Evaluation Questions – 6

We have answered this question in the form of a video responce displayed below:

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

In this question we talked about how used technologies to help us in the aid of our production.

We used the internet a lot during all the stages of production including planning where we used google maps to scout locations and researching titles sequences already in existance and in post production where we used the internet and sites such as youtube to get instant feedback.

During the production we also learnt about how to use programmes like final cut as well as learning about cameras and borrowing a DSLR camera for its advanced focus effects.

Evaluation Questions – 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The target audience of any media product is largely based on the content of the film, especially the aspect of genre. This is because different social stereotypes are attracted to different genres of film for example romantic comedies would appeal to the stereotypical female, possibly in her early 20’s+ and Action thrillers appeal to stereotypical male of almost any age (despite the 12 and 15 age certifications often given to these films for the level of violence). For this reason it is important that before we can suggest a target audience, we can identify a genre for our film to fall into. Despite us only having an opening sequence we can identify that if the film were to be continued on it would probably become a kind of dark drama indie film. From this we can then begin to identify a target audience.

To begin with it is important to consider the age certification that would most likely be given to our film by the BBFC and other film classification boards around the world. From our opening sequence we can see that there are already some adult themes present including drug abuse and suicide. According to the official BBFC guidelines for 2009 “No work taken as a whole may promote the misuse of drugs and any detailed portrayal of drug misuse likely to promote or glamorise the activity may be cut. Works which show drug misuse while emphasising the dangers may receive less restrictive classifications than works that present drug misuse in a neutral manner.”

Considering that our opening sequence depicts the drug user as a man who is extremely unhappy and at the end of 2 minutes takes his own life I would say that we are not glamourizing drug use so on this issue we may escape the boundaries of the 18 classification. The Suicide theme in the sequence however means that we could not but classified with a 12 or below because, according the BBFC website for a 12/12A certificate: “Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied, or appear pain or harm free. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.”

This means that our classification would most likely land us with a 15 certificate which is quite a typical certificate for a dark indie drama film, this means that our target audience would start at 15 however this kind of genre is generally more appealing stereotypically to adults in their 20’s to 40’s. This may be because they usually have elements that require more thought on the audience’s part as well as usually having characters that are usually glamourized versions of everyday people of the same age as the audience that this audience can relate to.

A similar kind of dark drama, ITV’s TV series ‘Whitechapel’ has on the ITV website a target audience of middle class females. This could also be true to our film because of the complexity of storylines that could form from our opening sequence that are typical of the genre. Stereotypically middle class people like to think more about what they watch whereas working class people just want to watch. I would however not agree that our film would be targeted at just women but at both sexes because there is nothing that suggests women are more interested in this kind of film than men.

 

Evaluation Questions – 3

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

The media production that we have created an opening title sequence for is a small, low budget, independent British film. This narrows down the options for distributes quite considerably because now we know that we would never get backing from any major Hollywood distributer such as Paramount, Warner bros, Columbia, Disney, Universal or 20^th Century Fox that is more concerned with huge budget blockbusters. None of these ‘Big Six’ film distributers would ever consider distributing a film like ours; however some of these companies do have horizontally integrated art-house distribution companies that are involved with production and distribution of smaller independent films.

From all of these the company that would be most likely to back our film would be Fox Search Light, the 20^th Century Fox Company. This is because unlike Paramount Vantage, Sony Pictures Classics and Focus Feature (the companies set up for independent films by Paramount, Sony and Universal), Fox Searchlight specializes in independent British films and has been involved in many successful British films such as The Full Monty, Shooting Fish, 28 Days later, Millions, The Last King Of Scotland, 28 Weeks Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. Because of this I think that Fox Searchlight would be one of the companies that would be most likely to distribute our Product.

