Final Cut

This is the final cut of our film after all the feedback

Rough Cut Re-edit

This is a re-edit of the rough cut.

Rough Cut

This is the rough cut of the film before we added the soundtrack.

Ancillary task: Final Film Review

Ancillary task: Rough draft of film review

Here is the first draft of our film review, we plan again to show this to our peers and then create a final draft of the poster which I shall upload to my blog as a post again like with the film poster.

 The next post will contain the final draft of the review and the feedback for this poster.

Ancillary task: Final draft of film poster

We have shown our poster to our peers and this is the outcome we have now.

The changes we have made are small because our peers did not see much wrong with our poster or anything that needed huge changes. The only criticism we had was people thought the title, tag line and review were all too cramped up together and it looked messy, they suggested that we remove the review altogether or make the stars smaller. I decided I wanted to keep the review but to make more space I removed the stars. Our group decided that this improved the poster and helped it look more organised so kept the alteration.

Ancillary task: Rough draft of film poster

Here I have inserted an image of our first attempt of creating a movie poster for our short film advertising the film and when it is released. I have followed the popular conventions of the posters I have researched.
Here is our first draft of our film poster:

We intend on showing this poster to the rest of the class and ask their opinions on it and also compere ours to the ones they have created for their films.

Ancillary Task (Film Poster)

Research

Before we create a poster for our groups short I am going to research other films posters and bisect them to see their conventions and styles. I will be attempting to answer the same few questions for each different movie poster, the questions include:

• What elements exist in each poster?
• Where are specific elements positioned? 
• Do the fonts used reflect the genre or narrative of the film? If so, how? 
• How are specific elements used to attract target audiences? 

 The first film poster I have looked at is a poster for The Shawshank Redemption, here is one of the posters used  below:

 
This is the simplest poster produced for the film and shows Tim Robbins character Andy Dufresne in an edited shot caputred from the film. This is not know if you havent seen the film but whilst watching the film you would recognise the poster. This poster has 6 main elements, I shall go through each from top to bottom. The first elemet at the top is whats called the "Tag line" this is a snappy, whitty line best explained by Wikipeida as "The concept is to create a memorable phrase that will sum up the tone and premise of a product (like a film), or to reinforce the audience's memory of a product. This films story has strong message of hope and what hope (and the lack of) can do to people. So the tag line cleverly uses the words like a metaphore but also has the double meaning because the film is also set in a prison. So the tag line is very succsesful in what they used to achive becuase I think it sums up the whole film in short and with multipule meanings. The second element is the picutre used, the piciture is taken from the fill but has an effect that has raised the contrast and excentuated the rain. The pose the man is in resebles something religious which attracts a target audeinece of people who are religious. The next and thrid element is the top billed cast which is above the name of the film implying that it is more important but the size and colour of the font makes it look less sagnificant that the actual film name, then below the names of the actors is the film title. This is in a thin font whitch is normally hard to see from a distance but becuase the background is so dark and the text is light creamy white is stands out very well furthermore the word Shawshank is larger than all other text on the poster showing its importance. The fith and panulitimate element is all the main people envolved in making and producuing the film. this part of any film poster is a legal requirement and is a good way for the people behind the scenees to get regconized for their work. Then the last element is the relese date, in this poster they simply say this fall instead of an acutaul date. I am also considering the order that these elements come in. I most western cultures people read fron left to right and top to bottom. When making out poster we shall consider this like the makers of this poster have. The tag line and centre image gets us intrested, then we regonise the famous actors in the film that add more intrest thenn we are told the name so we can find out more about the film and how to see it and finally we are told when its out so we can look forward to seeing it. The fonts used are simple and look like they have a hand written style and when in a prison the only way any inmates could record infomation is by writing it down, its not possible for them to type or used a computer so the simple fon tthat looks hand written but still clear works well to give an insight to the film. Here are some other posters for the same film 

            

This version of the poster loses the tag line but adds a review and adds photos of the main charicters.
For our film poster we plan to do something more like the bottom poster with the charicters names and pictures side by side on the poster and have the film title centered like in these but at the top instead. 

Construction: Preparing for the shoot

To get the most out of the time we spend shooting and use the time we have with our to its full potential our group needs to make sure we all know our roles and have the right equipment. Firstly some of the scenes are going to be filmed outside so before we organise those shoots we must first check the weather. We will also have to bring with us to all the shoots, the Sony HDV camera (picture 1) and tri pod (picture 2) to hold the camera steady. For one of the shoots we will also have to transport a camera crane (Picture 3) to the shooting location. This will be no trouble however because it fits neatly into any of our cars.

Picture 1: Sony HDV camera
We will record our film in HD on tape and then render it onto computer.
Has a manual focus feature which will be perfect for filming our focus pull



Picture 2: Tripod
Used to hold the camera still at different hights and for panning the
camera with the handle.
We plan to use this for every shot.


Picture 3: Camera Crane
This is an attachment for a tripod which adds over 4 meters of jib arm
to the tripod.
It has wights at the other end to counter balance the arm and camera.
We will use this for one shot where Brian pulls up to Karens house in
his car.


When shooting in our group we will allocate roles for each other, so we all get to have a go at different thing we shall do diffent roles each time we shoot. However because there is 3 of us in the group there will be always one of us doing one of three jobs. One of us will focus on filming and sound, one of us will be the director and be in charge of the actors (checking there costumes and giving them directions) and the third will check for errors in what the other two are doing. These jobs will rotate so all of the group get to try everything. 

Shooting Schedule

This is the shooting schedule for creating our short film. It is important that we are organised so we dont take longer to do things because if we were paying our actors it would cost more.

Animatic

Here is our first annimatic with the soundtrack. The storyboard was made on Storyboard quck.

The images from this software were then imported into Final Draft so we could select the amount of time for each shot and see how long the film would last.

 

The film made from the storyboard images was then inserted into soundtrack pro where we could add the soundtrack and match it with the different lengths of shot.

Here is our first draft for the animatic:

Since this anamatic has been uploaded to YouTube we have made changes to the contence of the plot from feedback we had from our peers on the treatment.

Here is the final draft of the animatic with the soundtrack:

Storyboard

This is our storyboard. The software that we use is call storyboard which is a still pictured animated piece of software that helps you see a visualisation of your film and the type of shots that you will use in your film for that specific part of the film. This is a key stage in our production stage as this is when we see our visual image oof our final film as a whole and not in pieces.

Props List / Research

This is a list of the props we plan to use in our short film with pictures of examples of what we want. I have annotated each picture with a number so I can refer to the specific picture in the text below.

Picture Number 1: This is a cordless house phone, we plan to have one of our main characters, Brian to use one similar to this picture I have taken from the internet. In the scenes where Brian is at home he will use this phone to answer the calls from the obsessive girl he saved.

Picture Number 2: This is the car we want the female character Karen to deliberately throws herself in front of. We have picked this car because we have easy access to cars similar to it and it can break sharply and come to a stop quickly, this will be useful when filming the scene and safer for the actors involved in filming.

Picture Number 3: This is the car we want our main character to drive in the scenes where he gets a call while driving and when he pulls on his drive. We have picked this car because it is in the price range of our character so it is realistic and wont make viewers confused on what the characters job is.

Picture Number 4: This is the car we want to drive past  the second time she decides to try and kill herself. Again this is a compact small car that will stop quickly and will also fit in shot very easily.

Picture Number 5: This is the phone we want Brian to use when he driving. We should have him using a hands free system to encourage safety to viewers. This phone is also realistically affordable to Brian our character.

Picture Number 6: Karen writes her phone number on a pice of paper with a pencil we need to make sure to include this and all other items on our props list. I will also post a props list that can be printed to take out filming.
     

Costume Research

In this post I shall be assessing the main characters backgrounds and personality traits in relation to what clothes they might wear. I will consider how much the characters can afford and what they would ware in different weather and places.

Main characters:



Character: BRIAN

In the short this character is often busy at work and you can also hear him listening to guitar music at work. For the short to be more immersing and believable Brian must have clothes that match his lifestyle. The music Brian likes influences the way he dresses, he could wear a t-shirt like the one in the image below. This is a simple t-shirt with a band design on showing people his passion for rock bands and in this case David Bowie. T-shirts are also very casual and youthful so if we dress our actors in them it would accentuate their youthfulness.

