Meeting at loction to start filming...

Today was really exciting as we had obtained our equiment yesterday from college to do our filming (the camera, tripod, lightening etc). As the location of our film will be in my house inside my sisters bedroom, we all linked up my house today at my house to start filming. However, as we were setting up we realised that we didnt have a memory card for the camera!!!!!! We were really upset because we really wanted to start filming but this is not possible without a memory card!! Amy went back to college to see if the media department was open but it was not... so this means we have to wait until college opens until we start filming :( .......


In the meantime, we discussed and planned about the different scenes that we will have in our film, the different camera angles and shot types we will use, where we will place the dolls and how we will make them look thrilling, the sound effects we would use and so on... We managed to get some dolls which we borrowed from people and we put them in different places of my room to see how they would look..... Below are some images of us setting up and of the dolls.....



This is Mary setting up the tripod...



This is the lightening device (which we will need as all lights will be off when filming to add suspence)



The camera...

These are some of the dolls that we borrowed. As you can see we've placed them on the window seal...

Mary brought some of her old barbie dolls too... we stuck them on top of the bunk bed and tried to make them look scary.. HAHAHA..

We placed these dolls on to of the wardrobe....

We still need to get more dolls and barbie dolls so we've agreed to contribute money each and buy some at the pound shop... we hope our next meeting to start filming is much more successful than today's!!!

Our Final Pitch!

I finally got hold of our pitch!!! I have added it below (it may not be clear though)

PREPARATION FOR OUR THRILLER.

» Today we went to Ethel's house and had look around, as this is where we will be filming. The main location will be Ethel's sisters room as we decided that it is the right location for our scene.

»We asked around for dolls and barbie's, we got a few china dolls and others, on top of that we are going to but some doll's and barbie's in order to make our film sucessful.


»As I play the main character, I had to look for a doll's outfit, I looked throught my wardrobe and found a few peices that would be suitable for my part.

THE BLACK SWAN.

» As soon as I saw the trailer for 'The Black Swan' I said that I really wanted to go and watch it, so during the half term I went to the cinema to watch it.


















 -The trailer;
 






» The Back Swan, starring Natalie Portman (Nina), another example of a pyschological thriller about a girl, Nina Sayers, who is a ballet dancer desperate fro the lead role, the Swan Queen, the play 'Swan Lake'.  But she has competion with the arrival of a new dancer, Lily, so the director decides to give Nina the part of the delicate white swan and Lily the part of the evil black swan. All starts of well for Nina, but soon the stress of her role kicks in and leads her to losing her senses, she becomes obsessive like her mother, a former ballet dancer and wants everything to be perfect. She starts off as the delicate white swan and gradually loses her mind, realising the things that are unreal, becoming more like the evil black swan.

INSPIRATION...

» As you well know by now, we are inspiried by physochological thrillers such as Momento and Seven, after watching the opening sequence to them we decided we wanted to do our opening sequence in the same way, with close ups not revealing too much to the audience and making it suspensful and mysterious, keeping the viewers entertainted and wanting to watch the rest of the film. We also liked the idea of having a narrative opening, titles running throughtout the opening as this contrasts with what is happening in the opening and keeps the audience busy, watching what is happening as well as reading the titles.

THE PITCH.

» Todays lesson was 'the pitch', yes of course we had to pitch our idea to the class! But lucky for us, we got 20 minutes before the lesson to go through our powerpoint and practise what we were going to say. 


and here is our powerpoint...

Presenting our pitch!

We finally presented our pitch in our lesson with Bernard (our teacher!) My group was quite nervous about it at first but it turned out our pitch was really good and we really impressed Bernard. Imagine how relieved we felt! We were given 15 minutes to make final edits and plan who will be saying what in our pitch just before we started presenting it. Below is an image of my group...

We were the 3rd group to present our pitch and we hardly had any criticisms from Bernard and he was really impressed by our work especially our animatic and sound effects! He said our thriller had the potential to be a really good and effective one and so we need to make sure we put all the hard work in to make it excellent (we sure will be doing that!) It was also interesting and exciting to watch other groups presenting their pitches, as we found out their ideas of their thrillers and we were also able to give them feedback and suggestions to help them improve on their idea. Below are images of some of the other groups..

This is group 20 presenting their pitch...

This is group 18...



This is group 19...



Below are images of my group presenting our pitch!

This is Fatama presenting her part...

This is Mary talking about the music and sound effects that she searched for our thriller!

This was when we showed our animatic!

The Black Swan.....

