Location Scouting

We came across some issues when trying to find a location we wanted to film in. We didn't have a set idea of where we wanted to set our film, this meant that we took some time deciding upon a location  during our lessons and free time, we wanted to have a location that we felt would best suit our character and the situation they are in. We each came up with different ideas of where we could set our film.
After taking all our possibilities into consideration we decided that we want to film in a bedroom, this made it easier for us as we did not need to ask for permission, which could have taken a long time to get or we could not have been aloud. We didn't have a certain time frame in which to film our piece, meaning we can take more time and care when filming as we would not be under any pressure to get it done. It is the perfect setting as we wanted to show our character as being in a confined space, alone and angry and a bedroom seemed the most idle location.

Next we need to decide who's bedroom we were going to film in, we each took photos of our rooms. The first room we looked at was Georgia's but we found that it was too big and was quite childlike as she shared with her younger sister. We then looked at Molly's room but we felt that her room was also to big and was too plain. We looked at my room last and in the end we choose to film in my room as fit our original description, it is darker as my walls are a dark blue but my room is also quite busy, as I have many shelves full of books and DVDs and it was a lot smaller. My blue walls help to illustrate our characters emotions as blue connotes sadness. We thought that this represented our character the best.

Once we had chosen who's room to film in we need to decide what we wanted in the room. We used the news article to help us, it told us that our character would be back home from university, so would be in her old bedroom, so we wanted the room to be like a stereotypical teenagers room; messy, dark and work over the floor.

Audience Profile 2

Audience Profile
Age: 17 - 24
Gender: Female
Registrars General's Social Scale: A/B
Selby's Psychographic Cluster: Drifters: People who are not sure what they want’

VALS Classification: Experiencers

Description
Our audience would be made up of young adults, more female than male between the ages of 17 and 24. A typical member of our target audience would be a young adult or teenager and would most likely to be living with their parents still. They may suffer from low self-esteem or feel insecure, as this is quite common with girls within this particular age range and these feelings can be caused by a number of different things. This means they would be able to relate to our film more than other groups of people would. People from our target audience typically would be thrill seeking, looking for something to create excitement or scare them and like strong female characters.

The Machinist

The Machinist has a slow opening, following the stereotypical features of a psychological thriller film. However it differs from many films as it starts to create enigma as soon as the screen fades from a black screen to the opening shot. A blurred image of a man is shown to the audience, looking into the room through a window. This establishing shot creates enigma as the audience cannot clearly see what is happening inside the room and don't know who the characters inside are. As the screen fades from black to the establish shot music can be heard in the background. The music creates a tense atmosphere as it is off-key orchestral music, violins and pianos can be heard. Music is used to help the audience feel a certain way, this type of music is used to make the audience feel scared and suspicious. The lighting in the room is low key, the low lightning creates enigma as the audience want to continue watching so they can find out what is happening.

As the opening continues the same shot slowly focuses and it is revealed to the audience that there is a man rolling up a body in a carpet. This creates suspicion as the audience do not know why the man is doing this, or what significance this has to the film. The lighting is still low key, accentuating the shadows in the room. The music intensity increases, telling the audience that something bad has happened and is most likely to do with the man in the room and also increasing the tension. The shot is a high angle shot making the man in the room appear smaller, this could be representing the man as trying to hide what has happened.
The credits appear over this scene in white writing, contrasting with the almost black shot.
The opening shot has not changed, this makes the audience feel as though they are spying on the man in the room, this brings them into the film, making them want to keep watching.

As the opening scene continues, the audience watch as the man in the room walks over to the window. The shot focuses and clearly shows the mans face in the window, revealing the character. The low key lighting makes it harder for the audience to see the mans face, however it is clear that he has a cut on his cheek that is bleeding, suggesting he has recently been in a fight. He is wearing old and baggy clothing, implying that he may be poor and skinny. As the mans face becomes clearer, the music in the background softens so that it is not off key and is more orchestral, relieving some of the tension that had previously been created, but still makes the audience want to continue watching.

This film conforms to some of the stereotypes of its genre, it has a slow opening however it could be argued that it is not a slow as films such as 'The Number 23' and 'Memento' which do not reveal much in the opening. This film reveals reveal the main character and creates enigma as the audience have witnessed him rolling up something (most likely a body).

