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.

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.

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.