Examiner

To the examiner,

I hope that you've enjoyed looking at my blog in seeing the progression from my preliminary task to my groups final film, it has taken a lot of hard work and hopefully this will pay off now you've taken a look. I've attached labels on the side of my page to make it easier for you to take a look at my blog. :) Enjoy marking my work!

Emily x

Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups ?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Polariod - Our Final Film

Our Ident

As previous where we showed you our ideal idea for our ident but we had to slightly change it because it roved too hard, we wanted to achieve video footage of a TV in a dark gloomy area and then tried to edit in our effects over the top but unfortunately we couldn't get hold of any TV's that were small enough to move so we had to settle with taking a picture of a TV and editing over that. We were having trouble with making the white noise sound and so we emailed the person who we had got our ident inspiration off and kindly they sent us the audio clip they had used and gave us permission to use in it our film so we didn't have to spend lots of time looking around for a sound clip that would fit our ident as we thought this was perfect.

Sound and Music in our Film

Whilst making out film we found that finding the music was one of the hardest tasks we had to do for our film because we were restricted to using copyright music which meant we could not use music that we had heard previously even though it might have fitted quite well in our film. Firstly, we did to find the music was looking on royalty free music websites and we spent a large amount of time going through tracks that were assigned to the horror/thriller genre and after a long time of looking we decided to search some where else. In the end we thought a good idea was to look at other media films for inspiration to see what music they had used and we came across this video with music that fitted perfectly to what we had in mind and work very well with our end product. Finally to get the music we contacted the people who had made the video and asked them where they got the music from and if they could send us a link and luckily the emailed us the song so we could use it in our film.
Below is the video we found with the music in that is in our films for the camera shots.
This is the video we got the camera sound from again we looked on youtube to find the sound and again contacted the creator to get premission to use it in our film.

Editing

For all of the films we have made including all of our practice ones we used Sony Vegas Pro 8 to edit and found it a real success. Personally i think this is a very good software to use because it is very professional and allows for very precise editing to be done, also has a lot of built in video effects and media to use which helped largely with the making of our film being as we didn't have to add in the effects ourselves but we could chose from the range available with the software. Although the software can be quite confusing to start with it is a very good editing software to use when you know what your doing and luckily Mikey had used it previous to making my media projects therefore it really helped.

Fonts

Before making our film we decided that we needed to find some scary looking or distorted fonts to fit along with the theme of our film. Firstly, we looked at all the default pre loaded fonts on our computer but there were no fonts that pacrticulally stood out. So we looked online for a free font download website and found www.dafont.com a free font download website witha large variety of fonts accesible to all. We downloaded several fonts for our film but in the end only chose two; 'BASE 02' and 'El & Font Gothic'. BASE 02 is a slightly army styled font but has a nice distorted effect that we were looking for and at the same time it still stands out well and it fairly easy to read. El & Font Gothic is a very dark font it fits in very well with the horror genre as it has quite a distinctive gothy theme and we thought it worked quite well for our film title.

Sky Horror Ident Idea

This short clip inspired us as to what to make out ident look like in our film. I personally think that it would really set the mood for our film if this was our ident at the start of the film because it has a mysterious feel to it. For our ident we are planning on using the same idea being the TV in a dark room then it turns on with a fuzzy screen then we will have text on it saying 'HELM productions'.  We are trying to match the quality of this Ident so that we can grab the audience attention at the very start of our film opening. If we do this then the audience will want to watch more. I think that it will be a very good effect and give a good atmosphere to start the film off. The reason behind the text 'HELM Productions' is that it is the first letter of all of the groups names and it is the only word we could make with our names the sounded slightly realistic and scary.

'This is England'

An analysis of the film ‘This is England’ explaining how the production practices appeal to the target audience.