I was on the bus going home and i went past this place <<< and it had a name on the building, it reminded me blog about it, i finally watched the black swan. It was really good! It was what it promised, it was a really good physiological thriller, It had all of the typical conventions of a psychological thriller. I thought that it was really gross at some points but the actual storyline was really good and i really like the cinematic of the film. it was really good, i would rate this film but not for young people as it has inappropriate scenes. Overall i really like this film and the 2 lead characters are really good actors and play the roles really well. :D  

The Pitch

Today we did the pitch, i't went really well. we covered most things and didn't get much criticisms. Bernard gave feed back to all of the groups after their presentation and we also were allowed to ask questions, this was done to help each group see the bits they didn't think through and help them correct some bits by giving out ideas.

When we got to lesson we had 20 mins, to practice or finish our presentations ready for the pitch, my group had finished and just needed to got through it to know what we were saying. Here are some pictures of us going through our presentation:

Here are pictures of us presenting our pitch...

Here are pictures of other groups doing their pitches:

Pitch Presentation

We are going to do our presentation tomorrow, Here are screen grabs of our presentation:

Workshop

Today i went workshop to finish of the presentation for the pitch, Ethel came and finished the tasks she was delegated, yesterday i took all the parts to the presentation and went home and stayed up really late and put it all together and made it look really nice.

Here are some pictures of me working on the presentation at workshop...

Tomorrow is the big day of the pitch... I'm nervous and excited at the same time...

I have finally finished the presentation and our group are meeting up 15 mins tomorrow before the lesson so that we can go though it and see if we are in the time limit of 15 minutes.  

Turning our storyboard into an Animatic!

Today my group met up and we completed our pitch! We just need to make some small edits (which will only take like 5 minutes to do) and work out who will be presenting what part in tomorrows lesson!!! I'm quite nervous actually I hope we pass!

Amy successfully turned our storyboard which me and Fatama drew into an animatic and added sound too! I think its quite good! I have posted it below....

Animatic Storyboard

Me and Amy stayed longer to finish the animatic storyboard. There were loads of things that we didn't know how to do, so this workshop helped us learn new things in final cut pro. For example when we were adding titles in final cut pro, we didn't know if we could move the titles into a different position on the screen and if we could do it how we would.

Mary (the teacher) helped us and showed us how to do it so that we could do it ourselves. it took a long time but we finished, and we exported it and converted it into mp 4 format,then we realised that we have some preliminary sounds and we could put one on the animatic, so we went back and put the music in and had to do the process all over again. but i really like the animatic, its a bit long but that not how our real one is going to be because it's only allowed to be 2 Mins maximum. Here it is, i hope you enjoy it! :D

Here is the animatic with no sound:

And this is the animatic with sound:

PREPARATION FOR THE PITCH.

» So before we could even film for our final opening sequence, we do of course have to pitch our idea/s to our teacher aswell as class. In preoaration for this we all had to put a powerpoint together with 12 slides to help us pitch our idea. 

-We was given a brief in order to help us with our presentations.

» In my group we all took responsibility for each slide...

I was in charge of the storyboard and making it into an animatic.

Fatama was in charge of the reseach, looking into the thriller sub genre and locations.

Ethel was in charge of the risk assessment and production schedule, planning which days we should film etc..

Mary was in charge of sounds, looking on youtube for sounds that we possibily might use in our own film.

» When making the animatic, I had to use the storyboard we drew out and using a still camera take pictures of each individual frame from the storyboard, this was a very long process. I did already have the storyboard scanned in the comptuer, however when it came to cropping each frame individualy, it was hard, as i did not know how to using the Macs.

-Here is the camera stills of each individual frame.

» Making the animatic was pretty easy, as I was now quite familiar with it. Importing the pictures, dragging them to the frame, placing them in the right order and cropping if needed.

» Lesson finished, and I did not have enough time to add titles to the animatic, so me aswell as Fatama and Ethel went to workshop to finish off the powerpoint and the animatic. Using final cut pro I added titles to the animatic in the order which we would put the titles in our final film.

» I finshed the animatic! Then me a Fatama were watching it back and decided that we should and sound to it using one from which Mary found on youtube.

-Animatic without sound;

-With sound;

Planning the Pitch

Today in Phil's lesson we were planning the pitch, we were working through the pitch requirement list, we delegated the tasks and got on with it. This is the easiest way to get all the work done in the least possible time. We havn't finished yet, so were meeting up tomorrow as a group to finish it.

Phil also gave us another sheet today, telling us when all of our deadlines are.. it coming up SOOO soon, we only have a little bit of time to do it in.. I'm soooooooo SCARED!!     

