Logo

This is the logo that I created on both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.  The crow represents death and forebodes the fatalities in our film.

It is based on the mock-up logo Pip and I created a while ago using an existing image online:

Casting

It was very important to us to find an actress to play the protagonist, Catherine, who had the right look to fit in the 1920s era.  Fortunately, Pip's friend Iona had exactly the look we were looking for and was kind enough to agree to be in our film opening.

The other characters in our film were all members of Pip's family or her neighbours which was very convenient as we were filming in areas around Pip's house.  The casting of these characters was not as important as Catherine's as it was not crucial that their faces were seen.

Music Research

Colour Isolation

When we were planning our film opening we all agreed on adding a black and white filter in post-production to imitate films made in the era our film is set.  However Pip then had the idea to use a colour isolation technique to highlight the ruby in the ring as demonstrated in the 1993 film, Schindler's List.  This excellent idea would instantly make the ring stand out and the with the colour red symbolising lust and danger it would foreshadow the protagonist, Catherine's imminent death.

Bella then suggested using Adobe CS5 to achieve the colour isolation on our footage.  She also said when it came to filming we would have to make sure that nothing else in the frame could show any redness, otherwise the programme would identify those red pixels as well as the red ring and the whole effect would not work. However, when Bella came to creating the red colour isolation in post-production, it was picking up the redness in our actress' hands and unfortunately, it has not worked meaning we won't be able to use colour isolation in our opening.  We are quite downhearted about this as the ring has so much significance in our film, however becuase of this it will lose a lot of that significance we had based our whole film around.

Film Credits

At first, we inserted clips of falling confetti and placed the credits over the shots as planned and  shown in our Lana Del Rey inspired video moodboard.  However after inserting the clips into our film which is nearly completely edited Pip and I felt that the credit sequence wasn't that effective and broke up the church scene, therefore reducing the tension of the scene.  I then had the idea to use still black and white screens to present the credits which was a technique adopted by most films in the 1920s and 30s.  Here are some examples:

Inspired by these credits I created two credit screens which will be placed at the beginning of our film   similar to films in the 20s such as 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari' as shown above.  I downloaded many different fonts from websites such as dafont.com and fontspace.com which I felt were reminiscent of the era and then using PowerPoint I experimented with the different fonts, colours and backgrounds to finally achieve what I feel is an effective and authentic interpretation of an old fashioned credit screen.

Once inserted into the film opening we shall experiment with filters to make the screens look older and more authentic.

Evaluation of Filming the Church and Car Scenes

Evidence of Filming the Church and Car Scenes

The 1920's car we used belonging to Pip's neighbour, Donavon, who also kindly starred as a guest in the church scene.

Hadlow Tower - the setting of the car scene and where the bedroom scene is supposed to be set however we filmed in Pip's nan's bedroom instead due to mies-en-scene and convenience.

Pip's parents playing our protagonist, Catherine, and her husband, Charles.

Our bride and groom with guests, Pip's sisters Josie and Izzie, her nan Michelle and neighbour Donavon.

Storyboard for the Car Scene

Due to events out of our control which occurred today we weren't able to film the church scene.  Instead we are filming it tomorrow afternoon and are filming this car scene in the morning as planned.

Non-Diegetic Sounds for the Church Scene

Pip spent a long time the other day successfully experimenting with royalty and copyright free sounds from freesound.org to create a soundtrack for the church scene.  She played around with sounds of church bells, birds tweeting, talking, laughter, champagne classes clinking, creaking floorboards and screaming with the aim to create a mock-up of the non-diegetic sounds we would add to the scene in post-production.  However, we all agreed that the soundtrack she created was so successful that we shall use it for the church scene, with the exception of the scream as we felt it wasn’t very realistic.  We also need to add in more sounds of guests talking and background noises as the bride walks up the stairs as it feels quite bare at the moment.

The sequence begins with wedding church bells, with sounds of birds tweeting in the background order to give a realistic feeling of the outside.  Next are sounds of the guests cheering to co-inside with the bride and groom walking out of the church; as well as an ongoing track of people talking to create the ambience of guests surrounding the newlyweds.  Afterwards, Pip added in the sound of glasses clinking together to match the visual of the champagne glasses.   The wedding bells are then faded out using the transition of someone making a toast with their glass. This is when the one-bell chime is introduced, with an aim to build up the tension leading up to the murder.  

The sound of footsteps going up wooden stairs has then been overlaid, which the purpose again to build up suspense and apprehension. 