If Brian was seen wearing a large coat like the one pictured below it would make him seem to important and powerful and also make him look older. This style of coat is more expensive so would not suit the character because he could not afford it.

Brian would more likely if he were a real person rather than a subject of our imagination wear something more casual and that also reflects his personality more that is a music lover. The coat shown below is a leather jacket. This is more of a alternative style choice which matches his alternative choice in music. It is also a more youthful and casual design of leather jacket witch is important because there are different types that could give the wrong idea of the character.

Like the leather jacket below is still black leather but is primarily for wearing when motorbiking, this isn't one of Brian's hobby's and he isn't a sporty person so the jacket sends the wrong messages to the viewer.

Character: Karen

Karen is also young and in the age range of early twenty's, she follows the same casual dr sense ess as the character Brian, we decided this because Karen chose Brian to save her from the car and the only way she could judge if she liked him is by how he looked and what he was wearing at the time. So the two characters have their dress sense in common. We would like Karen to wear a hoody like the one shown below because it is is casual and is a girly warm colour, even though it is a hoody the yellow colour doesn't represent the young woman as a youth or a girl out to cause trouble without anyone seeing her face.

 

Location Resarch

There are various locations specified in the animatic that we would like to use to add to our films beliveabluty and immersiveness through what the viewer sees in the film. Here is a list of some of the locations we need to film our short with photos.

• A quiet road for Karen to walk down and then walk infront of a oncoming car.

 

This location would be perfect for filming the opening and closing scenes of the film because its quiet and would be safe for our actors to walk into the road and to place the camera anywere without getting in anyones way. The location below is quiet but is too wooded and there are no paths on ither side of the road so we couldnt fill karen stepping off the path into the road, so this location isnt approrate.

• We need a spacious kitchen for when Karen and Brian are talking after he saves her, it needs to be spacious to fit in all our group, actors and filming ecuipment.

The location above is perfect for the scene where Brian and Karen are talking. It is spacious and well lit and is realisticly afforable for Brian (the charicter that owns it)

• We need a house for Brian to drive to and tell Karen that he cant see her anymore.

 I have used Google Maps Street View to get this image of a house that is perfect for where karen lives because the road is long and straight infron of the house which is what we need for the cran shot of Brian pulling up in his car. It is also appropriate for Karen to live there. The location below isnt apropriarte because the house isnt on a main road and the crane shot wouldnt be as effective.

 

Script

Here is our script for the short, we have produced this to give to our actors so they can learn their lines before hand.

Final Treatment

This is our final treatment that has been updated after the feedback from our peers and that is shown below in the embedded video and the sound file of our treatment being read out and reviewed. After all this we took advice from from things they were saying. One particular thing we changed thanks to the help of our peers was the treatment didn't include scenes where our main character, Brian was getting calls from the obsessive girl and showing him getting more annoyed so we feel more sympathy for him.


Head Over Heels for Love Treatment

Treatment Feedback

This is the audio reading of our treatment and then a discussion of questions and answers about our treatment for our short. This has helped us develop our film and add details in to make our storyline more clear and easy to understand. The treatment is read out by me and then the questions and answers are the group and the rest of our class.

Treatment Feedback

This is a video of our group asking our peers in other groups questions we have written about our treatment. I will also post a sound recording of our class discussing our film.

Rough Treatment

These are screen captions of our first attempt of writing a treatment for our short film.

Research into the target audience

From what we've found out from our treatment feedback from peers and what we have discussed together our films genre is romantic thriller. I wanted to see specifically who watches what and a good easy way of doing this without having to produce my own primary research which is costly or time consuming is to use a feature on some videos on YouTube. The video below is a fan made video involving a slideshow of promotional pictures for Love actually set to music. The video is made by a 31 year old male, I have embedded it below.

I have print screened the information that YouTube keeps about viewing habits below.

The findings from this are relevant because I can see what conventions of films attract what age and gender. The slidehsow shows the main characters of the film. This includes handsome older men and good looking girls. The Audiences information shows that these charicters attract older men and women and young women.

I then looked at Poylgram film company's film Notting hill, I looked at this because it is a romantic film like the one we are creating for our short film project, I have embedded it below.

I have print screened the videos statistics on viewers age and gender below.

These results are more of what I would exspect from a trailer for the romantic gernre of film, younger women watch the video mostly. This could be because the actors are popular to women and the production could of spent more money on getting actors that are popular with a female demograpic. In our film we have used as our two main charicters a young man and a young woman because youth is popualr and people may perfer to watch the innocence and care free lifes of younger people to remind them of how life used to be.

Conventions of a romantic thriller

There are many conventions in the two genres that we have put together to make our short. These two genres work well together as we can also attract two types of audiences. I think the two audiences work well together also because the audiences of thrillers is predominantly male and the audience for romantic films is predominantly female. So with the two genres together they could help to create a good film for couples to watch together.

Thriller Conventions:

• Dark Setting
• Murder/Death
• Teenagers
• Scary
• Spooky
• Mysterious/Strange Happenings
• Paranormal

One of the conventions of thrillers shown in this trailer for Se7en is gunplay, high paced music and a shaky camera. some of these conventions would suit our film but the use of guns would not make sense to our narrative and story.

Romantic Conventions

• Love
• Happiness
• Passion
• Lust
• Sadness
• Tears/Joy
• Separation
• Forbidden Love
• The special or first kiss

This trailer for love actually shows several kisses and is a key convention of a romantic film. In our film only the girl actually wants a relationship and we could include a kiss scene but that ends awkwardly.

To make our film more interesting and rewarding to watch we plan to challenge some of the normal conventions of these genres. One of the biggest conventions we would challenge in creating this film would not to include death or murder in it. This would be one of the main conventions of a thriller but we are not including in our film. Instead we intend to leave the viewer thinking of the possibility of death at the end when the woman steps out in front of another car. This way the film can be a lower age rating so our audience for the film can be bigger.

Our group's original ideas

To start with each person in our group came up with a short idea and presented it to our entire class. Then when we was put into our groups that we are in now. then we had to decide if we wanted to produce someones idea or a mixture of our ideas or even just create a new idea from scratch. This helped us a lot because we used bits from each other but mainly went with one idea and just adapted it with the other two ideas. This made our main idea even stronger than it was to start with. There is a problem with us all coming up with an idea and then go into groups because you just want to do your idea and that only causing arguments within the group before you have even started. This did not happen in our case as we quickly decided on the storyline and the adaptations to the storyline to be made as well. This showed we have good team work from the start.

The three ideas originally were:

• The first original idea was a psychological thriller with an unsolved murder reopened when a detective is told some more information the case. Then he quickly finds out that it was defiantly a murder and the person who was murdered was the person he gave him the extra information.
• The second original idea was about a homeless guy that tries to bunk in an empty house. The when he wakes up in the morning he finds a letter in the letter box with his name on, He finds out that his parents actually owned this house and he now owns it. He has had a second chance in life.
• The third original idea that we actually went with was that a women is walking down a street and makes eye contact with a handsome man and then decides to step in front of a car to get him to save her. then he falls into a love trap with her being very clingy to him. he upsets her and she returns to that very same street where it all happened at the start and the same thing happens she makes eye contact with a handsome man winks and steps in front of the car with the screen turning black before it happens. To leave the video in suspense.

The third idea is the idea we went with but with the adaptations of the other two films in it as well for example the camera shots, type of credits, transitions etc.

Titles and credits in Shorts and Feature films

Before our group start creating the short I have done some research on how titles and credits are incorporated into films.

I first looked at a Future Shorts film called Apricot. I looked at this film because it is a short film like we were set to create.



In this short film the titles are simple hand written font in white on a black background.
This is a screen capture of the film name as it appears in the film.

The simplicity of the titles give us as viewers a hint of the nature of the short film, it will be simply shot with no special effects. The way the titles are shown is interesting. The male and the female character are involved in a shot reverse shot conversation and the titles, shown on a back background appear whilst the sound continues. They can afford to do this because nothing significant is happening on screen. The sound is still important so we can still here that but the film maker sacrifices the visual to show the titles. In our film we couldn't really do this because at the start of it there is no important sound, the opening scene relies on viewers watching what is going on.