Audience Research

During my research I went onto the BFI website and looked at their Statistical Yearbook, I looked at their documents on 'Genre and Classification' and 'Audiences'. Using the BFI gave me access to a lot more information and facts than the school could provide me with, so I was able to obtain a wide range of information for my audience research. This has helped me and my group to choose our target audience.

Quote from the BFI:

‘The Statistical Yearbook presents in one place all the available statistics on UK film and the UK film industry.’

The BFI show what films are most popular to certain age groups, such as comedy being popular with 15 to 24 year olds, however '18' classification films such as 'The Wolf of Wall Street' are also very well received by this age group.

Thrillers such as 'Gone Girl' and 'Sin City: A Dame to Kill For' are received well by young adults, this information has influenced our decision as a group to make our target audience age range between 17 and 24.

Writing Our Screenplay - Draft Script

Having a script is vital to making a film as it provides dialogue along with stage directions. This a draft we have written so that we can develop it and help us to develop our storyboard and film treatment.

screenplay

noun

1. the script of a film, including acting instructions and scene directions.

                        MINUETS, HOURS, DAYS 

By

Georgia Todd 

Molly Windsor

Anna Dunford

ESTABLISHING LONG SHOT OF DOOR, HIGH ANGLE LOOKING DOWN FROM STAIRS. - DIFFERENT SHOTS CUT TOGETHER 

SCILENCE 

LETTER COME THROUGH THE POST BOX.CHARATER (MUM) COLLECTS. 

FIRST SHOT REWINDED-GOING BACKWARDS UP THE STAIRS. 

MUSIC STARTS QUIETLY. 

Credits appear 

Shot of lights out of focus- slow motion, low angle point of view from bed. 

Character sitting on the bed, with a laptop reading an article. Reading parts of the news article. 

CHARACTER-callie 

(UPSETTIINGLY)

Tommy, a 19 year old student, fell to his death as he tried to coax his friend back inside to a party being held in a dormitory at a university.

After his 16 year old friend threatened to jump from a ledge outside the window. 

KNOCKING AT DOOR 

MUM

Honey are you alright?

SPINING OF ROOM- SPED UP 

CLOCK SPED UP

CHARACTER SITTING ON THE FLOOR, DIFFERENT ANGLES/SHOTS (SPINNING EFFECT)

CALLIE

(Non-diegetic dialogue-voice over)

Man dies preventing suicide. 

Fell to his death. 

He was trying to help. 

CLOSE UP OF DIARY ENRTY JANURARY 3^RD.-callies point of view

CALLIE

(VOICE OVER)

I’m sorry 

It’s all my fault 

(Repeated)

OVER THE SHOULDER SHOT, Callie picks news article off the wall.

CLOSE UP OF NEWS ARTICLE IN HANDS 

CALENDER-SHOTS OF DAYS GOING BY. 

KNOWCKING 

MUM

A letter came for you today 

I’ll leave it here 

CALLIE PICKS UP LETTER AND RUNS OUT OF HER ROOM AND DOWN THE STAIRS. 

DROPPING THE LETTER AS SHE RUNS OUT THE HOUSE. 

SHOTS OF HER LEAVING, AND RUNNING UP THE DRIVE. 

How Research Will Inform Planning

From the research I have done, I have learnt about many things that will help me and develop my understanding of how to create a film opening.
For my research I made timelines of film openings, in class we went through and picked out and learnt the conventions of film openings. I learnt that in a film opening, character, setting and time period should be introduced and enigma needs to be created.
I did more research independently and looked at a few different films that are from the psychological thriller genre, these films were; The Number 23, 1 Hour Photo and Memento. By doing extra research on film openings that are in the genre of our film opening, I was able to understand more about the conventions of a film opening from this genre.
I watched each of the film openings and noticed that there were reoccurring features, such as there was a slow pace to them, in Memento the opening consists of one long main shot which has then been played backwards, this creates tension and enigma which are vital to a film of this genre.

Main Task

Our main task is to create a 2 minute film opening, the video must be original and produced by the candidate.
The audio must also be original and audio effects such as music must be from copy right free source, such as mobeygratis.com.

We were given a choice of news articles to either base or link to the article of our choice into our film opening.

