of novelist Thomas Harris’ gruesomely wonderful story. As what happens with all great films, second and third viewings fail to diminish the ride.—Tim Basham
1. Rosemary’s BabyYear: 1968
Director: Roman Polanski
The most famous of Polanski’s paranoid thrillers, not to mention the most inviolable. The film infiltrates a privileged space of middle-class entitlement and pollutes it with the most extreme evil possible: sweet, unassuming Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is pregnant, but could her baby already belong to someone else? The volatile climax has an answer, and the sequence has remained one of the most celebrated in horror history for good reason.—Sean Edgar
As you can see the films which scored the highest is a rather old film, and this is the most viewed film of 2014 on Netflix, obviously our target audience typically prefer a much newer horror film compared to an old one produced in the 1960s.  Statistics show that 17 year olds specifically prefer jump scares rather than scares which are less startling.
 
 

Music Research

We started looking at various tracks which could suit our opening for the film ''Gone'' we looked at a variety from the Women in black soundtrack as well as the Insidious soundtrack.

This is the first one that we looked at which was the Marco Beltrami sound track and we thought this could potentially be the soundtrack we use.



 This is the Insidious soundtrack which we also took into consideration for using however some parts of this soundtrack may be too dark to use since we still want to keep the opening rather mysterious.


 This song is used in Insidious which is similar to ours in some ways which we also are taking into consideration.


Inspiration - Insidious

So while we are deciding the main plot of our film, we decided to look at a similar opening which we have in mind which is in the film Insidious.  We looked at the types of lighting in which they used as well as the type of music that they use to build tension since Insidious is not really a clique of a horror we thought to follow these steps to make ours out of the normal clique.

Titles Task

Titles Task
Richard Morrison's Interview poins -
1. Richard Morrison from personal experience suggested that, distractions could also be key as it gives inspiration so not thinking too much about the project and getting ideas to flow which will keep you calm and then start scratching ideas once you have inspiration or have pulled up an idea.
2. He recommended that before you start any digital work with titles, that you draw the idea first since then you are able to rub out any mistakes or changes that you want to make before bringing it digital where you are more unable to change anything in the process. 
3. Getting lots of different ideas which he said is key since you can differ what you want to do and pull all these seperate ideas together, but also making sure that the screen play is flowing and makes sense to the rest of the film.
Captain America: Winter Soldier Timeline -

Individual Pitch Idea

Genre: For the Genre we need to think hard about which type would be ideal for us to use in the current location we are in, I mean I want to try and implement Drama as an film pitch Genre since I think it is possible to pull this off and it would be very relevant to our current situation it is probably the most practical as well.

Story idea: The Story idea that I was planning is that there are two brothers one which is 17 and the other which is 13, there mother has passed away some years ago and the father is in the army so they are staying with there auntie in suburbs London, they both go to the same school however the older brother is in a college, he is the typical school dropout he wouldn't turn up to any lessons he did not do his GCSE's and he mixed in with the wrong people at school, he is part of group of drug addicts and is supplying drugs for this group on a weekly basis, if he fails to provide drugs for the group he would not get payed and would be beaten up, he is the only member of the family providing money for the family as the auntie is unemployed and the younger brother is too young to work the film will focus on the older brother's life and how he needs to provide money for the rest of the family so that they are able to eat and have daily essentials.  The film also shows how the poorest people can survive off the smallest things in life.

Target audience: As this is more of a family teen drama this would be suitable for the target audience to be teenagers and younger people potentially 

Titles: Title names could be easily edited into the scene or during filming examples include:

  • On the street curb as the brothers could be walking to school
  • On the side of a brick wall out the front of the school
  • On the back of a hoodie
  • Name edited into the reflection of a puddle

Student Film Openings Marking

We had to look from a list of title openings and evaluate some of them so below I have three that I evaluated and gave a grade to, I told them what I thought went well and I also said what I thought that they could have improved for the future.






I rated this video 55/60 I thought that the acting and the location went very well the amount of lighting they used and the correct tools made it look like an actual cooking show which is what makes this have such a high mark in my opinion, what could have been better is that if they used more than one location which would limit how much acting they could do.