The second film I looked at was Working Title film, Love Actually. I chose to look at this film becuase it is a romantic film similar to the film our group have decided to make. 

Here is a link to the opening titles to Love Actually on YouTube because I couldn't find one that would allow embedding.

Click Here For Clip

The opening scene gives us the reason why it is called Love Actually and is a nice prologue to the film and a good backdrop for putting the opening titles. When the film title is displayed on screen it shows the Love in red and Actually in white because red is often recognized to the colour of love. The title appears as the narrator says the words witch is effective and shows that the name of the film comes from the words he's saying. The title then stays on screen as the scene fades to black.

Here is a screen capture of the Title of the film being shown at the start of the film.

Our group could consider doing an effect like this in our opening titles. Our film is called "Head over heels for love" In our titles we could have the love word in red. I would also like to include the effect of having the titles appear in front of the scene then for it to fade to black and the titles to stay like in Love Actually.

Popular short films

This video is taken from the most popular section of the Future Shorts YouTube channel. This short film is called Words and it was made to show people how different words have different meanings in different contexts.




The film is made up of lots of different clips that are all related to each other by the word associated with it, for example the first 6 clips are all linked by the word play. The first meaning to press play on a tape player, then the second meaning to watch a play and then to play with others. This then goes on to playing a trumpet and blowing to create the sound witch then links to blowing out candles on a birthday cake. This is a simple idea that is put together with music accompanying it and is a good piece of media that can be watched by people of any language and understood.

Information about future Shorts

This video is on the home page of the Future Shorts channel and I thought to post it on my blog because it help explain more about the short film company and what and why they do it.

An introduction to short films

A short film can be any film longer than 1 minute and shorter than 15 minutes. Short films or abbreviated to short as a noun often act as a showcase for cinematographers and commercial directors, meaning it like a demo tape for a new band trying to get a record deal. New and aspiring directors create short films to then send to film companies and investors. Recently with the invention of websites like YouTube not only do they send there shorts to directors and film companies, they can upload the videos to YouTube for others to enjoy and to hopefully create some publicity around the video and some attention to it so other investors and talent scouts will stumble upon the video anyway.

I have looked at lots of short films on YouTube (particularly on the Future Shorts channel) and the film below is the one I have chosen to show on my blog because I enjoyed it the most and it has good examples of media techniques.

The Streets - Blinded By The Lights


Although this video is a music video designed to accompany a song the way The Streets song tells a story through a poem or rapping makes it an appropriate example of a short film. I like how the close up shots of the main character as he looks round reveal more of the scene in the background. In these shots its like the camera is attached to his body and as he turns to look around the room so does the camera, this allows us as a viewer to also look around the room but whats behind him. This feels more organic because we discover the location at the same pace as the character. In lots of the shots the screen is obscured by something and because it is closer than the subject being filmed it is out of focus. They could of does this to show how busy the event is and there isn't much space for cameras and it also helps replicate the mood of the character and how he is finding it hard to focus on things and stand upright because of the drugs he has taken. We could use this technique in our film to show how the girl feels when she realises the man doesn't like her at all. Because the girl is slightly insane she could be feeling dizzy and very emotional and the type of shots in this film would also complement the charactersmood.

My group Members

My group includes me, Josh and Jack, we are all good friends and have been throughout our school career. All members of the group including me have full driving licences and cars and live in close proximity to each other and the school so we can meet up to discuss and produce the film with ease and also getting to locations to film with all the equipment is made much easier. When discussing and producing the film the different members of the group have their own strengths. For example because Jacks idea was chosen for our short he knows how he wants his idea to turn out and makes sure the project doesn't stray from the original idea. Were as Josh helps us keep the story realistic and reminds us of the limits of using some techniques because he has a good knowledge of the software. I think I have a keen eye for detail in the production of the short and mack sure that edits are correct and shots match. I also have good skills with software like Photoshop and other image editing packages. My only concern is because all members of the group are male we could mis-represent women in our film this is why we must pay attention to comeback from our peers and others epically the women.

Welcome

Hello! In this blog I will be recording my progress through the task set by the exam board. The task is to  create a short film. The short film can be any genre and must be at least 5 minutes long. My name is Jonathan Marrion and this is a photo of me.