Next, there is a sound of floorboards creaking, suggesting the bride is now at the top of the stairs before then the sound of a woman screaming interrupts as she sees her husband holding a blood-covered knife.  The loud sound of the bell chime brings in the title screen.

Cast, Costumes and Props

I have created this presentation showing the cast, costumes and props for the church and car scenes we are filming this weekend.

Shooting Script for the Church Scene

Filming the Church and Car Scenes

This weekend we are filming the church and car scenes.
On Saturday 28th we will be filming the church scene in the afternoon and Pip has managed to get us St Mary's Church in Hadlow to ourselves for that time.  Now I have finished storyboarding, it has become clear that continuity in this scene is not a large issue or concern due to the choppy and dream-like reflective shots.
On Sunday 29th we will film the car scene which follows the bedroom scene we have already filmed and edited.  In the scene the protagonist will leave her house (Hadlow Tower) and walk over to a waiting car.  Her chauffeur will help her into the car before the camera zooms in on the wing mirror to show the protagonists abusive and estranged husband standing in the background.

Iconic Director of the Film Noir Genre

Bella has created this emaze presentation on the well regarded director Fritz Lang who is credited with innovating our chosen genre of Film Noir.

Storyboard for the Church Scene

History of Film Noir and Audience Expectations

The genre 'Film Noir' is used to portray 'cynical attitudes and sexual motives'.  It is mainly a mixture of romance and crime, however we have decided to give it a modern twist and add in a thriller element and only have a small amount of romance, some of which is shown in the new wedding scene.

Film Noir's peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, some having been famously directed by the likes of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and many others.  Here is an example of what a Film Noir genre trailer looks like. It is Fritz Lang's piece 'The Woman in the Window' 1944:




Here is some information on the history of the film noir genre from the website www.filmsite.org:

'A wide range of [film noir] films reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period, and counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs.'  It goes on to say how Film Noir is, strictly speaking, not a genre: '...but rather the mood, style, point-of-view, or tone of a film.'  

Here is a clip from a BBC documentary about film noir and the rules associated with it:




Bella also created our SurveyMonkey questionnaire in order for us to find out what our target audience thinks are the conventions of a Film Noir.

Our survey was biased due to the ratio of women to men and the fairly unvaried age group that participated.  However the results are still useful and have proved that our film uses almost all of the conventions that the audience expects from a Film Noir.

Half of the participants had seen a Film Noir before, indicating that although unusual it is a fairly popular genre and we do have a target audience.

Inspiration for our new opening narrative

We decided to change the original planned ending to our film opening as we felt a flash back and then another scene in the present would add more gravitas to the plot line and significance of the ring.  We have therefore decided to add a scene of the protagonist's wedding and then also a scene in the present in which the protagonist leaves her house to go the party.
Here, Pip and I have created a visual and audio moodboard showing our current thoughts and feelings  for what the church scene may look and feel like.  As the church scene is a flash back we felt the etherial quality of Lana Del Rey's music videos Ultraviolence and Born to Die, with the audio of her song Young and Beautiful has the feel we're going for.

Editing the Bedroom Scene

During our filming, we filmed every shot at least twice to ensure that in post-production editing, we could choose the best shot to ensure our film opening is to the highest possible quality.  We had no technical issues when we filmed, however when it came to uploading the footage onto iMovie we faced a problem- the camera only films in the formats MXF and MP4, neither of which are compatible with iMovie. 

Bella spent lots of time researching and downloading programmes from the internet, and tried ones such as VLC and Aiseesoft, but they didn't work because they lost the high quality, which is why we wanted to film on the Canon XF205 in the first place. Bella managed to find a conversion software from the App store called Prism, it was free and converted the MXF files in a high quality to MOV files.

Over the last couple of weeks since filming we have spent much time editing this part of our opening.  We are happy with the editing now however still need to find non-diegetic music to insert over the footage.  We are planning to film the rest of our film opening this coming week so we can edit at school once we come back after the half-term.

Filming Schedule

We will have to film over the course of 3 days, as we have three sections to film; the bedroom scene, the church/wedding scene and the car scene.

We will be using a Canon X205 to film our film opening which has brilliant quality and the exposure, zoom and focus can be done manually or no, depending on the scene.

Filming Schedule for part 1 - Sunday 1st February 2015

10:30 - 12:00  Our actress will arrive at Pip's house, where she showed her the test shoot so she has an idea of what our visions are. She will also have the time to style her 1920's hair and makeup.