Mise-en-scene | Costume Research

Setting

For our setting we wanted to film in a house but mainly a bedroom. To decide on our location we each took pictures of our room, this showed us which room we thought best suited the description we had and portrayed the emotion we wanted. We decided to use my bedroom as it was small and dark, this was the most like our description as we originally wanted a room that was small, dark, clostraphobic and needed to look like a teenage bedroom with child qualities.

Lighting
When we were shooting in the bedroom we wanted it to be dark and murky to portray the sadness that our character felt. But the darkness also helped to show how it was a teenagers bedroom as it is stereotypical for teenagers to have dark rooms.

Costume/Make Up
Along with the room and lighting we also wanted our costume to be dark. Our actor wore all black which represents the depression that we were trying to communicate. We had our actor tie up there hair to show that our character was distressed, but it also kept her hair out of her face allowing the audience to see her face and emotion. We used minimal make up as we did not need it to show anything.

'Uses and Gratifications' Model

In our media lessons we have looked at the 'Uses and Gratifications' model. It was first introduced by Elihu Katz. He said that audiences use media texts for gratification. Katz also said that there are four types of 'Uses and Gratifications’ that audiences get from media texts.

The four types of 'Uses and Gratifications':

• Personal identity: We can get a sense of ourselves and our peer group from media representations.  This is probably particularly important for adolescents.

• Information: The media are full of information which we are at liberty to use.

• Entertainment: We often consume media texts for entertainment.

• Social interaction: The news, films or last night’s television programmes are common topics of discussion; we use the media to feed this social interaction.  The media may also ‘keep us company’: radio, in particular addresses its audience on a personal basis.  We may feel we know characters in, say, soap operas, better than we do our own friends and thus engage in parasocial (interpersonal relationships in which one party knows a great deal about the other, but the other does not) interaction when ‘interacting’ with them.

Shot List

Actor Research

We wanted to find an actor who suited our initial description of our main character. For this we need someone small, preferably female and someone who was around 17 so that the audience could see that our character was a young adult helping us to show that she was coming home from university. By having the actor around the age of 17 it also makes them more relatable to our target audience which is females aged 17 to 24. The actor didn't necessarily need to have previous acting experience. as our opening does not require that much acting, this is because our opening is quite slow so that it fits within the genre of psychological thrillers.

Prop List

Ideas for a film opening

Earlier in the year our teacher had set us a task to create short opening to films on post it notes which were then put into a jar, this was to help us to start getting some ideas of our own for our main task.
When we were set our main task we were told that we would have to base or link our opening to a news article that was either provided for us or that we had found on our own.
We had a lot to chose from but we as a group had narrowed it down to two news articles but we found it hard to decide which we preferred. So to help us decide we made a short film treatment for both and a mind map to show to what we could do with each of the articles.

Things To Consider When Making A Film Opening

There are different features that need to go into a film opening:
- Enigma
- Character
- Setting
- Time Period
- McGuffin

Enigma
A person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling or difficult to understand
A riddle or paradox

A film opening should create enigma, a conventional film will create enigma.

Character
Main characters tend to be introduced in the opening of films.

Setting & Time Period

Setting and time period are shown in the opening of a film, through visuals and sound. They're are a important feature of a film to consider and they help the audience understand the story.

McGuffin
It is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, often with little or no narrative explanation. 

The specific nature of a MacGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot.

Memento

The 2 minutes opening to Memento consist of one main long shot which lasts 1:30 min and nine 

shorter clips.

As the shot progressing it is evident that it has been reversed. The long take used creates enigma and and suspension as the audience can only watch and wait as nothing is revealed.

The titles and other credits are played over the top of the long shot, this could because there is not much happening in the shot so the credits are not interrupting anything particularly important.

The long shot is of a photo developing but it is reversed, this creates enigma as the audience don't understand why the shot has been reversed or what the picture is showing or why it has been taken

At the end of the long shot a character is introduced, but the audience are not told his name and don't know anything about him apart from he was the person who took the photo. This also creates enigma as the audience want to know who he is and why he has taken the photo.

The music used is orchestral/strings which convey a menacing low note undertone whilst the photo un-developes. This helps to illustrate the genre of the film, because the music creates a sinister atmosphere which is associated with thrillers.

