My Premliniary task

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlplRtEADbk

Unlike the other three in my group I was in a separate preliminary group. I found the preliminary task extremely difficult as we had to think of an idea extremely quickly and make sure that we had exact continuity throughout the opening. However I did find it an extremely useful experience as I got to work with people that I had never worked with before and it was a good introduction to media.

FINAL VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LaYbIBYkEg

Evaluation question 3

http://prezi.com/eqo3u6apolfr/question-3-what-kind-of-media-institution-might-distribute/#

Story Board

After spending hours trying to perfect our story board we finally finished. Due to the size of the story board (3 A3 sheets) the picture quality has not been as successful. However we feel that we have gone into great depth into all parts of our opening for this story board as we have made sure that all of our shots were clear and concise. 

Evaluation Question 7 - Prelim vs Final Project

Evaluation Question 7 Video

Question Number 6 - Technology

Evaluation Question 6 Video

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1 Prezi

Question Number 4 - Interviews and Target Audience

Evaluation Question 4 Video

Evaluation Question 5

Evaluation Question 5 Prezi

Evaluation Question 2

Evaluation Question 2 Prezi

Analysis of Se7en Opening Scene

We decided to analyse the film "Se7en". We chose Se7en because we knew it was a thriller and it followed a similar distant opening. The opening scene throughout has the use of both digetic and non-digetic sound which is similar to our film opening. We felt that the use of dynamic images gave this film opening an edge that many others did not. 

Film Opening Analysis- Quantum of Solace

Gunshot Test

Seeing as there is going to be a gun in the video, I thought I would test some gun shot effects. I knew it had to look realistic and therefor had to think about a number of things:

Muzzle Flare
Flash from the gun
Where the flash will light up
Gun sound effect
How it would effect James and the surroundings
Smoke from the shot

Firstly what I did was create the muzzle flare which only had to last 1 frame. I looked at shoot out scenes from action films such as "The Bourne" films to see how large the muzzle flash was and how long it had to last. I then created the flash by adding in a colour effect. The flash wouldn't hit everything so I masked out areas that the light from the flash would hit, for example James's face, his hand, stomach and the fence behind him. The smoke was a clip I found which originally had a black background but I was able to screen it out, only leaving the smoke. The sound is a simple gunshot sound which I matched with the timing of the muzzle flare.

Obviously in the final version we will not use a nerf gun but if we can make it look convincing with a nerf gun then I think we can make it look great with a realistic pistol!

Here is the gunshot test video:
Gun Shot Test

Costuming for Second Film Idea

Costume

Due to our change in film idea, we have two characters that we need to plan costumes for.
We want one of the costumes to be a suit to show that the man is smart and in control. This will also show he is a "hitman" like figure. After doing some research, we thought that the suit would be good for the genre. Films that fit this genre such as James Bond, often have the main character in a suit. It shows their superiority of the character. This is shown in the pictures below:

For our second man, the victim, we decided that we wanted him to be simple dressed in jeans/trousers and a top. This is because it is just a 'normal' man and, therefore, would be dressed in normal everyday clothes. We may make his hair scruffy and damp to make it look like he is sweaty from being nervous as this will add effect to the whole film. This would also show his inferiority as he is being threatened and cannot do anything about it.

Location Change

Location Change

Because we are changing our film due to a poor response at the viewing, we have to find a new location. We know that we want it in a film because this is a simple yet effective place to film an action thriller; which is our new film genre. We have found two fields that we could use as they are at Tiffany's house. These are in the pictures below:

Field 1:

 Filed 2:

After showing the group the two choices of fields, we decided that field number 2 was the best. This is because of two reasons. Firstly because, at the edge, there are the steps, in the picture below. We thought that these would be very useful to use to film our long shots from because there is a sturdy base to put the camera. Also when looking at the shot through the camera, it looked exactly like what we had drawn on our story board.

Another reason that we chose this field is because it has a mount in the middle, as shown in the picture below. Even though we had not planned on using something like this in the story board, we thought that it would add more effect and make the all of the shots look better than if it were to be simple on grass.

What is an action thriller?

http://slides.com/tiffanypocock/action-thrillers

Why did we change our idea?

In this video we voiced over some scenes of our first draft that our audience didn't like or something that we weren't happy with and wanted to change. We explained why we didn't like them and what we would do to improve it.

Voice Over Video - Click Me!

20th Century Fox Intro Gun Shot Edit - James

Jak came up with an idea to have our own movie intro related to our genre. He got the idea from the Simpsons intro to change it slightly and make it original to our genre and film opening. Using this inspiration that Jak gave us, James decided to test it out.......................


Intro Gun Edit

Inspired by The Simpsons movie intro I (James) decided to play around with gun shot effects as this is what happens in our film opening. I edited in gun shot sounds and a smoke effect to make it seem like someone was shooting at the logo. At the end I then edited the footage so it looked damaged and broken. This isn't our final piece but James and Jak will evolve the idea and make it look a bit more professional.