The film 'This is England' was produced Shane meadows and is an auto biography of his own life. 'This is Engalnd' is about a young boy that has been growing up in 1983, which at the time was a skinhead era. Shaun who was the young boy was walking home from school on day where he just had a fight because it was his first day at the school. As he walks under a bridge Shaun comes across a group of skinheads - Woody and the gang and they were just hanging about as you do having fun and laugh together so they make Shaun feel welcome and invite him to join them. Soon after this theybecome best friends and decide to change his looks to suit the group - skinheads, he hangs round with them all the time and loves it. By doing this they buy him Doc Martin boots, a Ben Sherman shirt, and they shave his head so he has a skinhead hair style. This all suddenly changes when Combo an old mate of Woody’s comes back, which suddenly cange the mood and atmosphere of the group. Combo is a psychotic, bitter, dangerous, and very racist man, you would class this as a typical skinhead culture. The gang splits with the help of Combo and Woody leaves the gang and takes a few lads with him, which left the rest with Combo which includes Shaun because he realises what had happened to his dad which encourages him to stay. All the way throuhg this film Shaun and Combo and Woody are the main charactres. Personally, i think that this was done so tthat you could see the differences in age between the same culture.The way in which Combo looked and brought Shaun up i think that he would have been brought up very simular to this which would mainly come from people in the working class. Therefore this is because there was high unemployment in working class. Which determined people forming gangs such as the skinheads, another idea could be that it could be resembled as the Midlands man - Working class that is unemployed and resulted into the skinhead culture. Also there were many females in the skin heads in the 1980's the 'female charm' was very common, therefore they had control over men by charming them. This is known when the girl and Shaun get together in the garden for the first time when they kiss! She charms Shaun into liking her. The cameras used in 'This is England' are 30mm camera lensend which is good quality that has good picture.In 'This is England' there was not a lot of editing through the film as they wanted to make the mise en scene in the film as natural as possible. On the other hand the budget was low for the film so they spent the money on the camera quality to make what they had filmed of a really high quality and look really good. The actors used in 'This is England' aren't very well known or famous stars vecause he had such a low budget and because Shane Meadows didn’t want a well known actor that would be in what is quite a racist film because it would have been bad for the actor. An example of this would be by having Pierce Brosnan acting a Combo or Woody wouldn't have seemed convinced to the audience and could of felt threatened. So by having an unknown actor like Stephen Graham is

convincing and makes it feel more realistic. The lighting used in 'This is England' is mostly from natural light, they did this because they are on a tight and low budget therefore they could not afford to pay for special lighting and for lighting scenes. Another idea is that by using natural lighting it makes it more realistic as to what era it is and where abouts it is set and to give a feel of the time period it is set in. Shane Meadows was trying to portray the time period of teh 1980’s (1983). In this era there wasn’t much to lighting in housesat because of low money incomes and horrible weather at the time. Also it is set in the Urban area in Nottingham on a council estate the mise en scene is really dull, as they would have much money to buy have expensive lighting on a low budget film, also it makes it enhances realism. The props and costumes used in 'This is England' are critical as there was a low budget and that they need to get the most suitable and cheat but not tacky props for every scene. An example if this is when using the cars for the mise en scene in the 1980’s they bought old cars off ebay instead of hiring them which saved lots of money. Even if the cars they brought didn't move it didn't matter because they where just used in the scenes as parked cars.

The Soloist

http://www.thesoloistmovie.co.uk/


http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies/2008/10/oscar-watch-09-thinning-herd.htm


These are two websites linked to the soloist.


Also here is the making of the soloist :)

The release date for 'The soloist' in the USA was Nov 08 which moved to April 09. The release date in the UK was 25th Sept.

- Advertising budget cut because they were backing Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road, therefore they had more chance of winning an Oscar.

- Also there was another hick up because they got removed from the AFI (American Film Festival) and from the opening night on the 30th Oct (world premier) . Apparently they described the film as a 'cinematic innovation' and a 'renewal of a tradition of realism'.

- Joe Wright also created 'Iron Man' and 'Atonement' which won a golden globe BAFTA. The soloist was Joe Wrights first American film.

An example is Alice in wonderland because it had a DVD release date which was 12 weeks after it was brought into the cinema therefore the exhibitor ODEON boycotted showing it (biggest in the UK) which forced institutions to change their plans.

