Voice Over's

Our group has been discussing the idea of possibly using a voice over rather than just music for the opening of our film. We think this will be effective because it will make the story easier for the audience to understand as it may be quite unclear at the moment. It has also been successful in other films such as Mean Girls and Usual Suspects.
We were thinking about what the voice over could be and some of our ideas were
* Charlotte explaining to a friend her night
* Charlotte's thoughts
* A police interview
* Narration

We all agreed that the police interview would probably be the most effective type of voice over so we could have them asking questions about her night and she can either explain each flashback as it happens or she could remain silent for the whole interview and just say something at the end that stuns the audience.

An example of a voice over used in an opening of a film is Mean Girls. The main character Kadie has to explain her first day of school and why she is only just starting at the age of 16. She uses photographs from her past to illustrate it whilst she is talking about it over the top.

Mean Girls -



Another film that I just recently watched was "The Beach" with Leonardo Di Caprio. I really enjoyed this film and thought all of the camera angles and movements made it a really interesting film. It also related to research for our own film because the beginning starts with a voice over. This voiceover is crucial to the opening of the film because without him explaining where he is and why he is there the opening would not make much sense to the viewer. At the moment this is the kind of problem we have with our film, that it is hard to understand what is happening so by having a voice over in our own film hopefully it will create a similar effect and help our audience understand the film.

This is the opening to The Beach with the voiceover:



This is the trailer to The Beach:

Our film title

We have been thinking of ideas to what to name our film when it is completed and have tried to think of something effective and relevant to our film and what it is about.
Whilst we were on the font website looking for one to download to use for our credits, we saw that one of the fonts was called "Pulse". We thought that this could be a possible name for our film as there is a clip of Charlotte whist she is on the floor of her chest going up and down to indicate her heavy breathing. As we are hoping to film to be eery and quick paced we thought that Pulse may be a suitable name for it and we could also relate our background music to it by having a heart beat or something similar.
We have put this film name into our third draft and all think it looks quite effective but if we think of a different name that we all agree is better we may change it later on.

Credits

Over the past two lessons of editing we have completed making our credits and edited some more of our opening.
After hearing Miss Foster's comments on our opening draft we have changed some things to help to make it more understandable to the audience.
We have changed the very beginning by adding colour clips of Charlotte in to make it easier to understand that she is alseep and she is having a dream/flashbacks.
We also decided to play with the effects in imovie and see if there was an effective alternative to black and white as this is quite boring. We decided to use an effect called "Old World" and also turn down the saturation which makes the colour look drained similar to that in the film I blogged about earlier "Premonition". We cut out some of the driving car scenes from the film and replaced them with other things as we all agreed the car parts were repeated too often.
Another bit of editing we done was put short fades inbetween the colour parts of Charlotte and when it goes to the flashbacks almost as an ellipsis to show there is a time differece.

For our credits we tried to base them on the credits of the film se7en which we all really like and enjoy. The credits create an eery feel to the film and set the mood. The actors, directors and producers names all come up on a black background with white writing which jumps and jerks around the screen. In this picture you can see the type of font they used in the opening credits of Se7en:


We decided to try and create the same kind of effect for our film. As we were looking through the fonts provided on imovie we decided that they were all to basic and not effective enough for our film so we tried to see if we could download a font from the internet. We found the website www.dafont.com which has loads of different fonts to choose from. We were searching the site and all the different themes to find something that would suit the genre of our film.
Some of the examples of the fonts we liked were:






In the end after carefully looking at all of the fonts we liked we decided that the most appropriate one for our film is Sketched:



We downloaded this font to our mac and started putting together our credits. We used black screens and added the text to it. We made all the texts only appear for about half a second each and for each one we slightly moved it or adjusted it in some way so when it's played it creates a flickering jolting effect.
We're really pleased with our credits and after spending a long time on them all agree that it was worth it. We also like that they are longer clips so it contrasts all of our other short choppy clips and gives the film some variety.

This is our third draft of our film:

Second draft

We started to edit in some of the parts of Charlotte waking up into our film. At the moment this is very rough and we need to add lots more colour parts in and maybe slow them down rather than speed them up. We also need to take out the part with the clock as the lighting does not fit in with the rest of the film

Here is our second draft

Premonition

Today I watched the film Premonition with Sandra Bullock and really enjoyed it. I thought it was a really good film with an unexpecting ending and thought Sandra Bullock played the role well and convincingly. The film is about a wife who falls into a time slip and experiences her husbands death before it actually happens and then has to think of a way to stop it happening but unfortunatly can't.
Throughout the film Sandra Bullock has various flashbacks which are shown in a similar way to how we have shown ours in our film. They are quickly paced short shots and are not in the same colour as the rest of the film. Rather than being in black and white like our film however, they have the flashbacks in a different effect which is a bit hazy and a drained colour. I think this type of effect looks good and maybe our group could try this effect on our own film and compare it to the black and white and see which effect we prefer.

