Gareth - Evaluation

The preliminary task gave me experience in camera work. This was the first time I had filmed with a video camera and this experience has taught me little things such as remembering to turn off the night mode, which I made the mistake of leaving on for a portion of the technical task, therefore having to cut those sections. I also learned that when wanting to zoom into a close up shot, it is better to move towards the object, rather than using the zoom button. Both tasks also gave me experience in editing and I am now more comfortable using the Mac’s. Furthermore this task increased my awareness of the 180-degree rule, as it was vital to follow it.

One of the good things about the main task is the camera shots used. The extreme close up shots, of parts of the bodies of the characters running is good as it helped to reveal enough for the audience to know what is going on but not much about it, so there was an enigma created of who are the characters and why are they running? Creating enigmas and mystery is also a convention of horror/thriller genre. Another good shot is the point of view shot from the antagonist chasing the protagonist as that shows the pace of the chase quite well and helps to draw the audience into it more by making them see from a characters viewpoint. Also, the worm’s eye view shot from the broken glass is good as the sharp glass is a connotation of danger and when the class veiwed this shot, they also gave positive feedback on this.

A second positive point of the sequence is the sound. It sets the mood very well and creates a dark atmosphere, which is good for the horror/thriller genre we were aiming to create. The slow tempo of the non-digetic sound juxtaposed the pace of the chase effectively as well. Also using the programme “Garage Band” has given me experience in creating some good non-digetic sound to go with films, which is quite useful seeing as we were not allowed to use any ready-made songs due to copyright reasons. Another point with the sound is I learnt how to edit it out certain parts when they were not necessary, for example in the antagonist’s point of view shot, the actor decided to do heavy breathing which made it sound less serious, so it had to be edited out.

Also, we had difficulty finding a cast to be in the film. As one of us had to film, just one of us could act in it, but we managed to get Josh to participate. Just having two characters in the sequence turned out to be an advantage as even though it is set in a public street, there are no other people visible, therefore created an isolated setting, which is a typical convention of the horror genre. Also, Josh and I are 17 and 16 years old, which helps to appeal to the target audience of a similar age range (about 15 – 35) because being of a similar age helps the audience to sympathise and relate to the characters more than characters of different ages.

However an issue with the film is the time of day it was filmed. After watching back the film, we saw that it was a bit too bright. This was an issue picked up on by the class as well. We filmed it at that point of the day, as we knew that if it got too dark, it would not be too visible. After viewing another film that was darker, we found that they filmed it at a later time than us, so perhaps it would have been better for to have also filmed it later. Overall though it doesn’t matter a lot, but on the one hand it would have been better if it was darker as that is a good connotation of danger, but on the other hand it challenges the normal convention of danger occurring at night time effectively well because the sound and isolated setting help to outline the mood.

The main issue that the class picked up on whilst watching the film back was the part of the film where I (the protagonist being chased) enter the house. We originally filmed a scene inside involving a door slamming and me taking a knife to investigate. However the class made note of some poor camera work and editing at this point. They also fedback that the inside scene was not necessary as the chase scene was sufficient enough. After taking note of this, Marty and I decided to cut the film at the point where I enter the house and bring the title up there. After doing this, the feedback we got was quite positive.

The product does not particularly represent social groups, however it could be seen as following the stereotype of the young men/teenager boys getting into trouble and violence.

The kind of institution that might distribute the product would be a small private cinema company as there is a very small budget and unknown actors; so big cinemas would not be willing to show the film. Another way of distributing the film is via the internet as files can be shared easily. Videos can also be easily viewed on sights such as Youtube, so this would be a good place to aim it. Another strength of showing this product on Youtube is that it is accessed a lot by young people/students a lot, as well as a lot of older people. Internet networking groups would also be a good place to advertise the product as well, especially to the young target audience as they have a lot of internet access and have signed up to networks like Facebook and Myspace, where videos can be viewed and have word spread.

Evaluation - Marty Leggatt

Our preliminary task was to film a conversation between two people in the correct way to excecute the 180 degree rule. Our conversation was between two friends that were planning to get there own back on a rival football gang, again Josh played the part of the second actor. As it was filmed inside we didnt need to worry about lighting as the ceiling lights gave a natural bright light. We filmed from 3 different angles, 2 from behind each actors shoulders and a third from in the middle of the room between the two actors, we also added insert shots and extreme close ups.

Our main task in our media coursework was to produce an opening sequence for a film, i worked with Gareth and we chose the genre of horror to do this sequence on. Throughout the work we didnt really encounter any major problems, the first minor hick up we had was finding people to appear in our film as only 1 of us could act in it because of the other having to be filming it, in this instance i was filming. After drafting in Josh to be the main antagonist we had all of our cast sorted, then began the filming, we had to fit all the filming for 1 day in around a 45 minute time period because of the fading light, and we needed it be getting dark to fit in to the atmosphere of our opening sequence. All the lighting came out very well in the final cut of the film so this never really caused a problem, one improvement we could of made concerning this would have been to carefully plan our time to fit around the lighting as we filmed more on a different day and the light wasnt exactly the same but did not cause much of a problem.