Annotation of editing

How does the editing in your choosen video construct the meaning of teh relationship between chracters?
Editing used: There are many jump cuts from taio cruz being on a boat with lots of women to him being on a speed boat with one woman, this makes that one woman stand out as possible the one he'd like to be or is in a relationship with.
Cross cutting is used to in twine different scenes, one of taio being followed by a woman and another of him on the boat.
Camera angles: over the shoulder,two shot,short fast pace shots to suit the pace of the beat, close up to show intimacy between singer and woman.





This music video uses editing shots such as: juxaposition,montage editing,and cross cutting to tell the story of robbie riding across the desert in order to reach a woman who he drives away with at the end. The short shots and camera angles of zoom,close up,low angle and over the shoulder shot make all see only robbie.

Film Draft feedback

Improvments: too blurry,pixilated camera shots,not enough narrative. take the volume down on the camera noise. needs more angles.seems more like a trailer than an opening.
Success:well edited,the music matches the acton on the screen.nice effect between shots.well placed titles,that fit in with the clip transactions.
comments: i wanted to watch more,music and transactions work well to make me want to watch on.

The general level we recieved from everyone was around level three.

The Soloist

Actors- Jamie Fox, Robert downey junior
Website Budget- £60 million
Licensing- 12A, categoryE-American film with small british input.
Director- Joe wright (Atonement)
Software- Shots in 35mm film (expensive)
Box Office- £31 million
Audience Appeal- Basedoon a true story and real people.
DSN?
Exhibition(where?) - 25th Sept 2009 in the USA, Origanal date was May 2009 because advert budget was cut, therefore it wasn't nominated.
Distribution- Universal, dreamworks- working title film. (conglomerate) This allows vertical intergration.

Location shots

This is the outside of the House we will be using. This is the outside of the girls house and we have chosen the front of the house so that the bedrooms can clearly be seen into from the outside and we would lke to include this in one of our shots.

This is where the stalker places his pictures of the girl he is madly in love with. 

We have chosen this room because it has enough space to fit in a desk and chair for us to film the stalker cutting out photos and putting them on the wall, it also has a clean white wall which we will be using to put the photos on and with the wall being white it brings more focus to the photos because the walls have no real colour.

This is the cellar where the pictures will be developed and made.We have choosen this room to be the dark room because it is very dark and mysterious already and we thought that this would be perfect for a place were the stalker goes to develop his photos. (This room also really fits in with the genre of a pyschological drama/thriller

We have two possible rooms for the girls bedroom because we have no set layout for her bedroom as we are trying not to focus on her as a character and trying to just make her room look like any other bedroom. (All of the things in the photos can either be take out or kept as props).

Polariod Draft and Mock Up

Film questions

1. The action: identify the event your idea is based around; what actually happens (discovery of a body, an illicit meeting, a witness seeing a crime being committed, a criminal act taking place, a telephone call, a chase, a short journey etc)?
A teacher that becomes obsessed with a student. The teacher has been taking pictures of her. Then shrine of them all in his cellar at home.

2. The theme(s): what should it make the audience think about or feel, what ‘issues’ will it raise (revenge, sexuality, voyeurism, stalking, obsession, greed etc)?
The film makes you think how easily how somebody can come across as a normal person with a normal job but could be a psychopath. This explains the psychological drama.

3. The narrative: how is it structured - classic narrative pattern or break with convention, real time or different time zones, flashbacks/forwards, dreams etc. Will there be dialogue? What about diegetic/ non-diegetic sound?
There will be diegetic music to help the story line and create an atmosphere. The change of music/tone will show a change in story line. There will be no dialog in the opening of the film. This is so that it doesn’t look unprofessional. This is because we don’t know any really good actors.

4. The character(s): who are they, identify their roles, what are their characteristics, including gender, appearance etc?
Our stalker will be an attractive,tall,’hairy’ man who receives many admirerers making his psychological issues very unsuspecting. Our student who is being stalked by the teacher is a pretty, blonde haired blue eye girl who the teacher finds attractive.