I rated this video 58/60 since the suspense from the start until he was shot was major, even when he was putting in the memory card into the laptop the camera work was well used and the shots they got were very important, the ending is very sudden with the gunshot and is not suspected even though it came from a hooded figure.









I rated this title sequece 49/60 since this is a very detailed and mysterious opening we do not really understand much or why the title is caleld To the end of the world, it does convey a lot however I am still unaware what this could mean, to improve I would add more dialogue to understand what actually happened.


Film Opening Marking Criteria



In today's lesson we watched some students title sequences to films which they had produced, we also looked at the marking criteria and we marked them ourselves based on the criteria that was supplied, below I will give the score out of 60 for each one I watched as well as giving my own comment on what I thought of it.



 
I give this 40/60 as I thought the titles that they created were unique and it based around the theme of the teenage girl waking up and getting ready in the morning.  It is very different however the ending is what makes it interesting.

 
 
 


I give this 50/60 as this is very interesting as it has some very intense and detailed acting it is at some points very misleading to know if there are two different people or if points are just going back in time.






I give this 58/60 this was a very well put together sequence, the music which was in the background went well with the actions of the boys and the car which hit the boy over conveyed a dark sense whenever it was filmed so this created tention between the care and the boys.





 

Representation

Representation
 
Representation is the way in which people, events and ideas are presented to the audience, the media breaks this down and takes things that are already reperesnted and they then present it to us in the way they chose, for example Stereotypes.
 
Stereotypes - Media use stereotypes which is because the audience understand them, this is known as a visual shortcut which is repeated a lot so that we assume they are true.
 
Scottish man Example -
 
Achetypes - This is the ultimate stereotype.  For example a scottish man using bagpipes wearing for example a kilt or something this is an extreme stereotype.
 
Countertype - A representation that challenges tradition stereotypical assiciations of groups, people or places.  Example is Steve Jobs he is an arabian decendant. 
 
 


 Gatekeepers - If an person involved in a media production has the power to make a decision about something the audience are allowed to read, gatekeepers having power to overide.
 
Moguls - They have overall power, the person who owns the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch who is one of the most powerful people in the world. 
 
In the media, they can create something so powerful that it will change peoples opinion on something for example it can put people in a good or a bad light, an example of this is Richard Dyer who people argue that he was a good or a bad person, this creates a representation of him this comes down to power from people such as rupert murdoch he has th power to create someone that comes across as good or bad.
 
 The Bechdal Test
  1. It has to have at least two (named women in it)
  2. who have a conversation with eachother
  3. about something besides a man
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Narrative Task


 
The main four:
 
- Roland Barthes
 
- Vladimir Propp
 
- Levi Strauss
 
- Todorov
 
 
Roland Barthes:
-Symbolic
-Enigma
-Actions (what happens)
 
 
Vladimir Propp:
Main characters and how they are presented
-Hero
-Villian
-Princess
-Helper
 
 
Levi Strauss:
Good vs Evil
Exterior vs Interior
Dog vs Cats
Male vs Female
Black vs White
 
 
Todorov:
There is always an thing or obstacle that someone will need to overcome:
The persons life will change from start to end.
Equilibrium then to the obstruction then to a different equilibrium.
 
 
Applying Barthers theory to Insidious 2 trailer:
 
 
 
 
-Symbolic
In the start of the trailer when the toy is moving across the floor making a happy noise it makes us wonder how it is moving towards her on its own which makes us ask questions and wonder why this is happening.  Then the items on the board move on there own to symbolise paranormal acitivty within the area, this also creates a creepy sense of distortion in the trailer as the music cuts off and plays a kind of screaming sound.

-Enigma
When looking at the lady who suddenly appears behind the wife and then slowly stands up and walks off we wonder how she moved there since before she was not there and just appeared there, then she appears on the baby monitor in the childrens room without going up the stairs so this also makes us wonder how she magically made her way to the room.

-Actions
from looking at the actions when the wife is running away and screaming from the paranormal actions going on within the house this creates tension in the trailer and also makes the audience scared, the actions from when the child is running around the house also contrast with the paranormal behaviour which links in with the engima in the house. 
 
 
 
 
 


My Company Logo


Prelim Task ''Broken Brothers''

Here is our Prelim task final for broken brothers.