The music quietens as the long take changes to the next shot. This could be to show that the character that is now shown is significant to the rest of the film.

News Article

We had to use a news article to to influence our film and my group choose to use this article to become the background and basis of our film.

British man dies preventing suicide in Honolulu

A British man has died trying to prevent a suicidal friend jumping from the 14th floor of a building in Honolulu.

Thomas Bennett, a 24-year-old landscape gardener, fell to his death as he tried to coax his friend back inside to a party being held in a dormitory at the University of Hawaii on August 16.
After the 19-year-old friend threatened to jump from a ledge outside the window, Mr Bennett went to help.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4556983.ece

Audience Profile

Our film is aimed at females between the ages of 17 to 24, we decided on this age range. We did research into how to choose a target audience, during our research we went onto the BFI Statistical Yearbook and looked at the 'Audiences' page, we found that in 2014 the age group that made up the largest proportion of the cinema audience was people aged 15 to 24, at 32.5% in 2013 and 30.8% in 2014. Whilst researching on the BFI Statistical Yearbook I also found out that, comedies and action films appealed most to 15-24 year olds, with '22 Jump Street', 'The Inbetweeners 2' and 'Godzilla' which attracting the highest significant above-average audiences. Also, the 'The wolf of Wall Street' which is an '18' had a high appeal, with 45% of its audience coming from this age group.

From this information we knew we wanted our target audience to be young adults so choose 17 to 24 and people from that age range will be the most likely to go to the cinema. The genre of the film will be a psychological thriller.  The top performing thriller of 2014 was 'Gone Girl' which took 5.6% of the box office total that year and had 71 releases. Comedy was the highest earning genre of 2014, taking 18% of the box office from 19% of releases and was the highest earning genre of 2014. 

We aimed our film at young females because we have a female lead. From the research I have done from the BFI website, it shows that films with strong female leads, such as 'The Hunger Games' series younger women are more interested in watching the films. They are still received well by both male and females, but having the main character female, attracts more women to see the film.

Our target audience is between the ages of 17 and 24. We choose this age range as are film will be more relatable for younger people, as it discusses topics which are more relevant with younger age groups. However we did not want to aim it at young teenagers because some topics discussed may be sensitive, so we we thought from 17 to 24 would be a more appropriate age range.

Creating a Storyboard

When creating our storyboard we came up with many different ruff drafts until we final stuck with one we liked.

Purpose of a Storyboard

Storyboard definition:

noun
A sequence of drawings, typically with some directions and dialogue, representing the shots planned for a film or television production.

The storyboard is a very important stage in pre-production as it is the guide that helps the production team stick to what they need to film. But it also helps to plan out the logistics of the production stage, such as timing how long it will take to film certain scenes or working out what shots we would be able to do or ones that will illustrate our film opening how we want it to.

We had an original storyboard which we have made to use before starting to film our opening, this was our draft where we were experimenting and trying to work out how we were going to make our idea come to life.

This draft of the story board helped us to understand what was needed in a storyboard to make it effective. 
Looking back our draft, is to vague and we should have taken longer to plan it out. But we learnt from these mistakes and our final storyboard is more detailed and more effective.





















After drawing up our draft we made our real copy, which we will use during our filming, but we have the draft that we can refer to or test old ideas from.
The draft helped when making our real copy as we had an understanding of how our film opening was going to come together and how we should order all our shots.

Focus Group

Our target audience is females from the age of 17 to 24. For our focus group was made up of 6 people between the ages of 15 and 17.

What film did you last watch? Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Legend of the Guardians, Jumpers, GBF, Lord of the Rings

What’s your favourite genre? Sci-Fi, Comedy, Action/Thriller, Comedy, Comedy, Fantasy

What’s your least favourite film? Rango,  Frozen, Horror films, Nightmare on Elm Street, Smurfs, Prometheus

When did you last watch a thriller, psychological thriller film? Few months ago, 3 months, A week ago, Last year, Never, 6 days ago

How do you spend your free time? Reading, Watching Now TV, Watching movies, Youtube, Youtube, Watching films/tv

From this focus group research I have found that many people between the ages of 15 to 17 spend their free time either watching TV, films or things on YouTube. This tells me that having younger target audience is more people are likely to watch our film as 15 to 25 year olds are the biggest age group to go to the cinema.