5. The setting and choice of location: where is it set?
The setting of our film is in a dark cellar type room belonging to the stalker. The house that he lives in is set in the secluded country side. The teacher’s bedroom is constantly dark and filled with photographs of the girl he’s obsessed with. The dark and ‘bricked’ cellar provides a great setting for creating an atmosphere of drama/thriller.

6. The mise-en-scene: identify colours, lighting, dress codes, the overall visual look
The house our film is set is very dark, old fashioned with antique furniture and plain colour walls. There will be very little lighting in the teachers room only glimpses of natural light from the sun rising.

7. The camera work: the style you are aiming for
In the opening scene we plan to use fast, quick paced camera shots of the teacher getting ready for work. every few shots we’ll have a camera flash and the camera noise to show the constant use of the Polaroid camera by the teacher. Our camera angles will mostly consist of of mid shots that only show parts of the teachers face, hands, clothes, feet to restrict how much the character know about the characters appearance.

8. The editing: edited as a continuous sequence, use of cross cutting, use of montage, or combination?

We are in a way creating a montage of the character getting ready fro work with quick clips of him dressing.

Thumbnails

These are my thumbnails which is basically a broken down version of the storyboard but with less detailed but i understand it cleaarly.

Storyboard

This is our moodboard which basically tells you our plan of what our opening sequence. - we will redo this

Audience Profiling

Age: 12-25 (12+)
Background: Middle class
Occupation: Student
Gender: Both
Likes: Horror + Thriller Films, School Dramas/Dramas with killers/stalkers
Dislikes: None
Musical Prefrences: High tension music (mainly instrumental)
Heros/Rolemodels: None (Able to see teacher presented in bad light)
Media Habbits: Watching Horror/Thriller Films, TV Dramas. Reading scary books that would fit the horror/thriller genre.

Target audience

We decided from the feedback that we will aim this at ages 12-45. We think that males would be more interested in this film opening rather than females because it is more horror based but we know some females enjoy this type of genre of psychological dramas becasue it usually has a good cliff hanger.
Here is a picture of my brother called Marcus who we think is a prime example of the type of audience who would watch this. He is 18 and loves psychological, horror, action dramas. These are a few of his favourite fils: Saw, Stanger calls, The Butterfly effect and House of wax.

The Actors

Lauren Findley will play the girl that is getting stalked. She is 16, blonde hair, blue eyes and pretty. We decided to get her to play as this part because she fits what we had in mind and also we wanted someone pretty so that we understand why the pscho is stalking her.















Danny Jenno will play the stalker, but we will never see his face in theb opening scene. He has brown hair and brown eyes and is 17. We wanted an adult to play this part because of hand feature looking more mature etc. But we couldn't find anyone suitable therefore that is why were using Danny because he looks old for his age and i think we can get away with him looking like an adult seem as though we won't see his face.

Rating

We decided that our film would be a 12A –
This is the information from the bbfc website that i got:
Suitable for 12 years and over exactly the same criteria are used to classify works at ‘12A’and ‘12’. These categories are awarded where the material is suitable, in general, only for those aged 12 and over. Works classified at these categories may upset children under 12 or contain material which manyparents will find unsuitable
for them. The ‘12A’ category exists onlyfor cinema films. No one youngerthan 12 may see a ‘12A’ film in a cinema unless accompanied by an adult, and films classified
‘12A’ are not recommended for a child below 12. An adult may take a younger child if, in their judgement, the film is suitable for that particular child. In such
circumstances, responsibility for allowing a child under 12 to viewlies with the accompanying adult.

Our Pitch

Polaroid Paparazzi

View more presentations from guestb8750357.

"Our film is called Polaroid, the reason we have decided to call our film this is because it is a film about a character who takes picture of a girl with a polaroid camera so we felt it was a well fitting title and was short and snappy!"