As well as Fox searchlight there are some companies that are more local that could also be a good choice to help us in production and distribution of our film. This company would work alongside fox searchlight. Because our film is an independently made British film there are only really three choices for this job:

• Film 4 – Film 4 is a channel 4 owned company that has been behind a large number of independently made films in the UK such as Shaun of the Dead, Attack the Block, Submarine, This is England, 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire. Film 4 has produced many films that have also involved fox searchlight.
• DNA Films – DNA films is a smaller company that has not backed as many films as film 4 however the some of the releases are very credible, including 28 days later directed by award winning director Danny Boyle.
• Vertigo Films – Vertigo films was set up in order to distribute the films Football Factory and It’s all Gone Pete Tong. It is the film company behind monsters and other films.

Taking all of this into account I think that the best company for us here would be Vertigo Films. As much as Film 4 has had some extremely credible Independent film releases, recently they have moved more into the larger budgeted side of the independent industry, which is a bracket that our film doesn’t really fit into. DNA films have had some good releases however Vertigo films have had credible releases and some that have more gritty content such as ours including monsters which was a huge success and had a similar type of budget as ours would have if made into a feature length film. For these reasons I think that Vertigo films would be most appropriate to back our film.

Evaluation Questions – 1

This is where all the planning and production side of it ends, The sequence is made and all the planning is documented, posted online and done. This means that from here on in its time to start evaluating the media product. There are seven questions that i will be posting, the first of which is this one. I hope its all good and you enjoy it!

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

There are many conventions of real opening sequences in our work, but we have also left some out, not because we forgot, but for a reason. But before we can identify these we must first identify why films have opening sequences and what the purposes of these conventions are.

There are many reasons why a film would have an opening sequence at the start of it; in fact it is actually quite a crucial part of most films as it can tell the audience quite a lot about the film. It gives an early look into narrative giving the audience a kind of idea about where the storyline might go as well as displaying an early idea of characterisation and genre. This can give the audience a good idea of whether this film is going to one that they are going to want to watch, making it very important to get the opening sequence of a film right. It also says a lot about the possible setting of the plot; the visual style that will be present throughout the film and even sometimes the ideology that is present, protagonists and antagonists are often identified in the opening sequences of some genres such as action.

I believe that we have kept to some of these conventions in the creation of our opening sequence however some of them we have challenged. To start with we haven’t really kept to the convention that the opening sequence shows the chronological starting point of the narrative, although it is questionable whether this is actually a convention because although most films do this, there is also a large amount of films that don’t. Our opening sequence begins at the chronological end of the narrative showing the characters supposed final day (although it may not be). It does show some narrative and hooks the audience’s interest by not revealing too much about the characterisation. They want to know who this guy is and why he is so depressed, what has happened to him that has put him in this position and is it really that bad. The opening hints at this but it doesn’t make anything clear. This leaves the ideology to be discovered along with the story behind the character; are we wanting him to die or are we on the edge of our seat hoping he decides not to? The Film ‘Pulp Fiction’ directed and co-written by Quinten Tarintino also uses this idea of a non-linear storyline. Pulp Fiction has many elements of this, displaying different parts of the film at different times but similar to our opening sequence in the way that it starts mid-way through the storyline, and not at the start.

The begging of puple fiction is set just before the start of the robbery in the dinner that is chronologically about mid way through the story.

The Start of our film is set just as the character wakes up sometime after his girlfriend has left him, towards the end of the chronological story line.

A convention of the opening sequence that we have conformed to is that the setting has been established in the opening sequence. It is easy to see where the rest of the film would be set from our opening, the transition slowly between the house being clean and tidy to the total mess that it is in at the end. We can also see that the house is in a large village/small town from the shots that have been shown throughout his day giving quite a clear idea of the location that the storyline takes place in. This is important information for the audience to know, as without it there is no kind of bearing and elements of the story can become confusing.

A good opening sequence will also normally show a good representation of the visual style of the film. I feel that our opening sequence has established this well, showing the audience that the films themes are slightly macabre and that the visual style of the film is reflecting that in the use of the effects put onto the camera and the titles. Another film that similarly does this is one I have already written an analysis on, the opening titles of ‘Se7en’. The whole visual style is representative of the themes in the film and they are all displayed extremely well within the title sequence.

The title sequence of se7en gives a good representation of the visual style that will be present throughout the film through the use of titles, the shots and the clour filter applied to the clip.

Our opening sequence shows the visual style that will continue throughout using titles and camera effects to reflect the themes in the storyline.

Taking all of this into account I feel that our film has both developed and conformed to conventions of an opening sequence, Conforming to the conventions of establishing a clear setting and visual style that will be consistent throughout the film and not conforming the rules of a chronological narrative, rather building on the ideas of a non-chronological narrative in films such as Pulp Fiction. We have also broken a few by not establishing any ideology or much of a characterisation, however I feel that this is to keep the audience interested, not giving to much away to make them want to see more.

Title Research

Of course we were never going to make a seperate title sequence, the plan all the way through had been to create a hybrid between an opening and title sequence. This would require us to put our titles over the opening sequence that we had already created. As we got all ready to put in our first title we realised that we couldn’t just write whatever we wanted wherever with no kind of thought behind it. We realised that first off we needed to do some research into what order the credits of an opening title sequence are normally in because we had no idea if producer would go before director or actors after editor and so on.

We visited wikipedia which gave us a rough outline of the order the credits could go in and they did seem to make sense. They go as follows:

• Name of the Studio – In our case Fox Searchlight.
• Name of the Production Company – Vertigo Films.
• The name of the producer or director – This would be all of us.
• Starring – Myself, Heather Paxton, Toby Broughton.
• Music Composed by – Myself
• Edited By – All of us.
• Camera Work – Sam and Toby.
• Written By – All of us.
• Title of the film – One Month Earlier.

This gives us a much better idea now of hoe to put the titles into our work and in what order we can put them in to make them look like a real opening credit sequence.

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

Editing – 3

Today we continued our editing from where we left off with the character walking down the street. We began by editing in the shot of the drug deal and cutting it up to shorten it down. We cut it into five parts and then added effects and adjusted them so that throughout the shots the effects shift from triple hard light all the way back down to black and white gradually. We did this to give the impression that the effects of the cocaine were starting to wear off during the actions. We also detached the audio from all the clips. This is a process that we have being doing to all the clips since the start. Once the audio is detched we can delete it, effectively muting the clip. We do this because we do not want any of the sound from the clips because all our sound is going to be made in post production. We are creating our own music for our production so that we can custom create it around events that happen in the video and because of this we can add other key sounds in in the logic file and edit them in that way.

After this we edited in the shot of the character taking more cocaine off a bench. This shot tells us a lot about the character even though only a couple of seconds long. It tells us that he doesn’t care about people seeing him take drugs as he does it in pubic. It also tells us that as soon as the effects of the last lot of drugs wear off he needs more and more, showing that he  is heavily dependant on drugs. In this shot we edited a flash transtion in before the next shot of the character walking into the pub. This shows that the drugs are taking effect immediatly. The outside of the pub is affected with triple hardlight.

Second Day Filming

Today we just finished our second day filming. We all met in northbourough at about 1:30 this afternoon and began shooting the shots from our storyboard that were located in northborough, we made the desicion at this point to cut the scene in the shop where the character steals the item. We made this desicion because of three points:

•  It is not particularly vital to the storyline. We can tell by the state of his house and his lifestyle that he doesn’t care and that no one seems to like him, this part is only to reinforce that.
• We knew that all the shots we had planned would come to a sequence way to long anyway and that we knew we would have to make cuts.
• We were running low on time during the day to film this scene because we also had to travel to barnack for the rest of the filming and we needed to be done in northborough by 2;30 PM.

Once we had made this desicion we put me in the correct costume and make up, just as we did in werrington to preserve the continuity of the scene. We filmed the character walking down the street from a few angles so we had a choice when editing, as well as the drug dealer shot in the alleyway.

Once these shots were filmed and we were happy with the results we traveled to barnack to film the final chunk of the scene. Once we got to barnack we began by sitting down and figuring out in what order we needed to film the shots. We decided that we could film the shots in any order as long as the climax of the seqeuence, where the character gets into the bath fully clothed must be filmed last or else the clothes would be wet through the rest of the shooting. We chose to take a walk around barnack in a loop that would bring us back to tobys house visiting all the locations we needed to before coming back for the bath. We filmed the first shot

of the character leaving the house just outside toby’s house, then we walked over to the barnack boules club to film the shot of cocaine beigning done off the bench. After this we went to the pub. As we walked there, and this had been in the back of our minds for a while, we realised that the likelyhood of getting permission to film in the toilets there on a saturday afternoon, with the shot depicting the injection of herione was very slim. We therefore decided that we could film the toilet scene at the ‘Welly Boot Shop’ in barnack where toby works. The toilets there looked quite similar to some pub toilets so this was appropriate. With this in mind we filmed the shot of the outside of the pub and then left. After this we went back to toby’s and travelled to the welly boot shop to film. We filmed the shots in toilet which took quite a while because we nedded quite a few shots in that space. After this back at toby’s we filmed the knife in the drawer shot, the bath running, suicide note, and final death shots.

It has been an extremely productive day of filming which will now allow us tocontinue further editing and production. Unless we find out later that any of our shots are unsuitable, we are finished filming so will put the shots on my portable hardrive and return the equipment.

Editing Begins

Today we began editing the clips that we got filmed yesterday. We started at the beginning because we had all the clips we needed to start from the very beginning until a certain point. We got to grips with final cut pro and then all sat down together and got on with it. We started by editing in the shots of the character waking up, then getting up, walking down the hall, making breakfast and starting to take amphetamines. We decided that as the character walks down the hall and down stairs, the shots were too long and some of the parts of the shot were undesirable so we thought we would cut some of the footage out so the the motion jumps, making the clip look more professional and shortening it. This worked very effectively. We also had the idea that instead of before when we were going to have the brightness increase as he took the drugs, showing that to him the drugs make life better, we would have our clips in black and white and then we he takes drugs it will become coloured again and slightly brighter. This also worked very nicely. We did the same jumpy effect on the shot where he makes cereal and then on the shot where he takes the cocaine we sped the shot up to emphasise the kind of drugs he is taking and their effects. We did not get round to it become coloured but that is our plan for next time.

First Day Filming

Yesterday we began filming at Sam’s house. We stuck to our plan and filmed over half of the shots that were necessary for our final media product. This is very useful for us because it means that we can begin putting the clips together right away. Before we began with filming however we needed to think about how we would transform me into the suicidal character. We needed to take a few things into account: He doesn’t care about his appearance, his well being or anything really. This meant that we needed to make me look pretty bad and just generally a bit of a state. For this we decided to dress me in a plain white t-shirt, plaid pyjama bottoms, cheap imitation crocs and black socks. We messed my hair up and put some grey eye liner around the bottoms of my eyes in order to make me look tired and slightly older. We also popped out the lenses of an old pair of glasses and put them on me. We videoed the procedure demonstrated below:

We also needed to make it look like some one who was seriously depressed would live here. for this reason we put all kinds of litter all over the floors on Sam’s landing and up his stairs. Everything form crisp packets and dirty clothes, to empty cigarette boxes and towels, just to make the area look like the person that lived there really didn’t care about the cleanliness of the house or the cleanliness of themselves, their hygiene or anything in particular.

 

Story Board Video

This is the video that takes you through our storyboard:

We have made a couple of adaptions to the storyboard since this video was made:

• The POV shot of the cigarette being lit and walking downstairs is now a tracking mid shot.
• The Flashback where the character and his ex-girlfriend are in bed are no sitting on a sofa.
• There is a close up of him writing a suicide note.
• There are shots now between him slitting his wrists and his ex-girlfriend finding him including an extreme close up of blood hitting the water, a high angle shot of him dead in his bath, close ups of his suicide note and his ex-girlfriend calling his phone, close ups of his girlfriend knocking and putting a key into the door, a long shot of his ex-girlfriend searching his house and then a close up of her opening the door handle, then the screen will go black and we will hear her phone call to the emergency services and then the title will come up.

This storyboard is going to be the basis for all our shots and will be essential in the filming process.