the Animatic

we did an animatic to show what our final outcome would look like following our storyboard, this is part of the planning process and helps us know what we're working towards and if we need to work on any of it. it is only a rough mock up of what we're aiming for -





we still need to add the sound effects and a soundtrack in the background, and some editing still needs to be done, but this gives us a really good idea of what we are working towards before filming and lets us see our idea pieced together. from this animatic we can see what we need to develop and change also.

we all really liked the animatic and were quite enthusiastic about it, the whispers coming out of the locket were effective as non diegetic sound and the over the shoulder shot which focuses on the locket was also effective as it showed the audience the inside of the locket, the reverse shot fot he characters reaction also worked well and we liked this part of the storyboard. however, from looking at this i feel the long shot is too far away and it would benefit from being a bit closer, more personal. we also need to work on the ending, the zoom into the locket is very cliche and our alternative ending, of the boy running through trees is also cliche, so we need to work on an appropriate ending. we will brainstorm this next lesson and make a revised stroyboard with a changed ending as none of us are keen on the zoom. We are also worried about the length of the piece, it is only a minute long, and the brief states it should be two minutes, we might think about adding another scene to continue the narrative of the locket following the character, or we might change and lengthen some of the woods scene, this is something we need to talk about.

planning a schedule

this is our first plan for our schedule, although it is only a rough estimate as we cannot predict how long it will take for certain aspects of production.
Schedule for filming-
November
24th-Individual planning
25th-Show initial ideas - this was done, we got some feedback.
26th-Blog ideas
27th-Blog ideas
28th-Day off
29th-Lesson - we are working within the lesson here on our ideas.
30th-Lesson
December
1st-Put pictures of props on blog
2nd -Day off
3rd-Lesson-Talk about filming etc - we spoke as a group about our plans and how it was all coming along
4th-Day off
5th-Blog
6th-Lesson
7th-Lesson
8th - day off
9th-Day off
10th-Get camera and start setting up - this was not possible due to extreme weather conditions around this time, we could not amke it to our location.
11th-Film at 8-9am at black park , this was still not possible
12th-Day off
13th-Lesson
14th-Lesson-
15th-day off
16th-Day off
17th- Make sure blogging is complete
18th and onwards - try to film over the winter holiday period, subject to weather and availability of the group.

evaulating the schedule 27/03/2011:
we couldn't stick to this schedule, it was very optimistic as it only scheduled a few dates for filming, and things dont run as smoothly as you expect. we planned to film around the time it started to snow heavily, and we couldnt get out to our location for over a week, by the time the weather had shifted it was the holidays and members of the group were unavailable as they were off on holiday elsewhere, so we decided to film after the christmas holidays, which was unfortunate. it would have been useful to have stuck to this shcedule but it was unrealistc, we filmed on location four times in the end, and twice elsewhere, so we hadnt taken into account here how long it would take to get the shots we needed. it was very naive to think we could get everything filmed in that short space of time before the holidays.

questionnaire - the results and analysis

we gave out 20 questionaires to people in our target audience age group of 15 - 17, half females, half males so we had a fair representation in our sample. the questionnaire is going to be used to get some audience feedback, as the audiences views is extremely important. this will help us shape the opening.

 The questionaire asked wether they prefered 15 or 18 rated movies

 the evidence shows that for the age group of 15-17 they prefered 15 rated movies, which is a good result, as this is the age restriction we are setting our opening at. this could be due to them not being able to legally watch 18+ movies, or for them being too yound to understand some of the complicated nature of some over 18 movies.

 Next the audience was asked what sub-genres they like to see on the big screen.
Action- 14
Western-0
Crime-9
Film noir-0
Religous-1
Gangsta-4
Physcological-12


action was the highest scorer, with a scor of 14, but psychological had a mark of 12 which is not far off. we have already decided we are likely to look at a psychological thriller, however had it got a mark like film noir, we would have re thought this decision.

 Next the audience were asked what films they most enjoyed, the choices were:
Jaws-8
Paranormal activity-14
Godfather-4
Inception-10
Pulp Fiction-1
Dark knight-14
Physco-2
Se7en-2
Memento-0
Silence of the lambs-4

the most popular was paranormal activity, which is a psychological thriller. it was useful to see which films the audience respong best to, as the ones that they dont will be ones that are not aimed at them as much. we need to look closer at the ones with the same sort of target audience as us. 