"The genre of our film is a Psychological Drama/Thriller and the main target audience is teenagers and young adults from ages 12 - 25. We feel both genders would like the film equally and although the main target audience is 12-25 we think the actual target audience could be anything from 12+. In order to gain ideas for our film we have researched into other films of a similar genre (horror/thriller) to try and get ideas the main films being; Donnie Darko, The Butterfly Effect, American Psycho, Seven (Se7en) and a few other films between us. From these films we have thought about characters general behaviours, editing, camera shots, music and almost everything within our film we have used alot of other films to inspire us for ours."

"The main plot for our film is about a male teacher who is stalking and taking pictures of one of the female students at his school. The girl is completely unware that she is being followed or that the teacher has any intrest in him at all and she isn't actually seen with the teacher untill nearer the end of the clip. We have decided that opening titles we would like to use a simulatneous camera flash and camera noise and then put some credits on the screen saying something along the lines of 'produced by ,edited by e.t.c' and then after about 4 bits of text the main footage will begin without any transitions just straight cuts. We will have clips of him cutting out his photos and taking them into the dark room and then we will have clips of him getting dressed and putting his tie on so we immediately know he is a teacher at the school however we have decided we don't want to show his face so we are going to keep him hidden by using a lot of close ups or over the shoulder shots of our stalker."

Feedback

From pitching out idea to the class these are the possible problems from the feedback they gave us-Hiding identity of psycho, Needs more of an enigma, Realism, Tough story line might be hard to make it look good, Getting an adult to play as the teacher, Can’t make it obvious who the stalker is, Sound effects, If it doesn’t creep me out then might lose interest.
The positive comments we received were- likes psycho stalker idea, seems well planned, good idea, liked the Polaroid idea, good original ideas, good research, suspense- the audience will want to find out who the stalker is, like the idea of flash and sound effects .
The advice and suggestions we received were - Need more than two suspects, show a scene of paranoia with girl (spinning ), get a good stalker to act as the teacher, plan the story line better, Use adults to act because it makes it more realistic, Use and older person for the teacher, experiment with the edit to see what effects you can use, and try and use different and unique sound effects in your film, Use unusual shots when editing, To keep the sense of it being psychological don’t fall into usual film conventions.

Analysis of opening sequence to Donnie Darko

Mise en scene:
The name of the producer and director appear
first against a black background, followed by
a dull and dark opening scene which i can connate
is the morning time becuase of the sound of birds and the sun rising.There is very little sound other then a build up of slow music to suit the slow pace of the surroundings.

We can see a very natural setting with trees and fields.
Camera constantly in one anlge of paning across the scene, firstly creating an establishing shot of the surroundings and slowly moving toward one part of teh scene where the main character lays on the road.
music chimes in quite suddenly at the site of the main character, this could signify our surprise as the character appears to have fallen off of his bike and is simply attempting to get up. we see the main character from the back to begin with as the camera pans around to give an angle of his face and the scene sticking to the 360 degree rule. the camera then gives you another establishing shot of the surroundings of the countryside. I can connote from the scene that it signifies the characters feelings of seclusion and that he is very far away from society, literally and metaphorically.
The use of a dark setting,lack of music of use of slow pace creates the theme of a psychological thriller based around one person.

Moodboard

This is my moodboard on phsycological dramas because we want to base our film on this genre type.
Donnie Darko: A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident.

Fight Club: A lonely, isolated thirty-something young professional seeks an escape from his mundane existence with the help of a devious soap salesman. They find their release from the prison of reality through underground fight clubs, where men can be what the world now denies them. Their boxing matches and harmless pranks soon lead to an out-of-control spiral towards oblivion.

Sweeney Todd: After hard years in exile for a crime he didn't commit, Benjamin Barker, now Sweeney Todd, returns to London to find his wife dead and his daughter in the hands of the evil Judge Turpin. In his anger, Sweeney goes on a murderous rampage on all London. With the help of Mrs. Lovett, he opens a barber shop in which he lures his victims with a charming smile before casually ending their lives with a flick of his razor across their necks. But not one man nor ten thousand men killed can satisfy Sweeney's lust for vengeance on those who've caused his years of pain.