Our second film idea

After talking more about our new film opening, we have decided that it might be effective to make an opening similar to that of Donnie Darko where a character wakes up in the middle of a strange random place for an unclear reason. By doing this we hope it haves an effective on the audience for them to want to carry on watching the film and find out what happens next.

We have thought that we could show a character sleeping, and then have lots of different shots put together in a fast paced edit to make it look like a dream or flashback. We will then show the character waking up with confusion and then as we move the camera away it will show their strange surroundings.

Me and Molly were at Forty Hall last week for some photography work and as we were walking through the woods we thought that it would be a really good place to film our opening as it is a strange place for someone to wake up in, it is nice and quiet so we would not be disturbed while filming and it is a really pretty place which would look nice in our film.

We are still working on this idea and we are still thinking about why our character would be waking up in that situation. One idea that we have spoken about already could be that our character is a troubled teenager who is into drugs and prostitution, so the flashbacks or dream would be of them the night before taking drugs and showing them at a night out, and then maybe getting out of a clients car. The drugs would explain why our character ended up in their strange sleeping place and in the woods and why they do not remember.

I really like this film idea but we are going to talk about it a lot more and plan it really well so that we know exactly what we are doing when we go out to film so that we do not make the same mistakes as our last opening.

Our original film beginning

This is the first draft of our film opening that we decided to scrap.
You can see from this draft that we have been playing around with imovie with different effects to try to edit our film.
After completing this first draft we decided we really did not like it.
Some of the shots we liked and thought could be quite effective, but others were just too long and boring.

The first shot where Sarah's dad opens the door to the dark room was quite effective because when he turns on the light it takes a while to focus completely which could be quite creepy as it takes the viewer a while to realise where he actually is.

The next shot from inside the dark room i really did not like. I don't think we focused enough on our board of photos that we made as we only really look at one. The pan that is used is not as effective as we thought as it is quite unsteady. It is also really hard to see what is going on in this scene when Sarah's dad is developing the photo's. This shot is far too long and boring and to make it better we needed to add in different angle shots of what he was doing to make it more interesting and understandable, which we did not realise at the time. As we had to edit this scene to make it lighter so you could see what was happening, the light went quite grainy which I don't think looks very professional or effective.

The next scene of the house and Sarah's dad walking into the shot had some good points and some bad points. I like the way that he just strolls into the shot and looks at the house as he walks past as I think it is quite eery. I do not like the effect we put on it however as it does not look realistic. I also again think that this shot is too long and we should have filmed it from different angles to cut it up.

The shot of Charlotte walking out of the house I thought was quite good because we placed the camera in a position so you could see Charlotte and her stalker at the same time which made it quite effective. The continuity in this shot however is not very good as when Charlotte walks out of the house she walks towards the camera and then turns which does not look realistic and we did not pick up on at the time.
For this shot we did film it from different angles to make sure it wasn't too long which was a good idea and I do think that part is quite effective.

The next part of Charlotte being followed down the allyway again is too long and boring and we found it really hard to try and match the two shots from the different points of view to make it look continuous which again makes it look unprofessional. It also changes effects each time the camera moves positon which makes it look wrong and uneffective.

The last shot where Sarah's dad is back in the darkroom is again too dark so we can not see what is going on and we positioned the camera in a bad place which meant that Sarah's dad was infront of the camera for most of the shot so we could not see what he was doing anyway. The photo's that we took of ourselves to use as our credits were far too dark so you cannot even see what the photo's are meant to be when we were filming it. The light we used in this scene was a phone light but it kept going off every few seconds. At the time that we were filming this we thought that it may looks quite creepy and effective but now that we have put it together is does not looke effective it just again looks unprofessional.

I think we have definatly made the right decision to re make our film as I hope we can do better than our first draft. We have gained experience and knowledge from our first go and now we know that we cannot make our shots too long and we need to have many different camera angles to add in to make it interesting and get the effect we are aiming for.

Discussions about our film

In todays lesson we spoke to Miss Foster about our film, showed her where we were up to and ask for her opinion.
As we were speaking about our film she could see that we clearly were not very happy with how our film has turned out so far as we kept making comments on how the lighting was not quite right and our shots were too long or confusing. As we were talking we discussed the option that maybe we could reshoot another film that was better and not as complicated with the story line. As a group we decided that maybe we did rush into our first film too quickly and it would be wise to think about starting again with our storyboard and thinking about it all more carefully. We've decided to look at all the possible genres we can do, look at films that fit into that genre, and come up with a rough idea for each one and then decide which idea is best and will work most succesfully. We started to do this in todays lesson and came up with some rough genres such as "supernatural" for example, Paranormal Activity and Signs, "psychological" such as Donnie Darko and The Sixth Sense and "spoofs" such as Scary Movie.
We have not made anymore progress yet but we are going to carry on working on our ideas and hopefully come up with a better, more structured idea than our first. We realise that by comitting to making a whole new film, we will have to work really hard to get our blogs back up to date and to keep in the time frame. We are hoping to come up with an effective story that we can easily shoot over just a couple of days in the Christmas holidays which are coming up in about 2 weeks.