Working On Our Pitch

In todays lesson we got into groups and began working on our 'pitch'. The pitch will basically be a presentation that we will create using the program Powerpoint and present it to our class and other media teachers. The pitch must contain the following;

1. Title of our film
2. The treatment (brief outline of the film)
3. What type (sub genre) of thriller it is
4. Planned locations and location shots
5. Prop, costumes and other mise en scene
6. Full storyboard and preferably animatic including titles
7. Preliminary ideas about sound
8. Production schedule
9. Risk assessment
10. Skills audit to date
11. Institutional detail
12. Audience detail

We were told by our teacher Phil that if our pitch was not good or did not convince him and other media teachers that our thriller film would be successful then we would not pass and therefore we will no be able to start filming! This put pressure on us! We had to make sure our pitch was very convincing!
We split the responsibilties amoungst our group. For example Fatama was incharge of of tasks 1-5 from the list above (all in which she had to do using Powerpoint). Mary was in charge of looking online and trying to find different music and sound effects we could use in our film. Amy was in charge of transforming our storyboard into an animatic so that we could include it in our pitch. I was in charge of tasks 8-12 from the list. Below are some images I took of us working on our pitch...





This is me creating the presentation on Powerpoint

This is my complete first slide

 This is my second slide. I have wrote about the different skills we have learnt since the start of this unit (unit of preparing for making of thriller film)

This is Mary searching for different sounds online...

She found some good ones on Youtube....



This is Fatama working on tasks 1 to 5 (from pitch list) using Powerpoint

 

We didn't get to complete our pitch though so tommorrow my group will be meeting up at lunch time to finish it off before our next media lesson because this is when we will be presenting it!!!!

THE TREATMENT.

» When planning our films we had to write out a treatment which is basically a full detailed version of our plan.
The things we had to include were:
-Location
-What happens
-Titles
-Sound 
-Props
-Influences


The Treatment:
-Locations;
The location that we have chosen to use are the bedroom, bathroom, outside the house and in the kitchen. We have decided to use these locations because they are small and confined spaces, these locations help set the mood/atmosphere/genre of our film.


-What happens;
The story is about a girl who is mentally ill, she has an obsession with dolls and they control her life. Her favourite doll, Annabelle orders her to do bad things. Annabelle is jealous and envies the other dolls which are much prettier than her. Annabelle's existance is only in Amy's, the main characters imagination. Annabelle tells Amy to destroy the other dolls. Ethel, Amy's socical worker glimpses weird things from Amy's obsession.

The social worker visits, Amy opens the door and tells the social worker that she is fine. The social worker is concered and asks to use the toliet as a cover up to look around the house. Soon the social worker finds broken dollies scattered around in the bathroom, in the toilet and bath tub. She becomes even more concered and decideds to go into the bedroom and have a look around, she discovers a box under the bed with some more broken dolls, then turns around to see Amy standing there with scissors in one hand and a dolls head in the other.


-Titles;
name of film: Annabelle's Whisper


-Sounds;
Non-diagetic, voice over of dolls - giggling, whispering...
Drones, suspensful music, drums, violins, gothic, bass, piano, depressing.


-Props;
Dolls
Scissors
Doll costume
Make-up - lipstick..


Influences; 
After looking at a few openings to some thriller films, we have decided to to a narrative opening, where the titles are running thoughout the opening sequence, we chose to do a pyschological thriller, wtih the influeneces from 'Momento' and 'Seven'  as there are lots of close ups, which dosent reveal much to the veiwers, making it more mysterious and suspensful making the audiences want to watch the rest of the film.

Evaluation Of Prelim Film

The good things about the film is that the music picked for the film worked well i think music is important becasue if the right music is not added the point of the music may be lost or misunderstood. We have a variety of shots so we bring suspense to the piece we have low angle shots high angle shots close ups long shots etc. The cuts matched together so it look fluent. If it was cut randomly then of course the piece would not flow.

The improvements
we could have made more jump shots when the gun was being pulled out. We made it obvious that the gun was going to be pointed at Amy becasue we filmed a close up of the gun the a longshot of Ethel pointing the gun at Amy. If we had filmed a close up of the gun then a close up of Amy doing shopkeeper stuff to show she has no idea of what is going on then we could have filmed a close up of Ethel's face to show that she was about to do something. The we could cut to Amy's face to show that she know realises what is going on then a two shot (?) of the both of them together. I think if we had filmed it this way it would have created more suspense.

This is our Preliminary Match Cut Film.

Ethel- Robber
Fatima- Robber/ Cameragirl
Amy- Shopkeeper
Mary- Camera Girl

In class we were told to create a animatic storyboard using jelly babies. FUN! The story that our group came up with was a robbery at a shop. Amy was the shop keeper who was held at gunpoint. Ethel and Fatima were the robbers. I was filming so thats why im not in it. Here is our story board.

Thriller Audience

Most thriller audiences are aged 18+ but some are under 18. But it really depends on what the sub genre of the thriller is for example thrillers like The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village because they are borderline horror movies which are genreally targeted at females these movies are most likely to have younger female viewers. Films like crime thrillers would be targeted at males so it depends on the subgenre.

THRILLER PLANNING.

» So in todays lesson we all put our heads together and started planning for our thriller opening sequence, we came up with a few ideas, but at the we all decided on one. 


-here is the storyboard: