Planning: Shot List

Planning: Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas

My idea:
Narrative - a young female who gets raped and is extremely effected mentally. She then has a mental breakdown and seeks revenge to the people/person who raped her, killing them and then having an addiction to killing. Killing anyone when she thinks about the time she was raped.

Title - 'Wounded by a single touch'

Sub-genre - Horror, psychological

Characters - Female victim/antagonist, rapist

Narrative structure - Todorov (Beginning, middle & end)

MES:
Iconography - Knife
Setting - Ally way
Lighting & colour - low key, red

Marlyns idea:

Narrative: A young female who is pregnant with a possessed baby in which the baby then effects the female mentally causing her to blackout and commit murder at any random time. She then finds out about her doings and then mentally she gets worst.

Title - 'From the inside'

Sub genre - Psychological

Characters - Female Serial killer

Narrative structure - Todorov, Barthes

Schelahs Idea:

Narrative - Young students are sent texts on their birthday greeting them ''Happy birthday. Look behind you''. They are then attacked with a baseball bat, kidnapped then murdered.

Sub genre - action , Psychological

Character - Antagonist

Narrative - Todorov

MES:

Iconography: Baseball bat
Lighting: Low key
Costume: Dark, scruffy, hoodie

Conclusion:
As you can see, all of our idea are relatable through several features, of the characters, sub genre, narrative and narrative structure etc. Through sharing ideas, we then decided that we all wanted to create a psychological thriller.

Planning: Micro Elements - Ms. Begum

Micro Elements



 Cinematography 

Cinematography consists of three main features; Shot sizes, angles and movement.

These are used to portray different values and ideologies of a characters representation and also help set a mood of a location.

-The shots I am planning to use in my thriller are shots such as extreme/close ups, medium & long shots etc. For example I will use a close up shot on my protagonist to allow the audience to view the characters facial expressions clearly in order to let the audience see the different types of emotions the character portrays.

-The types of angled shots I will be using are mainly high angles and low angles shots. These types of shots are used to portray which characters are superior or inferior. I am planning to use low angled shots for example, when my antagonist is overpowering the protagonist in which then I will use high angles shots on the protagonist to show that they are inferior.

-I am planning to use movement shots such as tilt shots to introduce a character and allow the audience view clearly their whole appearance.

Sound

The types of sounds I am planning to use are both off/on screen and non/diegetic sounds. The off screen sound I am planning to use is fast and intense soundtrack to try and disturb the audience. I will also use slow and gritty soundtrack to make the audience sympathy.

The on screen sound I am planning to use are stabbing sounds, phone ringing, door slamming etc. This will create emphasis on the situations of the scene.

Editing

I will be using both slow and fast paced editing. I am planning to use slow editing throughout the majority of the film but when their are intense climax's I will use fast editing to create a more intense and suspense scene. I am also planning to use some jump cuts to emphasise the suspense and also create suspicion towards the audience.

Mise en Scene

Iconography

The iconography I am planning to use are mainly sharp objects such as scissors, knives etc. that my victim/antagonist can use to harm other characters within the film. These objects will also be

 used to portray who the superiority of a character.

Costume

The costume I am planning to use for my main character are white, mental patient uniform. I want to use this to create both an innocent but dangerous look in order to make her seem pure towards other characters but create a worried effect towards the audience when she encounters other characters.

Body language & facial expressions

The body language to be used by my character would be fast and fidgety movements to make her seem unusual and mentally unstable. The facial expressions will be aggressive and intense to also portray her as chaotic.

Setting

As my narrative contains a mental institution. I want to create a mental hospital effect towards the audience, meaning I would need empty, blank rooms, hallways etc. with everything being all white. This would be ideal when trying to recreate a hospital as I am not able to film in an actual hospital.

Lighting and colour

The types of lighting I am planning to use are bright high key lighting when my character is placed in her hospital cell and also use low key lighting when their are intense conflict scenes.

The types of colour I am planning to use are bright colours such as red in order to portray vengeance, blood, danger etc.

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions?

Final Product:The Only Child

I am Joshua Aristorenas - 7264

 

I worked with;

Marlyn Ukah - 7147

Shelah Abongi - 6064

 

''The Only Child''

Planning: Storyboard

Storyboarding

 Importance of storyboard

This part of the planning is essential because the main purpose of this, allowed me and my group to know what to do specifically when filming and creating our final product. Storyboarding helped us significantly as it allowed us to plan and know what type of scene and imagery to create that included the different types of iconography, connotations, lighting, dialogue and more. This part of the planning made sure that we would create exactly what we wanted.

-Advantages of storyboard

Storyboarding helped me to know specifically what was needed and what our group wanted to create in a scene. This significantly helped with the planning stage to get ideas on paper. This was also helpful because it saved time when filming as  we had a guide to follow, further this will also help in the editing stages. Storyboarding also allowed us to experiment with our creativity in creating images.

-Conventions of the storyboard

The conventions included all the small details such as the type of lighting, iconography, cinematography, type of shot we wanted to use and more. This helped us to know what we wanted to create before filming.

 

Overall, storyboarding was beneficial because of several reasons that allowed me to create our production as soon as possible. This provided a less time consuming process which made it easier for me and my group to create the final product.

Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

What was the preliminary task and what were its main aims?

- The purpose of the preliminary task was to introduce us to filming so that when it comes to our final

Production, we would all know how to play our roles whether it is operating the camera or editing the footage after.. This was mainly for us to get used to filming and learn several filming techniques to help us create an our full product

- This task was not planned so we had to improvise and make a quick scene in a short amount of time. This gave us practice in improvising in case we needed to when filming the final project.

This is the Preliminary Task we had created:

Improvements in filming & editing:
 

Looking back at our preliminary task, I have identifies several improvements in both filming and editing that I am now better with and more confident with.

 

Filming: Comparing my preliminary and my final product, I have noticed the difference in character positioning when creating still shots. In the preliminary, the framing of certain shots could have been improved by filling in the unwanted spaces e.g. an over the shoulder shot was used to focus on the character speaking but had a huge unwanted space beside the characters. I improved this by filling in the space with better framing a positioning the characters so that there would be no more unwanted space.

Filming: When filming the preliminary, we didn't have as much time to film than we had for the final product. Therefore our variety of cinematography was limited. From identifying this, when filming the final product I made sure that the most cinematography we could create was implemented in order to gain as many marks as possible. An example of this would be the more variety of movement and different angled shots we had made.

Editing: When we finished our preliminary task, we were then introduced to editing in which the majority of our group were not familiar to. Meaning when being taught this and then had to edit our footage by ourselves, we had very little knowledge of operating the format (FinalCutProX) to create edits we wanted to create and also overall editing. Comparing the preliminary to our final product; our preliminary had only basic edits such as straight cuts and fade to black whereas our final product had many more edits that we included such as slow-mo, fast edits and visual effects.

Editing: I have identified an edit in our preliminary that was not appropriate for the scenario. We had a fade to black between the end of one conversation, transitioning to a different conversation and location. This edit was unnecessary and disturbs the scenes from becoming fluent.

Comparing preliminary to final task:

 

From looking at my preliminary task, I have improved significantly on the still shots. I have been able to use more effective shots such as the over the shoulder shots to show the audience a conversation between the two characters. However In our final product I noticed the unwanted space from the preliminary task and made sure that I would fill in the unwanted space when shooting still shots in my final product. In my final product I have been able to fill in the unwanted space by getting the character in the centre of the camera making sure that the main focus and centre of attention.

Looking at my primary task I am also able to see some of the angled shots that I have improved on, such as these high angled shots. From using this high angled shot in the preliminary I can see that the character shown is the main focus and in the centre of the framing. This could have been improved by using a tripod to make the shot more stable. I have done this in the final product, as shown.

 

 

This shot from the preliminary is very bad because of the bad framing, the character is out of focus and also the shot doesn’t show the characters face and body clearly. I improved this by positioning the character in the centre of the frame, making the character the main focus. What I also did was, when operating the camera, I moved further back from the character so that it was clear to see what is going on within the scene.

 

Another improvement I noticed was the use of an unnecessary transition between two shots. A fade to black was used which disturbed the fluency of the film. What this does is also make it unclear to the audience why there was a fade to black. This gives a gap between the film as if it pauses then

plays.                                                                         

 

 

Discussing the Planning…

After the preliminary planning became essential because the main purpose of this, allowed me and my group to know what to do specifically when filming and creating our final product. For example, the storyboarding helped us significantly as it allowed us to plan and know what type of scene and imagery to create that included the different types of iconography, connotations, lighting, dialogue and more. This part of the planning made sure that we would create exactly what we wanted. Planning group roles were also essential because it let our group know, individually what we would each need to do when it comes to planning, filming, editing etc. These roles were then allocated to each member of our group separately, based on the experience or skills that we have or had in the past. We then created pre-production paperwork which helped to be organized when filming. The paperwork consists of our group + individual schedules for filming, location, filming consent forms etc. These forms ensured our safety throughout the filming process. This overall planning meant that we progressed from our preliminary task because identified the mistakes made and had to ensure that we avoided those small mistakes for the final product.
 

 

 

 

 

Personal reflection:

I believe that I have made a successful thriller due to the conventional themes we implemented in our thriller which appealed to our target audience (mainly people aged 15-30 that are interested in the thriller genre). This was successful because of the themes that our target audience could relate to such as danger, love in which these themes kept our audience engaged.

Out of the whole creation of the final product, I most enjoyed filming the most as it allowed me to experiment with creating the different types of cinematography. I was most interested in this as it was both a learning and practical experiment. This also helped me to express my media skills when it came to filming.

From looking at my final product, I can see that there could be many improvements that I would like to add if I could. One of these improvements would be using more of the other cinematography as we mainly had the use of shot sizes instead of angles and movement. If I could have done this I could clearly highlight the key events in our thriller making our narrative clear to the audience. It would have also helped if I could spend a little more time on the soundtrack as it would engage my audience even more and create a better response from the audience.

 Overall, I have learnt many things when creating my own film production. I learnt the basics of teamwork when having to film, edit, organizing when to film and edit, decide roles, deciding all the small things that would make our production effective. I also learnt how to operate several new media formats which I had never used before, such as Final Cut Pro X and Garage Band. With these new set of skills, I can now research, plan and execute in a professional manner.