Our Film Distribution

As our film genre is an action thriller, we did some research into 'Taken' as the genre of this is the same as ours. We found out that the company of Taken was '20th Century Fox' so we decided that because the two genres are the same, we would put this at the beginning of our film.

Below, is the link for the 20th Century Fox Film Intro:

20th Century Fox

Second Storyboard first draft

The process of changing our idea

.
 

Opening Credits

To research what order the opening credit go in, I found this wikipedia article which clearly states the order in which the opening credits appear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opening_credits

We do not have all the different roles shown the the article e.g. "Based on the book" so we had to skip some out.

James and I (Jak) edited the opening credits. Some of the credits are in line with things on the screen for example the first credits where the names are sitting on the steps, but in other shots there isn't anything for the credits to line up with so they were inserted in the corners of the screen.

Filming and Editing is complete!

After a stressful start on Sunday morning, we are finally finished filming our project! To this day (21/01/14) all we have left to do is edit a few clips and put the opening credits in. Because I (James) have had experience in opening titles before, I know that this will be stressful and very long winded. But, with help from Tiffany, Jak and Immy, I'm sure it won't take that long and we will all be happy with our final project.

We are confident with our piece and even though it runs over by 40 seconds (which we do need to cut down) we feel like this has gone very well.

Our first draft of our storyboard is quite accurate with our final piece, we did have to take some shots out for time purposes but Tiffany, Immy and Jak are all working on making our draft storyboard a bit more appealing to whoever sees it.

Thank you for all the support and we will keep you updated on any changes or things that will be happening in the future

Target Audience for Psychological Thriller

PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER TARGET AUDIENCE

Target Audience for most psychological thrillers are 18+, this is due to the amount of violence which they normally contain as well as many psychological issues that the characters encounter throughout the movie.

We want our target audience of our film to be of the age of 18. As their is violence in our film this is why we felt that we needed to give it a higher rating due to the fact that it could be scarier to younger viewers!
All though the beginning of our film is unlikely to show upsetting scenes apart from one of the characters being attacked in the shop there is no sign of any psychological problems with the actor in the short clip in the film, however the rest of the film, the character may encounter problems with his health.

Background Sound Problems

While we were filming the shop scene we noticed there was lots of background humming and people talking. This was a problem as we needed the shop to seem empty, so what we have had to do is delete all audio from the video and add in new sounds. This means all the audio in the shop scene is non-diegetic and was added in post production.

We still however wanted the music that was playing in the background in the shop so we got a song and edited the EQ settings so that the song sounded like it was being played out loud in the shop when  really it is just a normal MP3 file over the top of the video.

Other sounds like speech we have had to re-record and match up with the lip movements on the video, fortunately there isn't much dialogue so there are only a few occasions where we have had to do this.

Testing Red and Green "Traffic Lights"

Testing Red and Green lights

We added some filters onto a torch and tested the 'traffic light' effect

Making Fake Blood

Making Fake Blood


We made fake blood!

Coin Flipping Test

Coin Flipping Test Video

We did some coin flip tests! Take a look at the video above

Testing CCTV Footage

This is a screenshot from the clip we edited to make it look like it was filmed from a CCTV camera.

Sunday is coming fast..

Seeing as we are filming on Sunday, we thought maybe it was about time to discuss what we actually need to prepare before Sunday comes..

- A homeless man (not a real one, I don't think the school would let us)
- Man that gets stabbed
- Man that runs away
- Homeless man clothes
- Fingerless gloves
- A hat
- A coffee cup
- Some coppers
- A weird coin
- A magazine
- Some headphones
- Fanta
- Coke
- Fake blood
- A knife
- A camera
- An alarm to wake us up at 5am
- Motivation (this one will be hard to get)


See you on Sunday!

Our Genre: Psychological Thriller

Fake Blood Research

Fake Blood Research

Before I tried to make my own fake blood, I thought it would be a good idea to research some different ways that have been successful to others.

These are the best ones that I found:
1. What you’ll need: 

• Golden syrup 
• Red food colouring 
• Blue food colouring 
• Corn flour 

Method:

Step 1 - Add golden syrup to a mixing bowl and add about a teaspoon of corn flour.
Step 2 - Add a teaspoon of red food colouring and one drop of blue dye.
Step 3 - Mix together and add more red food colouring if needed or flour if the mixture is too light.

2. What you’ll need:

• Half a cup of cocoa powder. 
• Three tablespoons of corn flour. 
• Red food colouring. 
• Some cold water. 
• Litre of boiling water. 

Method: 

Step 1 - Pour cocoa powder and starch into a mixing bowl and add some cold water.
Step 2 - Mix into a smooth paste.
Step 3 - Add red food colouring and mix.
Step 4 - Add litre of boiling water.
Step 5 - Leave to cool.