Institution Task



Adobe Premier Pro - Editing

 
This is my first adobe premier editing task, this took around 2-3 lessons and it consists of me getting use to using the cutting tool within the new york city and using dancin bears to make them fit together with music supplied by Kanye West, I tried to plend the music and the dancing bears together after we had done this then we had to add a james bond mix into this so after the song I used clips from james bond as well as the theme music to make an alternative opening to the film and I feel that I have done this well.
 



Juno Storyboard

Here is our Storyboard
 
 

Premier Pro Editing Task




Juno Task
This is our Juno opening scene which we filmed, the footage is slightly rushed because of the short amount of time in which we had which was 1 hour, we also had to try and find suitable places to film these short clips however we could have done this prior to the filming, the film was done quickly.

The storyboard we made was accurate however the level of detail we used was not very high and we could have expanded on that, this made it hard for us to get the correct shots to compare to the original juno opening scene, in the future I would like to add more detail and writing into the storyboard and actually including the background to compare to the original scene easier which would increase the depth of the shots in our footage.

The stength personally in the group was the editing which we accomplished easy and I tried my hardest to make sure that everything was in sync, i.e slowing certain parts down to get the timing as perfect as I could due to the lack of the detail in the shots.  Our weakness was the storyboard because we underestimated how important the storyboard is and how we needed to base all of the footage around that.

At the time when we started editing we thought we had all the shots however when I started comparing this to the original it was quite the opposite and it made it very difficult for me to edit and make sure that it is the same to the orginal.  We had a very poor storyboard and for this it made the rest of the project difficult.

The camera which we used to film the footae was very easy to use and it became very simple very quickly which made it somewhat easier to get the footage and the right clips. 

I think our footage looks very similar to the original in my opinion however obviously there is a few exceptions and in some parts we made certain shots not look the same which was a problem.

What went well: The editing, speed of production and camera work.

What I learnt: Features of Premiere and about camera shots and effects

What I will do in the future: To take more time planning shots and producing storyboards.

Film language


Film Language has four key elements, these are:



Camera
Sound
Editing
Mise en Scene
All these four elements are put together to create effects in the scene and manipulate the audience to how you want them to feel. Each of them can be broken down and explained in much more depth.





Camera - FAM
Frame:
extreme close up (e.g. somebody's eyeball)
close up (e.g. someones face)
mid shot (e.g. someone standing (cannot be taken above the belly button))
long shot (e.g. someone standing from a distance)
extreme long shot (e.g. mountains/scenery)
Angle level:
High (birdseye view)
Low (wormseye view)
Movement:
Pan left/right
Tilt up/down
Zoom in/out





Sound - MCDOVED
Music
Contrapuntal (music/lyrics contrast)(opposite: parallel)
Digetic (sounds actors can hear)(non-digetic - e.g. voiceover)
Off screen/on screen (e.g. phone call in another room)
Voiceover
Emotion
Dialogue (way people say things depends on: age, tone, level, accent)





Editing - TOP
Transition (straight cut/dissolves/wipes)
Order of narrative (beginning/middle/end/flashbacks/dreams/time period e.g. years)
Pace





Mise en Scene - CLAMPS
Costume
Lighting
Actors
Props
Setting


Film language analysis - Terminator 2


Mise en scene -
- Bad Guy Image  Leather Jacket, Jeans also wearing boots (Arnold S)
- Guns such as Shotguns and machine guns as well as futuristic weapons
- Low key lighting most of the time, as well as lightning
- Very Strong imagine for arnold.
Sound -
- In this specific scene we see very strong music, instrumental as to think something bad was taking place within the car chase and the music was in que with the crashing of the cars.  Lots of crashing sounds which created effect as the (robot) was creating the crashes. 
Editing -
 - The editing was very fast paced the scene from the car chase was constantly being shown from different perspectives and the special effects which were edited in were also very explosive.  The weapons which were used were very high tech which means that would also have been edited in.
Camera -
- Close ups which are used on the robot to show the visual effects which are used

Genre Task

In class we were given the term DISTINCT and told to analyse four film trailers based on it. We were also taught about hybrid genres which is where genres overlap. An example of this is romantic comedy films.
The trailers we had to analyse included:
  • Oculus 
  • The Guest
  • The Vow
  • Guardians Of The Galaxy




This is the Oculus trailer, instantly we notice this is a horror film as we can see this from the setting of the film which is in a dark house, the time is set at night which is normally to do with horror films.  The characters are also looking very scared.