12:00-12:30 Lunch

12:30 Bella and I arrive

12:45-1:45 Set up the room (mis-en-scene)

1:45-2:00 Shots of our actress with clothes/hair/makeup doneShots of the room and props

2:00-3:00 Filming begins

3:00-3:15 Break

3:15-4:00 Carry on Filming

4:00-4:30 Contingency time

4:30-5:00 Tidy up room

Model Release Form

We need our actress and her parents to sign this 'model release form' as our actress, Iona, is under the age of 18.  This is especially important as our film opening will be available online and we need to ensure that nothing is shown that is not approved of by the actress and her parents.

Iconic Sounds Associated with our Genre

Here are some examples, which Bella kindly put together, of what you would expect to hear in a crime investigation/thriller genre, with a twist of a 1920s theme:

Editing the Test Shoot

Pip kindly made this Emaze presentation showing the process we went through when editing the test shoot.

The Ring

Here are photos of the ring which we have bought for our protagonist to wear.

Colour Isolation

Our film will be in black and white, however in post production we are going to edit a few of the objects to make them red, using colour splash. The ruby ring and the red lipstick will be the only objects in red; with an aim to draw attention and symbolise blood, consequently foreshadowing the female protagonist's death.

Our idea was inspired by the 1993 film, Schindler's List, where there are only four colour images during the three hour long black and white cinematic picture. The girl in the red coat is the most obvious and haunting symbol in the film.

Bella has been experimenting colour splash using a special software on her laptop. In the meantime, Pip used the app 'Video Star' on her phone to demonstrate our idea. However because it only picks up blue pigments, it wouldn't show anything red, so she used a bracelet with blue charms to demonstrate.

Test Shoot vs Storyboard Analysis

Over the last few days Pip and I have been putting this Emaze presentation together to compare still frames our test shoot and the corresponding storyboard images.  We have found by analysing and comparing the images that in general we have closely followed the guide of the storyboard.  However, we have changed the angle and framing of some shots as we felt they looked better and more effectively told the narrative of our film.

Test Shoot

A few weeks ago Pip and I filmed the test shoot of the bedroom scene.  It was a really useful exercise which will definitely help with filming the real thing in the upcoming weeks.

We had to set up the room in which we were filming to make sure the mise-en-scene was appropriate for the timer period our film is set in, the 1920s.  Filming the whole scene took about two and a half hours and other hour or so for setting up the room and putting it back as it was after filming.
From the test shoot we discovered that some of the storyboarding was slightly inaccurate in terms of the camera angles used and the logistics of them- especially when panning as the camera had to be at the right height and position in order to frame everything in the sequence.  The panning therefore took a few goes to get the angle and position correct, but once that was sorted out the panning went very smoothly and I feel is very effective in the opening of our film.

A few camera angles were changed during filming as we felt they worked more effectively than the ones planned.  Two examples of this is the lipstick shot and the mirror shot. The lipstick shot was planned as a birds eye, however whilst filming we felt there was something about it that didn't quite work and so we changed it to more of an eye level shot. 

For the mirror shot after the protagonist gets dressed, we swapped the camera from the left of the protagonist to the right and a lot closer than planned too.  The reason for this swap from medium shot to close up was to enable the protagonists face and expression to be seen more clearly by the audience and we felt that switching the side from which the camera was filming helped with this.

A shot we thought worked very effectively was the one where the protagonist picks the ring up from her bedside table.  We love the framing of this shot and feel the small photo frames with old fashioned photographs in behind the ring are a small touch which really add to the mise-en-scene of the shot and the scene as a whole.

Pip and I had some trouble with the lighting due to the fading of natural light as filming progressed.  Therefore we turned on the light in the bedroom and also used a phone torch from a distant to give more directed light.  Whilst filming with the torch light we felt it looked quite artificial, however after post-production, which included putting the scene in black and white, we thought the lighting looked a lot better than we expected.  Despite this we would still like to improve it for the real thing as we did have to lighten most of the footage in post production.

Overall, the test shoot was great for us to see what needed to be improved for the real thing and what problems we were unprepared for- such as lighting.  I feel that changing some of  the shots as planned on the storyboard is normal as sometimes you only really know how that shot will look when you're actually filming on set with all the props etc.  This is possibly something that we didn't consider, however it was very easy to adapt and I think it was definitely the right decision as the shots are effective in aiding the telling and development of the narrative.

