Planning

We are nearly finished all of our planning, we only have the stroyboard to finish and the photos of location and actors to take; we should have this all finished very soon. We are looking forward to shooting our video as we feel that it will be very interesting.

Call sheet

Holly has made the call sheet which we will find useful when filming our piece

Name
Photo
Contact Number
Meeting Times

Production Schedule

Production Schedule

By:

30^th November – Plan genre and ideas, decide group.

14^th December – Research into existing opening sequences, analysed in detail, notes on how it may be useful to you.

11^th December – Pre-production planning completed. Must include: storyboards, production schedules (this), call sheets, script etc.

1^st February – all material shot and uploaded onto media server.

17^th February – Rough edit completed and uploaded to blog.

15^th March – Final edit completed and uploaded to blog and media server.

22^nd March – Group presentations of video and evaluation.

15^th April – Blog entries answering evaluation questions, plus a video commentary.

Wednesday 5^th (first day back of term) – Book Camera.

Week beginning January 10^th  and week beginning January 17th – Shooting Footage.

Week beginning January 24^th – Edits.

Our final movie pitch

We have all decided on a pitch for our final piece which hannah has posted on her blog http://hannahharveyasmedia.blogspot.com/ We have decided not to write a script for this film as we have found that we never really follow them and we would like the dialogue to seem natural. We have thought that if the dialogue is natural then we will have a higher verisimilitude which would be useful in making our film seem more professional and realistic. We all have something to do over the christmas holidays - I will be doing the storyboard, holly is doing the production schedule and hannah is doing the detailed storyline plot.

Opening sequence of 'Night of the living dead'

Nothing really happenes in this opening sequence which will make s want to see what happens next, the black and white colours that are used make it seem quite spooky and eeire, this feeling is reinforced by the music as it seems quite peaceful which may be used to signify that they are going to a graveyard which often are places that seem peaceful. The time that the camera is folowing the car seem like quite a while which builds tension and makes us feel like something is about to happen. Without the eerie music the film wouldnt seem spooky at all, the graveyard could also been seen as something significant in the story as it is the first place they go in the film. The lack of editing and special effects sort of makes the film scarier than normal horror films as it seems real and adds a feel of emptiness to the film.

Opening sequence of 'Clockwork orange'

The opening sequence of this film is really effective as the close up of the main characters face is very scary and makes the audience feel extremely uncomfortable and gives the feeling of being watched. This lasts for about 15 seconds which is slightly too long which gives an even scarier feel. When the camera zooms out and wee see all of the naked women it is very creepy and almost makes the audience cringe. The music is quite soft and gives an eeire feel to the opening sequence, we get a feel for what the film will be like from the first close up of the man we realise that the group of people may be abit deranged from the close they are wearing and the strange eyelashes he has on his left eyes; then this is reinforces when we see all of the naked people in there 'den' this makes the audience want to see what happens next as we want to know what the people do and why they are like that. However the creepy feel of it may make people want to not watch the rest as it is quite scary and we may be frightened of what is about to come as we do not want to know what they are capable of. The short title sequence consists of the colours red and black; both of these colours connote death, danger and blood which also adds a creepy feeling. Similarly the pace of them is quite slow which allows the audience to take more notice of them.

Opening sequence of 'Scream'

The opening sceme of scream is quite scary, however nothing really happens we are just expecting it too which gives a very eerie feel; which sets the scene staright away. The 3 main colours used of the title sequence are white balck and red, red has connotations of danger and death which tells the audience straight away about the genre of the film and what they should expect, the sound at the start of this clip also is effective as it consists of screams, a heartbeat and a telephone ringing which are all the things that happen in the film as the whole film is about the girls phone ringing and the scream mask. The screams signify torture and terror where the heartbeat signifies panic and being scared. This feeling is also felt by the audience as we feel part of it. The fact that the girl doesnt know who is calling her also adds to the tense and edgy feeling of the opening scene. Also the phone rings alot and each time it adds even more suspense. Sfter the phone has rang twice the camera shows a shot of the house which makes us feel like the house is being watched by the person who is ringing her, then we are assured that the girl is being watched by the caller as he is asking for her name and says " i want to know who im looking at" which causes the girl to scream  - adding more fear to the clip. There are lots of big windows in the house and therefore when she is going around trying to lock all of the doors it feels like a long time which makes her seem exposed and vunderable. There are quite a few close ups of her face which adds the to the sense of fear and emotion when she sees her boyfriend struggling in the chair. This film is aimed at an older audience as the film has a high age rate, the genre is teen horror which is useful to us as we are planning on doing a teen horror opening scene.

Opening sequence of "Halloween"

There is very little sound in this opening sequence which adds to the sense of fear already being created by the camera work. The camera is very effective as it puts us in the point of view of the killer and gives a sense of somebody watching; this makes the audience feel quite scared and weary as we dont know what is about to happen next, also the sound adds to the tension as we expect there to be a big bang or something to happen, so the quietness causes us to feel edgy. However we start to hear a very faint piano in the backround which suggests that something is wrong and something is going to happen. Also to add to the audience being in the intruders position the mask that tge intruder puts on blocks our vision of the scence which adds even mnore to the sense of being suspicioius as we cant see the whole frame. There is also a close up of the knife which shows the audience its significance and it causes them to think of thigns that might happenn this causes the audience to be thinking all the way through of what might happen and what he intruder might be like, we are totally shocked when we see that it is a child and this makes us want to watch more to find out what happens.

Research into our chosen genre

Our chosen genre is horror and we have started to research that, we have found that there are many sub-genres to horror and these are; teen horror, slasher, satanic, vampire, alien, evil children etc. Horror is often crossed with other genres, we have found that the most popular one is science fiction. Horror films have been around for along time and the very first ones are in gothic styles that were usually set in big houses and haunted castles or mansions and they were usually based on mad-scientists, monsters, vampies and devils.

Evaluation

We are quite happy with our continuity task, as we included all of the required criteria. We are also pleased as we know that we have improved many of the skills we need for our final video, such as editing, being more aware of the 180 degree rule, getting action matches right and being able to do shot reverse shot. However, there are many aspects of the piece that we could have improved for example at times the camera is shaky, we discussed how to overcome this problem and decided that we need to make sure that the camera is loose enough on the tripod for us to move it easily and carry out fluid tilt/pans. But if we found that we still had this problem we could cut between shots instead of filming continuous movements. When evaluating our film we also realised that we put in a fade between the conversation which is used to suggest a passage of time - we did not intend this. We are also aware that we must improve our framing as one of the characters head is cut off at one point, we will ensure that this does not happen in our final piece. Also after evaluating our video and reading other peoples comments we realised that there is a slight break of the 180 degree rule, after making this mistake we will know not to make it again. We were happy with our song choices as we thought that they were good at representing the type of environment that we were trying to portray, however there are times when the audio wasn't very clear, to avoid this happening in our final piece we will include effects such as cross fades to make it clearer. We regret using zooms in our video as they seem to be quite jerky and we feel like they don't look professional, we are not going to use any zooms unless we really need to. We are now aware of all of the errors we have made and will be sure not to make them in our final piece.