This is a clip that shows some of the flashbacks and the colour of them that someone has made with music over the top:


This is the trailer to the film:

Classification

These are the official guidelines from the BBFC on film certificates classification

Classification Guidelines

And this is the student guide to film classification

Student Guide to Bbfc


From this website I found the guidelines to the film Donnie Darko as this has a similar opening to our film. This film was rated a 15 and the website had this information about it:

"DONNIE DARKO
Feature Film
Classified 13 May, 2002 .
Run Time 113m 11s
Consumer Advice: Contains strong language and psychological horror."



For our own film we have decided that it is also going to be a certificate 15 as our horror and violence is within the guidelines listed for a 15 certificate film. By having our film at this rating it will be able to be viewed by a wider audience including our target audience of teenagers.

The BBFC guidelines for a 15 rating certificate are:

Drugs

Drug taking may be shown but the film as a whole must notpromote or encourage drug misuse. The misuse of easilyaccessible and highly dangerous substances (for example,aerosols or solvents) is unlikely to be acceptable.

Horror

Strong threat and menace are permitted unless sadistic or sexualised.

Language

There may be frequent use of strong language (for example,‘fuck’). The strongest terms (for example, ‘cunt’) may beacceptable if justified by the context. Aggressive or repeateduse of the strongest language is unlikely to be acceptable.

Nudity

Nudity may be allowed in a sexual context but withoutstrong detail. There are no constraints on nudity in a non-sexual or educational context.SexSexual activity may be portrayed without strong detail.There may be strong verbal references to sexual behaviour,but the strongest references are unlikely to be acceptableunless justified by context. Works whose primary purpose issexual arousal or stimulation are unlikely to be acceptable.

Violence

Violence may be strong but should not dwell on the inflictionof pain or injury. The strongest gory images are unlikely tobe acceptable. Strong sadistic or sexualised violence is alsounlikely to be acceptable. There may be detailed verbal references to sexual violencebut any portrayal of sexual violence must be discreet andhave a strong contextual justification.

Second day of filming

Today we had our second and final day filming which we are all really happy about. The rest of the group came to my house this morning where we filmed some more of our flashbacks. We filmed the tea idea which had which hopefully turned out quite successfully. We had a cup of tea with the camera looking down from above, we then poured in milk and saw the milk cloud out into the tea and change colour which when we slow down are hoping looks effective. We then filmed me cutting up cheese into slices from another angle which was head onto the chopping board. Some of the other shots we did was a high angle shot of Charlotte typing on a laptop and another of just her hands scrambling on a shelf for a necklace. We also had a clock which we took the battery out of and put back in which made the hands go the whole way round, when we speed this shot up we think it will be another effective shot. As Charlotte was doing her makeup we also filmed her in the mirror with a close up of her face putting on mascara and blusher and then an extreme close up of her lips putting on lipgloss.

We then went to 40 Hall which is near my house to film the part of Charlotte waking up in the forest.
This is the location we used:


We took binbags for her to lay on as it was very muddy and tucked them in around her body so they couldnt be seen on the camera. We then took lots of different shots of Charlotte which we are going to add into our flashbacks but in colour to show the time difference.
Some of the shots we included here was:
* A close up pan of her whole body laying down
* Extreme close up of her eyes twitching
* Close up of her face
* A close up of other body parts like her hands, feet and knees also twitching to show shes dreaming
* A medium shot of her waking up and sitting up in a panic
* A close up of her eyes opening
* A high angle shot of her sleeping and also from various other angles
* A point of view shot from Charlotte as she wakes up
* A point of view shot from when she stands up and spins around looking up into the sky
* A pan follow of her walking off onto a path
* A long shot of Charlotte walking along the path that we are going to put slow fades inbetween to show her fading down the path.




We also had an idea for our credits which filmed. Each of us from the group had an extreme close up shot of our left eye looking around which we can fit into the flashbacks and add our names onto using imovie which we thought could look goood.

We are going to upload our footage onto the macs at school on Monday and start to edit straight away. I'm really plwased with how our filming went today and hope that we have all the footage we need to put our film together now.