University of Kent

On Wednesday 14th January the two media classes from my school visited the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Firstly, we were put into small groups and were given half an hour to create a film. We were also helped by two film students who showed us the quiet areas where we could film. Our brief was to include: a mysterious stranger, blinding light, a lost soul and a key to a lock. Because of the short time we had to film, we couldn't re-film anything or delete any clips, meaning it all had to flow continuously when we presented it to everyone at the end. This taught us a lot about the importance of proper planning and thinking of all eventualities in order to produce the best footage possible in one take. I feel this was an important lesson to learn as I think it is all too easy to over film, which does have its benefits, however by taking lessons learnt from this exercise we should be able to film our film opening in as few takes as possible as we know now the importance of planning and making the first take as good as you possibly can.

 We then had a session on screen play and shooting scripts, where we watched scenes from films and got to view the actual shooting script. After, we were set a task to team up with a partner and write our own shooting script then feed back to our friends, the lecturer and the film students.

 Next we were given a tour around the film, arts and drama building, including the very high-tech recording studios, computers suites and the green screen room. We also had an exclusive viewing of a documentary, Living the Dream, made by two students who are currently studying at the University of Kent which will be shown on BBC 3 Fresh. They are amongst a select number of up and coming film students who have had their work chosen to be aired on national television.

 We also had a lecture on the types of horror films and the iconography associated with them. I found this very helpful and interesting due to our film's close link top the horror genre.

Conventions of a crime investigation/horror film

Foley Sounds

We tested foley sounds of a perfume spray and knocking on a door.

We knocked on a window to achieve the sound of knocking on a door and feel it is effective, however echoes a little so maybe knocking on a solid wooden door may be better.

We used deodorant to create the sound of perfume spraying.  We found that when using perfume the sound was too quiet and the spray wasn't long enough.  Therefore we had a play around using deodorant instead and found that the sound was a lot more effective and sounds very realistic.

We shall use these foley sounds in our film opening and shall try and create any other non-diegetic sound effects ourselves such as the car horn.

Production Company Animation Ideas

Pip and I have been experimenting on various software's how to animate the logo so it will end up as a production company animation shown before our film opening.

Some examples of the most famous production company animations:

This is an idea of how ours will look which we found on Vimeo.  We would like to create an animation similar to this and have the logo appear from the birds wings or underneath the bird once it has paused in the middle of the screen.

Animatic

After completing our storyboard I made the animatic for my group which should give an accurate idea of the story and the shots and angles we will use in the opening for 'The Wring'.   I have included non-diegetic background music throughout and then also added a sound to add suspense at the end to reflect the sort of sound effects we will use in the real thing.

BBFC Rating for 'The Wring'

We have decided a 12 rating is appropriate because:

• There will be scenes of mild violence
• Some physical and psychological threat
• Brief and discreet scenes of sex and nudity in the flashback
• Discreet references to imitable behaviour
• No strong language used
• No misuse of drugs seen or referenced
• No discriminatory language or behaviour endorsed

Reverse Tracking Shot

A Reverse Tracking Shot is achieved by the camera being pulled away from a subject whilst the lens zooms in, or vice-versa. This makes the background appear to change size relative to the subject.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film 'Vertigo' was the first film to use dolly zoom.  Hitchcock himself implemented this technique. This shot can be seen in the clip below at 0:33 and 0:50 seconds.

The Reverse Tracking Shot was also used in Jaws.  It can be seen in this clip from 2:01-2:03.





We will use the reverse tracking shot in the bedroom scene of our film to build tension and drama, just like the clips above.  We will use this shot on the ring to emphasise its significance to the plot and the bad and haunting memories it holds for our female protagonist.

Health and Safety Risk Assessment

Risk	Hazard	Control
Wardrobe	Falling off the wardrobe whilst filming the high angle shot	Not sitting close to the edge and being more aware and careful
Car	Crashing the car during filming	Ensure neighbours know we will be filming so a crash will not occur
Car	Crew members being run over by the car	Stay off the road and be aware when the car is moving
Equipment	Tripping over equipment such as tripod	Being more aware of your surroundings and making sure the equipment is visible
Makeup	Allergic reaction to makeup	Use the actresses own makeup and be aware of any allergies she has
Lake	Falling in the lake whilst filming	Staying a safe distance away from the edge of the lake
Tower	Falling off the top of Hadlow Castle whilst filming the high angle shots	Don’t lean and keep a safe distance from the edge
Window	Falling out of the open window whilst filming	Don’t open the window further than necessary and keep a safe distance away