Treatment

We have to write a Treatment, the Treatment contains the following:

1. location
2. what happens
3. sound
4. props
5. titles
6. influences

The treatment is really important, the treatment tells us everything about the film, this gives a preview to the panel that we are going to pitch to. Here is our treatment:

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 existence 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 concerned and asks to use the toilet 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 concerned and decides 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, edited by Fatama, filmed by Mary, actors: Amy and Ethel, and directed by Fatama.

-Sounds;Non-diagetic, voice over of dolls - giggling, whispering...
Drones, suspenseful music, drums, violins, Gothic, bass, piano, depressing background music.
-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 throughout the opening sequence, we chose to do a psychological thriller, with the influences from 'Momento' and 'Seven'  as there are lots of close ups, which doesn't reveal much to the viewers, making it more mysterious and suspenseful making the audiences want to watch the rest of the film.

Storyboard

This is a rough guideline to the story line of our opening of our thriller in the form of a storyboard, nothing is set in stone, we will probably change some of it, if it doesnt work out: (and its not very good drawring.. sorry.. hehe)

Title Sequence to Thrillers PITCH...

In our groups we have to pitch to our teachers and the rest of the class your ideas and concrete plans about our film opening. we have mondays lesson to prepare our pitch and and then on wenesdays lesson we have to present our pitch, its going to be scary.... 

        We have 15 mins to present our pitch.. (i dont know if thats enough time... :s )



This is what our pitch has to contain:
1. the title of your movie
2. the treatment
3. what type of sub genre of thriller is it? have any other openings inspired you?
4. planned locations and locatons shots
5. props, costumes and other mise en scene
6. full story boardand preferably animatic including titles
7. preliminary ideas about sound
8. production scheduale (what you are doing and when)
9. risk assesment
10. skills audit to date
11. institutional deatil- which film company would produce your movie and how would that effect PDE
12. audience deatil- who is the target audience and what would appeal to them about your film?

Thriller Planning

We had to plan our thrillers on Wednesday in Bernard's lesson, this was an exciting and scary time because this lesson would kind of ultimately decide on what our film is going to be.

  

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We had this sheet and we had to fill in the squares in this order:

1. Locations to be used
2. openings that have inspired you and why
3. which sub genre will you produce
4. openings structure to be followed
5. key props to be used intertextual refrences
6. fonts and font effects to be used
7. we added a 7th box for sound we thought we could use

 

 

 

 

Evaluating the Preliminary

Our teacher Phil gave us feed back on our blog:

I agree with most parts of his feed back for example the last paragraph, where he says that we carefully planned it, and we payed close attention to detail because it is true, we spent a long time planning what scenes and where we could shoot our preliminary. I think that we can improve the titles a lot, but in my defense we didn't have much time and i was left on my own to finish the titles.

The part where Amy is looking from the counter to Ethel, i would say was right, we over did it with 2 point of view shots, but now that i think of it, it was meant to be all together but because we were under a tight deadline we weren't thinking straight and recorded 2 shots. If it was one shot of her looking down from the sweets to Ethel then it would have been better for the film because it would have flown nicely.

However i don't agree with when he said that the close up of what Ethel was looking at was too close. (cash till) this shot of the cash till was suppose to be for the audience to know what we were looking at not a reality of what Ethel was looking at.

Editing in Titles

We still had to add titles to our preliminary as you can see from the rough cut. (hehe) So on Wednesday after Bernards lesson i wanted to meet up and finish the titles so i talked to my group members and agreed to meet on Wednesdays. When we were there, we got stuck because we have never used live type before so we asked the media technician Marisa to help us. she showed us how to use it, she was really friendly and nice and it really helped having her there.
This is live type:

i had never had any experience using live type and it seemed really extra to have to import every single titles separately so Marisa showed me how to put titles on in final cut pro. final cut pro seemed easier and quicker so i decided to opt for this one. Below are some pictures of editing in final cut pro: 

  

We started putting in the titles at 3:30, Mary, Ethel and Amy left at 4:00. so i had to stay and finish it, it was hard because i didn't have anyone Else's opinion on where to put the titles...
i finished putting in the titles at 5, it took along time because i had to change a format because the titles were making the video blurry, and for a long time i couldn't figure out how to make it better, so i asked the workshop teacher and she helped me and told me what to do. i was so relieved when i finally finished!

Our 1st planning of our thriller film...



Todays lesson was really exciting as we started to plan our thriller film. We got into groups and we were given a big sheet to write down our plans for it. These are the main things we had to include;


- Title of our film
- Openings that have inspired us
- Opening structure in which we would follow (e.g. - narrative, descrete)
- Key props to be used
- The sub- genre of our thriller
- Intertextuality references
- Fonts and fonts effects to be used
- Locations
- Sound effects


Below is an image of the sheet that we made our plans on

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF OUR STORYLINE


The title of our film might be called Annabelle. We came up with the idea to do our story based on a psyocological thriller about a girl who is possessed by dolls. The dolls control her life and she wants best to be like a doll as she dresses up and tries to be like one!  She is actually mental (or some might say going crazy) as she thinks that one specific doll (Annabelle) speaks to her! All of this, though, is not true as dolls do not speak! Its all just in her imagination. Annabelle is an evil doll who tells her to go and destroy other dolls and so on... Her social worker comes in her house to check up on her and finds out that her mental illness is worsening as she finds a big box full of dolls in which she has destroyed and she also finds some in some strange places for example down the toilet, in the bathroom, in the bins and so on....... does it sound thrilling? HAHAHAHAA......


-The main locations we may use are a bedroom, a toilet, a school, a bathroom etc...


-We got our ideas (Intertexuality) from the film 'Memento' (I have blogged about this in one of my previous blogs)


- We may use a narrative opening (Inspired by the Stepfather)


- We may use a spooky-looking kind of font in 'hot' pink colour to represent the 'girliness' of dolls... They may fade in and fade out and may have a glowing effect to add suspense...

I took some images of myself and my group sitting together palnning our thriller film....

We also had to draw out a storyboard of all the main scenes that will come up in our film. Below are some pictures I have taken of the storyboard we drew (they may not be very clear though!)...



All the ideas that we have gathered today are only ideas, so we may change a lot of things or even slightly change the storyline. But I am glad we have come up with a good basic idea of what we want our film to be about.... now we just have to put all the work in and get filming!!