This film trailer The Guest looks like a 'hybrid genre' as it combines action and thriller, the music creates a sense of action and thriller genre, the main character is portrayed as mysterious which makes us think it has thriller.




This film trailer is The vow which instantly makes me think it is a romantic film, the light which is used as sunshine makes us think of happiness and shows love felt between the two characters.




This film looks like a hybrid genre as it combines Sci Fi and Comedy, the props which are used are high tech gadgets which make it obvious that this is Sci Fi and the element of humour can suggest this is hybrid











Semiotics

 
This is the promotional poster for the Hunger Games, I will be applying Semiotics to this poster to analyse the denotation and the connotation of this poster.
 
The denotation from looking at this is that the red mocking jay in the middle is on fire which may present anger or hatrid however it also has a golden glow which may symbolize majesty as the girl in the centre of the poster is looking up on the fire bird image it may show that this image is higher and is looking down on everyone,.
 
Looking at both sides of the image I constantly see images of a female which is in the middle on the left and the same on the right for a boy and the same pattern is used on both sides of the poster so this may show teamwork however they are so far away from eachother on the picture it may show that they may dislike eachother or compete against eachother, the fact it is in a pattern shows how this picture is suppose to show perfection.  The low key lighting around the edges which is used to represent the beacon of light at the top and the high key lighting which is emitted from the middle below the fire bird at the top may present an entrance which the female in the centre is looking at.
 
The connotation from this image shows how the 2 characters in the posters on the left and right may work together or be competing against eachother, the boy on the right has more of a serious face compaired to the female who is almost looking stunned at something upwards.   The arrow which is shooting through the bird may represent some type of war or anger from the bird or may represent peace for others.
 
 
 
 

Film Pitch Presentation


The lost ones from tomgbhs

This is my presentation which I worked on in groups, we made a presentation about the film we created which is called The Lost Ones, we gave the presentation on this and we also got feedback from people
Summary
Overall people thought that this presentation was very intruiging and we got an overall score of around 70/100 people gave us the best marks based on the narrative and how it was suitable for the target audience and will attract customers. The area which seems we need to improve on was how the narrative fit the genre.  The conventions needed to be in place as well.

Hybrid Genres


Hybrid Genres is the title today because we learnt about the mixture of genres which form a hybrid genre, we made a spider diagram of different types of genres which is below:

Genres -
Anime
Sci-Fi
Comedy
Western
Thriller
Musical
Fantasy
Romance
Horror
Superhero
Action
 
We had to describe in detail the following
- Setting - locations, time of day or night, interior / exterior
- Themes, Good vs Evil, Love, Revenge / Justice
- Icons and Props, Significant objects
- Narrative Story and Plot
- Characters, age, gender and class
- Texual analysis
- Sound, editing, camera

Mise en scene

5 Elements -

Facial Expression + Body language
Lighting + Colour
Positioning of characters / objects within frame

Low Key lighting - Created by using only the key + back light
Sharp Contrasts

High Key lighting
- More filler lights

Iconography

We looked at several films to see if we could work out the effect on the audience and looked at several Mise en Scene features such as settings + Props, Costume, hair and makeup, Facial Expression, ligting colour and positioning of characters within the frame.

Element of Mise en Scene
 
 
Mise en scene
 
 
Essentially it is information in front of the camera for the audience to help them to work out what is going on.
 
5 Elements- 
Setting + Props
Costume, hair and makeup


Genre Task




We were given a genre picture task in which we took pictures to show a certain genre. The genre this image was suppose to show was Comedy like a hangover from a party and he is now feeling sick in the toilet.
 
The genre this frame was suppose to show was Thriller and a serious look on his face while holding the briefcase.

The genre in this one was suppose to show Romance as the couple holds hands.

The genre in this frame was suppose to show horror with the lights off and the effect of the figure standing behind them.