Tuesday, 26 January 2010

Idea Development











When we were presenting our ideas we decided as a group to pick Leaya's idea because it had everything for a good horror-film.
It is called Class of 1973 and is about a girl who is trying to find the murder of her mother. So our opening sequence is about research and intruduces the basic idea f the movie
It should look like a mixture of the libraray scene in David Fincher's Seven and Napoleon Dynamite.













Seven











4:08-7:47

Monday, 25 January 2010

Storyboarding


In order to be prepared for the shooting day we draw a storyboard where we listed our shots and finally draw them. We basicly draw a comic and composed the shots carefully. We putted in arrows to show the direction of the camera movement. The only thing which might be disturbing is that in our sisuation it was distrubing our creativity because we were stick to the storyboard and had to do our shots like we planned them in the storyboard. We did not have time to do other interesting shots that might have been better. Today storyboarding is not used as much as in the past most film drectors use now animation but there are still a few like Ridle Scot or The Coen Brothers. Directors create a stroyboard to save time they just look at the storyboard while they are shooting and do not have to compos the picture on set which takes time and money.

Friday, 22 January 2010

Props


- Blackberry

- Books about Psychology and Law /The Human Mind/Science/Crime

- Apple MacbookPro*

- Earphones

- iPod*

- Newspapers

- Table

- Reading Glasses

- Passport holder

- Pens

- Papers

- Stapler

- Handbag

- Library Card*

- Used coffee mugs

Distribution Company

Our company would be "Fox Searchlight Picture" it is a film divison of "20th Century Fox" it supports "small" budged production for example, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hills Have Eyes and 28 Days Later. It would be perfect for our project because it is a low-budged production
and is not a movie that need a lot of advertisement. They support independend films (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Young @ Heart or 500 Days Of Summer).
Trough the support by "Fox" our film would be send to several Film Festival e.g. Sundance or London FFA. This would get the film more known. "Fox Searchlight" would also publish the DVD's or if the film woll be succesful Blue-Ray's and several Collectors Edition to increase the sale.

The other one could be "Platinume Dunes" which distributed films like: The Hitcher (2007), Friday The 13th (2009), and A Nightmare on Elmstreet (2010). These are all high quality Horror-Movies their movies are known for a greate visual look.

Target Audience

High Tension


Our Thriller/Horror is mainly aiming at people between 16 and 21. The film should be based on good special effects and and good quality picture. It is a movie like for example "High Tension" by Alexandre Aja which is a very gory and a really good looking movie. Of course the storyline is also a reason to watch the film and increases the picture and mood of the movie. It is not a movie that would be for the "Art-Film scene" for example old work of Woody Allen or Truffaut it would be a product for the mass.

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Thriller Sequence



When we shot our Opening Sequence for the thriller (19.01.10) we first met up in the studio. We were there with Luke and Guy our Media teacher who were with us the whole time and watched and helped us with several things. Because of the fact that we were well organized it should have been easier and should have took less time to shoot the 2 Minutes. I would change basic things for example idea or location. Not because the idea it is not good but because of it's difficulty we made things harder for ourselves. The idea should have been planed more!
Another thing is the location. We separated the day into two sections the first one we shot in the studio and the other time in the library. So we had to build and set up the studio and lighting. This is very hard and it is easy to make mistakes.The reason why directors shoot their scenes in studios are because of the space and the lighting in our case there was both enough in the library so there was no logical reason why we shot in the studio. The library had very good light conditions and there was enough space to shoot our scene. I would suggest to shoot as much in location as possible to capture the atmosphere and to avoid silly mistakes!!!!

The reason why we used a library as a location because it represents information and our title sequence follows a woman that is looking for a murder. We used books like "Freud-The Mind" or "Law-Crime" this are books which could be used in a crime case by the police.
My job was to select the shots and to shoot them. I and Luke came together after every shot and talked about what could be done different to make it more effective we were aiming to compose a picture that would have a great impact on the audience. For example we used a very smooth tracking shoot of a close-up of our actress to create a smooth and calm mood. Elly was there to organize the props and to put everything in position which she did very well. We used things that are connected with research for example news papers, books or a laptop. Lukas was responsible for the sound and Leayer was the glue that hold us all together as her role as the producer.

We choose our actress because she looked like a normal teen age girl. She did her job very well and had a lot of patients which is required in the film business!


We worked well as a team but if I look back we all could have done something better to create a better atmosphere on the set. It was tensed because of organisational problems or because some people did more or less then other. Next time I would plan the shots before the actual shoot it is just helpful and more organized. I would have done more different shots for one "scene" the reason for that is so later in the editing suite we would have more choices and could be more selective, this improves the quality of the final picture. We tried to overcame problems like: wrong or not effective props. Because we integrated our Titles in the props they were really important sometimes the writing was to small so we had improvise. All in all we did well but still could have done better!