3. What you’ll need:

• Gravy granules. 
• Red food colouring. 
• Boiling water. 

Method: 

Step 1 - Pour boiling water into a jug with gravy granules (add as much as you like to get the consistency you’re after).
Step 2 - Add the red food colouring.
Step 3 - Leave to cool.

4. I also watched this video:

I am going to test all these methods and then decide what one looks the most realistic and the on that I chose will be the one that we use in our piece. The reason I thought that these four methods were the best was because they all use easy ingredients and would therefore be easy to make, hopefully with no complications.

Storyboard

CCTV Practice

One of our scenes in our opening credits is going to be in a shop. This means that we want to have a CCTV-like shot to make it look like the character is being watched. To do this we will need to edit the footage to make it look like real CCTV footage.

Some elements that CCTV footage has is:
Grainy or blurry quality
Text over the top saying date and time
Black and white
Laggy frame rate

Here some CCTV footage that we used as inspiration:

Do we want music?

At first we didn't want music, because we wanted to focus on the 'city life' sounds around the homeless man. For example, cars, rain, people walking etc. We did some research and found a few pieces of music that we thought would work well with our film.

One song that James knew had a perfect beginning with beats every few seconds, we thought this would be great to use and we could time the beats with different shots at the beginning of our film.

We wanted it to end before it got 'too much' but we didn't want it to fade out or cut randomly and unprofessionally, so we thought that cutting it when a loud diegetic sound goes over it. For example, we would stop the music at the same time as we get a shot of a car driving over a puddle which would make a loud splash sound.

Song

(This Will Destroy You - Quiet)

Shot of car driving through puddle

(Car driving through puddle. The first car sound works perfectly but we would want it to be faster to cut the sound quickly)

Gary said yes!

On the 13th of January, Jak and James took a visit to the co-op and asked a very important question:

"Gary, we need to use your shop... Please"

After 5 minutes, once we were done explaining our concept, the owner of the local co-op said yes to letting us use his shop for our media, on one condition, we get up at 6 oclock in the morning to film as this is when no one will be around...

"Deal".

We have arranged to meet at 6 on Sunday the 19th of January to film!

WOO!

Gender Representation

Under Representation of Women

• Females are often portrayed as domineering sex objects.
• Men are presented as active, adventurous, powerful and sexually aggressive.
• Women make up only 16% of news-casters leading us to believe that there are more men than women - men are the cultural standard.
• Scarcity of women in charge if the media - female film directors are even more scarce.
• Minorities are less visible than women - African americans rarely appear.
• If women are shown to be successful but not at home, their career lives are hidden and not payed much attention to.
• Men are uninterested and incompetent at homemaking, cooking and childcare.
• Because women are the ones always shown taking care of the children it perpetuates a negative stereotype of men as uncaring and uninvolved in the family.
• Women are dependent on men and involved in relationships and housework.
• Women spend their time watching males do things.
• Women's primary functions are to look good and please men.
• Men are aggressive, dominant and only engaged in exciting activities.
• Women are usually portrayed as significantly younger and thinner than the population as a whole.
• Relationships that are shown in the media are depicted in ways to reinforce the stereotypes.
• A Woman's power lays in her looks.
• Commercials manifest power cues that echo male dominance and female subservience.
• Men are breadwinners.

What is a Psychological Thriller?

When we mention 'Psychological Thriller" to anyone, they straight away think of gore films, horror, scary, ghosts, paranormal, action etc. As soon as we say that our film will not contain any of the above things, people say to us "That can't be a Psychology Thriller then".

In wikipedias's words taken from the English Dictionary:

"Psychological thriller is a fictional thriller story which emphasises the psychology of its characters and their unstable emotional states" 

This definition is exactly what describes our film

I'm glad I cleared that up.

Costume research

Costume

Our film opening includes 4 main characters. These are:

*Homeless man

*Shop keeper

*2 Robbers

Homeless man

Inspiration

From these pictures of homeless men we have decided that our homeless man should wear:

*Hoodie with hood up

 *Beanie hat (under hood)

*Tatty trousers, ripped and dirty

*Shoes with holes in

We also decided that the person we are using as our actor for the homeless man should have a beard because it adds to the idea that he is homeless meaning that he cannot shave. He will also have dirt on his face because this will show that he cannot wash.

Shop keeper

Inspiration

The shop keepers uniform will be quite easy.

The shop keeper should wear:

*The uniform of the shop

Robbers

Inspiration

We typed into google “shop robberies” and this is what we found:

From these pictures, it is clear that all robbers hide their faces. This is clearly to hide their identity.

Therefore we decided that our 2 shop robbers should wear:

*Hooded top, zipped all the way up

*something, eg. Scarf, hiding face

*Baggy trousers. Eg. Tracksuit bottoms

*Gloves