 Next we asked our audience to rate 8 fields that a thriller genre could cover:
Suspense-80/160
Fast paced music-79/160
Plot twists-87/160
Action-90/160
Gore-98/160
Science-62/160
A sense of reality (Not too farfetched)-82/160
Clever Storyline-120/160

a clever storyline is most valued by our audience, this is not neccesarily relevant when focusing on an opening, as films dont give away their storyline in an opening, but we need to indicate that something interesting is going to happen in the rest of the film to keep the audience interested. They also value gore and action, which are two exciting properties of a thriller, so they want something interesting, gory and full of action, as we are fairly young, science and plot twists do not interest us so much, we want it to be less clever and meaningful, like The Da Vinci Code, but more quick and action packed.

 Lastly we asked our audience wether they liked seeing the actors, producers and directors in the first two minutes of a movie:
Yes: 3
No:5
Don't mind:11


most people are indifferent to whether we include credits or not at the beginning of the movie. it is conventional to have credits that introduce the production company, the director and the actors, but some films start without them and go straight into the main film. we have chosen as a group to include titles as these are important for the production company.


evaluation :
this was a really useful tool for analysing the views of our target audience. it is important for the production company to fully understand the wants of the audience, so the film that they make is guaranteed to be popular. likes and dislikes go through trends, so western thrillers may have been very polular a decade ago, but now none of our audience voted for them, this shows that producers need to keep up with audiences constantly changing opinions.

Initial planning - subgenre's

this was the first step in our planning process, before we go any further we need to decide on the subgenre or hybrid genre we are going to base out opening on, we storyboarded the existing genre's we could look at, and come up with a short list of possible favourites, including:

Psychological thriller : whilst this has been done many times, it is a firm favourite for audiences, can be very effective and is often the more interesting and exciting thrillers. we like the simplicity of it also, as we think some thriller subgenre's are quite intricate and confusing - such as spy, conspiracy and religious thrillers.

crime thriller: these are also favourites, as the openings can be quite interesting, we like the action and adrenaline usually found in them too.

disaster thriller : such as The Day After Tomorrow, this would be really fun and exciting to film, however quite difficult. It is not a subgenre often chosen by media students as it would be quite a challenge to tackle, but would be really effective if produced well.

we then looked at some examples of each chosen subgenre so we could fully understand them, what their codes and conventions are and whether we could achieve them. From this we found that we would find a disaster thriller too challenging, and that we preferred psychological thrillers to crime thrillers, including the conventions of psychological thrillers, as their opening were usually more intriguing and mysterious, rather than straight forward and violent. we felt that psychological thrillers were more intellectual.

storyboarding

we decided after some initial planning to do a rough storyboard as a group, so we could build on it, and to give us a starting point. our idea is to produce a psychological thriller in which a boy wakes up passed out in the woods for a mysterious reason, and finds a locket, he opens up and see's a picture of himself and someone else in it, and as he opens is mysterious voices come out of it, similar to pandora's box, he is shocked and runs away. It is a simple narrative as from our research we found that openings are generally quite slow and simple, and the professionals dont usually pack too much into the opening, or give to much away, which is why we want the boys reason for being passed out to be unknown and there is no explanation of the locket, these are things that would be explored later in the film. we decided when watching some of the previous openings that those that tried to give too much of a narrative looked More like trailers than movie openings. when storyboarding we thought about angle, shot type, such as CU, MS, framing and positioning, but not sound or parts of mis en scene, we will plan these later.

we did a paper storyboard, where we drew each shot, but then we also took pictures of how each shot would be framed and roughly what it would look like. this will help us know exactly what we are looking for when we begin to film it.

the paper version starts with a long shot of the woods, from the boys perspective lying down on his tummy, so this would be a point of view shot. there would then be a close up of the locket, which is central, and filmed from a high angle. The boy then gets up, and is filmed from the side at a long shot distance, he is offcentre to the left. there is then a point of view shot CU of the locket, and then a reverse shot, from the lockets point of view, of the boys reaction, there is then a long shot of the boy falling down, from a low angle, and a zoom back to the locket lying on the floor, which is central CU. we have written notes on the bottom of the stroyboard to explain what is happening and guide us.

this is the real life version of our storyboard, taken with an SLR camera. the idea for the first shots is that the boy will be blinking awake so the first frames will be out of focus, then slwoly come into focus as he blinks.

these shots show a zoom from a mid shot of the boy looking at the locket, to a CU of his face, to highlight his reaction.

this shot is an alternative ending to the previous one, we are uncertain whether we want to end it with a close up of the locket, or a few long shots of the character running through the tree's.