Our aim for the film was to attract a mainly male adult audience as these are commonly more drawn to the genre of film we were creating, to achieve this we put in all the conventions of most 15+ rated horror films, such as the creepy atmospheric music and a frightening enigma. I learnt quite alot while constructing the sequence, as we were using Apple Mac's which i havnt oftenly previously used it took a bit of getting used to, but i figured out a lot of handy techniques for editing film on them, some of these include diffetent types of cuts and creating music on garage band. We had various drafts of our opening sequence, we eventually settled on only using the first minute of our film, cutting in when Gareth enters the house, we decided to do this as its a good cut off point to enter the titles and then carry on with the rest of the film. We got very positive feedback from the class for our opening sequence so i am very happy with the way it turned out and look forward to future filming. One of the most positive points about our piece was the non digetic sound we created on garage band. We made it dark and atmospheric, to start with we had quite fast paced music but we decided that it would be better to slow it down and make it eary. The feedback we got from the class when we first showed them our film suggested that we should take out the later scenes of our peice as they could find some technical faults with some camera work and access noise. However we didnt take it out just for the faults, we also felt ourselves that the piece would work better as just the 55 seconds opening rather than the 1 minute 50 seconds opening. One thing they liked alot was the insert shot we used of a broken bottle when the credits are still rolling. We achieved this shot by placing the camera low to the ground and filming the protagonists legs with the bottle on the ground to only capture these two things in the scene.

Research

For our research we looked at films with a similar genre, it is important to do this as they will have the same conventions in them. The films we looked at are, "I still know what you did last summer" and "Halloween". Both of these films have chases in them and this is the main part of our opening sequence. Also for our research we looked back at work that we had done earlier in the year in class, this work included generic conventions of our genre (horror/thriller) and how you achieve certain shots and hint at things that may happen. A key convention of an opening sequence is that the names of the actors and titles appear on the screen as the scene goes on, it is crucial to keep this in mind when creating our opening sequence, the writing for these names never appear too big as it would swamp the screen, other than the occasional exception of top Hollywood actors. An example of this would be Arnold Schwarzenegger's name in the film "Terminator 2"
Below is the link to the opening sequence for Terminator 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIwWPO7f8ys

In our selected genre there are normally mysterious enigmas created, therefore we did not want to give too much away about our main antagonist either, in keeping with this convention.
Below is the link to the opening sequence of A Nightmare On Elm Street, this demonstates the mysterious enigma that we aim to portray in our main task
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEoq4OuT3lo

The brief

As we both enjoy and have a good understanding of the horror genre, we chose to make the opening sequence of a horror/thriller film. Generic conventions of this genre often include a single/group of antagonist(s) who cause disruption to the protagonists, often through violence or intimidation. The antagonist(s) normally have the trademark weapon or feature, for example in the "Scream" trilogy the killer wears a white mask and uses a knife as his feature weapon. There is sometimes a connection between the protagonist and antagonist, for example again in "Scream" the killer in the first film was the main protagonist, Sidney's, boyfriend. Other conventions of this genre are isolation, a sharp object for murder, blood, darkness and a killer that is extremely difficult to overcome - all of these are featured in "Wrong Turn"

Target audience

Our film genre would come under the horror/thriller, this genre is typically aimed at the male audience as they enjoy the thought of getting scared by a film, watching violence/gore and be sent on an emotional roller coaster, this however puts some female audiences off films such as ours. We mainly aimed our sequence at the 15 - 35 age range because this kind of film appeals to people of this age range, the age could not go lower as nearly all films in these categories have the certificate of a "15" or above. Another thing that would appeal to the audience we have aimed it at, are that the actors are of a similar age to the watchers and so they can relate to them alot more than they would for example a 60 year old man.

The pitch

Opening sequence:
Our main task was to make an opening sequence to a film of a genre of our choice, it had to be no more than 2 minutes long. Our idea was to make a chase a scene in which an unknown agent of disruption follows the main character into his house. We decided that we would not see the agent of disruption in full as it adds more enigma to the situation. The main character will then be greeted with a full sense of security upon entering his house, until hearing a noise that changes the situation. Following this he is grabbed and murdered.

Technical task:
For this task we had to demonstrate the 180 degree rule using a dialogue sequence, which also had to include a character entering through a door, and sitting down opposite a companion. For our dialogue sequence the two characters were discussing acts of hooliganism and violence.

Planning

Opening sequence:
The photo animatic below shows the plan of our opening sequence, which shows the chase scene in a slightly more detailed plan than the drawn storyboard that came before it.

Below is our photo animatic for the opening sequence:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytCPes9g9CM&feature=channel_page


Technical task:
The photo animatic below shows the plan of our technical task, it is a very simple version. As its a conversation, we chose to use the same shots of the two main characters a couple of times because of not being sure what shots would fit best with the dialogue we had.

Below is our photo animatic for our techinical task:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvE1_cMdCI&feature=channel_page