The rest of our film..

We have decided on the plot of our film for after the opening and where it will lead to.

We decided that it will be made out that Leyla's friend hurt Leyla and left her for dead in the forest but there will be a big twist at some point of the film where it turns our the mother is not in a fit mental state and it was actually her who drugged her own daughter and left her in the forest after a small disagreement they had, but to it was a big thing because of her mental state. The film will be about the police working with the family and friends of Leyla trying to find out what happened before finding her in the forest at the end of the film. (the beginning of the film will be repeated at the end)

Voice over discussions

We've decided that we can use the opening of "The life of David Gale" as an idea for our voice over by starting it when the black screen is up for our credits. We all agreed that this was an effective way to start a film as you are introduced to the story even before you see any characters physically.

Molly also had an idea that we could start our voiceover with the sound of a tape being put on to be recorded like it is in a police interview. This could be the first sound that our viewers hear when the black screen starts. I think this will be really effective and now we just need to start recording our voiceover and match it to our film.

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:

Filming schedual

We have decided on different filming times which are suitable for our whole group.
As we now have the camera for 2 weeks we had to think about a few different days that we can all attend where we can film all of our footage.

We have decided that on Monday after school we will start to film some of our flashbacks as the lighting will just be starting to get dark and will look eery and effective.
Some ideas for our flashbacks are:
* Shadows of different people in alley ways and on walls
* Different points of view of somebody running, from behind and from the person running's point of view
* The camera left on the floor with grass in focus and a girl running past the camera slightyly out of focus and falling over
* A clock which we can film for a whole hour, or a couple of hours and then speed it up to represent the time through the day
* Different home video clips, for example someone filming their friend talking to the camera
* Shots of a person coming out from different buildings and places

All of these shots will show the persons day and what they did, leading up to them waking up in the forest.


Next Wednesday is another day our group has agreed to film as we have an academic review day at school, meaning we are only going in for 10 minutes at a time. This will mean we can film the shots of the person laying in the forest during the day in daylight.
On Friday's lesson we have also been told that we have the morning to edit, so for our group we thought this would be a good oppertunity to upload what we film over the previous days, see if there is anything we are missing and if so, finish off some of our filming.

Our new film idea - final

Over the Christmas holidays and the new year our group has been carefully thinking about our new film idea and have almost finalised the ideas for it. We recieved the cameras today and have been allocated them for just 2 weeks before we must hand them back and finally start to edit. We have also completed a storyboard for this new idea which I will upload a photo of shortly.

Our final film idea is:
* We will have a person (most probably one of our group members) laying asleep in a part of a forest we found at Forty Hall and thought looked effective
* The person will have flashbacks of the day before which will start to explain why they are asleep in this random place
* The person will then wake up and we will see their confused and bewildered expression of why they are there

The camera shots we aim to use are:
* A close up pan of the body on the floor so the audience can see the person is asleep but can not see their location
* Close up and extreme close ups of the person and different body parts such as their hands and feet twitching to show they are asleep or dreaming
* A zoom into their eyes just before the start of the flashbacks to let the audience know they are about to see their dream
* A range of different camera angles including wide, medium, long, low angled and high angled for different parts of the flash backs
* A zoom back out from their eyes to show they are coming out of the dream and shows their eyes opening
* A series of 3 shots getting wider and wider out, keeping the person in the middle of the shot to show their location and to represent their realisation of where they have just woken up

We also discussed the idea of having the flash backs in black and white or some kind of other effect whilst keeping the actual sleeping person in colour to represent the difference in time and to show it is a dream. We have decided to film it all in colour though and edit it in imovie so we have a variety of options when editing.

We feel that this will be a better film opening than our first idea and think it will look effective. It will also be more of a film opening than a mini 2 minute film which is what we did before as we concluded our story.

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.

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.

Ideas for our 2 minute film and practising with the equipment

Our group finally decided on an idea for our 2 minute film that we all agreed on. We expanded on our stalker idea and decided we could use the dark room in school used for photography lessons to show how obsessed the stalker is by showing him developing photographs of all his victims.

Our opening shot is going to be of the victim walking through a park with a friend and then make an effect using imovie that looks like the stalker is taking photos of her as he watches.
Then we will show the stalker in the old dark room at school developing the photos he has just taken. We will also use certain camera shots such as a pan to show the stalkers many photos of previous victims he has stuck around the room.
Our next shot will be at Sarah's house where we will show the victim leaving the house and walking down an alleyway. We are going to use a point of view shot of the stalker as he follows closely behind her. He will then put out his hand as if to grab his victim but before he touches her the screen will go black and you will hear a muffled scream as we think that if we show the victim being grabbed we wont be able to make the reactions look realistic and if we show the screen going black it leaves it to the viewers imagination.
Our final shot will be once again be in the dark room where the stalker will replace the previous photo of his victim for a photo of the victim dead.
We are also hoping to include our credits in the dark room scene by having photos of our group up to show we were once his victims with our names underneath.



In our last lesson before half term each group was given all the equipment we needed to shoot our film over the next 3 weeks. We were then given the oppertunity to practise using the camera and tripod. Our group went into the playground and started practising a pan show and zoom which we want to include in the first scene of our film. We were also getting used to different types of lighting as we had to place the camera in certain positions to be able to see the characters clearly.
We also discovered the old dark room that nobody uses anymore which we thought would be really good to use in our film as it is only small, really old and really creepy which would add to our atmosphere we want in our film. It also looks like it could be a room in his house or possibly a garage he has converted into a dark room to develop photos of his victims.

We tried out different ligthing in this room too but thought the best way to film it would be with the night mode on because you can see everything clearly and it still gives a scary atmosphere.
We then went back to the media room and uploaded what we had filmed onto the Mac. We tried out our idea of the stalker taking photos by editing it on imovie and it turned out really well.
Were now really excited to start filming and look forward to start editing everything!

Our film research

Our group has been thinking of some ideas for our 2 minute film opening and have come up with something which we are looking to further research.

We thought that we could do a stalker type film where we could have point of view shots from someone watching a girl as she gets ready to leave the house and follow them down the road.

We have decided to research other stalker films that we know about such as Prom Night, The Watcher and Scream and see if we can get any more ideas from them and progress with our film opening.