What's eating Gilbert Grape

I just watched the film "What's eating Gilbert Grape" with Johnny Depp and Leonardio Dicaprio and really enjoyed it. I had heard a lot about the film and how good it was and it lived up to all the expectations as Leonaro Dicaprio and Johnny Depp played their roles really well.

The film is about Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) and about all the stuggles he faces in a year of his life whilst looking after and supporting his family. His brother Arnie (Leonaro Dicaprio) has a developmental disability and although he is turning 18 he has to be cared for as if he is a younger child, he has to be bathed by other people and watched wherever he goes. Their mother, Bonnie Grape, is morbidly obese after turning to food when her husband died and she had not moved from the house in 7 years because she was just gaunted at where ever she went by the rest of the village. Gilbert also has two sisters who also help look after their mother and the house.

At the beginning of the film there is a voiceover of Gilbert introducing his family and their past, this is similar to our film as it also opens with a voice over.

This is the trailer to What's eating Gilbert Grape:

Genre research

Psychological thriller:

'Psychological thriller is a specific sub-genre of the wide-ranging thriller genre. However, this genre often incorporates elements from the mystery and drama genre in addition to the typical traits of the thriller genre. Also, occasionally this genre will border into the also wide-ranging Horror genre.

Generally, thrillers focus on plot over character, and thus emphasize intense, physical action over the character's psyche. Psychological thrillers tend to reverse this formula to a certain degree, emphasizing the characters just as much, if not more so, than the plot.

The suspense created by psychological thrillers often comes from two or more characters preying upon one another's minds, either by playing deceptive games with the other or by merely trying to demolish the other's mental state.'


This is similar to the genre of our film as we have a character, the mother, who plays games with others minds to distract them away from the fact that she has mental problems and committed a crime.

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.

Film Opening looking at credits

In class we looked at a few different film openings to look at where they positioned theyre credits and what kinds of other things they had such as the distributors and production companies names.

In the film "Derailed" the opening was in a prison and the first thing you saw was a black screen with "Miramax" production company. As the action started the credits appeared on the screen over the moving image. First it was the names of all the technical team, then the director, the main actor and actress' name, the title of the film and then the rest of the actors.

In another film "The life of David Gale" the credits were quite different and this time the production companies were "Universal" and "Intermedia". There is then a black screen with the distributors names on and a black screen for the tutle of the film. This is all before any action starts and there is a sound bridge over the black screen to introduce you to the conversation before you see any actors.

In another film opening that we watched "Bourne Identity" this opening was again slightly different with the credits. In this one the production company is again "Universal" but this time there is a little bit of action and then a black screen with the name of the film and no actors names are shown in the opening.


After watching these openings it made us discuss our own credits and decided that the name of our film should come right at the beginning rather than at the end to make it look more like a film than a trailer. We also decided that we should give each person in our film a role such as editor, producer etc to make it look more authentic.

Voice over decision

On friday our group further discussed our voice over as we have decided we need to start recording it as soon as possible.
We thought that to make our film a bit more creepy we could make out that the girls' mother is the person who has put her there as she has some kind of problem. We decided that we could show this in the voice over by having a police interview with the mother where she is asked questions and answers them in ways that suggests she is quite strange and innocent by changing her tone of voice to change moods and by some of the answers she gives.
We thought that we could also still use the idea of the news report as well in the style of Plan B. We could have the news report cut up into 4 parts and have it over the parts of our credits. This way it would give our film some variety.
We have started to think about a script and who we can ask to do the voice over for us and hopefully we can record it some time soon using the microphones at school.

We also decided that we will need quiet background music to go with our voiceover but we want to keep it simple so the viewer is not distracted from the voiceover. We could prehaps just have a slight heart beat or something similar to that.

Voice overs

Our group discussed our voice over that we want to put on our film and we spoke about all of the possibilities we have. We thought that we could make the voice over similar to the content of our film by having different voice clips cut up and put together. For example, parts of a police interview, parts of a news report, parts of a conversation the girl is having with a friend, parts of a conversation the person who put her there is having and maybe some of the girls relatives and friends speaking about it.
We thought of some possible voices that we could use for these ideas and made a list of some people at school and some teachers we thought would be good to ask.
We need to talk more deeply about our ideas but I think it will work out well and hopefully sound good with our film.
An idea that we had for an example of a good television or radio report is in Plan B's song Suzanne. The song is about the Camden Ripper who raped and killed 3 prostitues. Towards the end of the song there is a news reporter who is talking about the case and the reason why we liked this was because the names were blocked out which made it seem quite creepy

This is the song Suzanne:

Shutter Island

Last night I went to see the film Shutter Island with Leonardo De Caprio and really enjoyed it. I had heard reviews about how good the film was but did not actually know anything about the plot apart from that it was based around a mental institution on a remote island. I think that because I knew nothing about the plot this made the film even better because everything came as a suprise. There was a really good twist at the end that was unexpected and really well put together.

The storyline was at first quite hard to understand and was one of those films that only came together at the end when everything was revealed. I still really enjoyed it though and would recommend it to everyone but I think it would be best to see it in the cinema as it wouldn't have the full effect on a TV as some parts were quite jumpy.

This is the trailer to Shutter Island:

Copyrighted music

For our film we have been told that we are not allowed to use anyone elses music if it is copyrighted and this is what it means:

'Copyright protects creative works and enables composers, literary authors and other creators to be paid for their work. Copyright is the means by which those who create and own works (e.g. music and lyrics) can control who makes use of each work and the circumstances in which it is used, to ensure that the integrity and value of the work is respected.'

'Copyright in a song
Every song comprises two copyright works:

The music itself (a musical work)
The lyrics/words (a literary work)'

'Rights of the owner
Subject to certain limited exceptions set out in the CDPA, if you own the copyright in either type of work, you have the sole right do any of the following, or to authorise another to do so:

Copy the work
Issue, lend or rent copies of the work to the public
Perform, show or play the work in public
Communicate the work to the public (i.e. broadcast it via television, radio, online etc.)
Adapt the work'

Casino

Another film that has a voice over to open the film is Casino with Robert De Niro. The opening to this film is very simple but it is explained using the voice over and it is also quite similar to our film in the way that the beginning does not make sense until the end of the film when the same scene is repeated again and the viewer then understands why it has happened.

This is the only video on youtube I could find of this opening scene. It is only 19 seconds long and it's hard to hear what he is saying so I also found the trailer -

Opening scene:



Trailer:

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:

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.

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.

Paranormal Activity

Over the weekend I went to the cinema to see Paranormal activity.
Although it was not as scary as I was expecting I thought it was a really good film and the way they filmed it was really effective.
The whole film is filmed on a handheld home camera by the couple in the film.
The woman, Katie, has been followed to 3 different houses by some kind of ghost or demon, she believes, that watches her at night, makes noises in the house, whispers her name and breathes on her.
As an attempt to try to catch any of this activity on camera and get to the bottom of it, her husbad, Micha, sets up the home camera on a tripod in their bedroom with a microphone. The camera is placed so that you can see the bedroom and the door, and the corridor and stairs.
Each night different strange things happen that sometimes wake up, and sometimes don't wake up the couple. One night their bedroom door opens and closes, another night they hear footsteps coming up the stairs and into the bedroom, another night they hear a loud thud from downstairs in their front room.
As the film goes on, whenever it comes to the night scenes the whole cinema made groaning noises and sunk into their seats as they knew something unexpected and scary was about to happen, which I think was a really good effect to have on the audience.
The part of the film which I believe was most succesful and effective was the end. The woman becomes possessed by the demon and you see her get out of bed and go downstairs. As you cannot see downstairs you do not know what is going on and then siddenly you hear a desprate, terrified scream of Katie so Micha jumps out of bed and runs downstairs after her. After some kind of struggle everything goes quiet. You hear footsteps coming up the strairs towards the camera again and then it all goes quiet. The silence stays for a couple of minutes which had a huge impact on the audience because they were in suspence and it was left to our imagination of what was happening and what had happened downstairs. Suddenly the silence breaks when the possesed Katie throws a dead Micha at the camera.
The end was so effective and had everyone in the cinema screaming. The element of silence was what was so scary because you did know what was coming next. Also the fact that you did not see the demon or whatever was possessing her for the whole film had a huge impact as it was left to the audiences imagination of what it was.

I hope that the fact you cannot see our stalkers face in our film, has a similar scary or creepy impact on our audience.

Se7en

In our lesson on friday morning we watched the film Se7en. This was because Miss Foster had previously shown us the opening credits to get us thinking about our own opening credits in our film, but because we all thought it was so good and wanted to know more about the film she decided to let us the whole thing as a class.

The opening credits were really effective because you don't understand what it is or what is happening until you watch the rest of the film so it makes the veiwer interested and want to carry on watching.


The rest of the film is about a detective, Morgan Freeman, who is about to retire and has 7 days to teach the new detective, Brad Pitt, how to do his job.
Within those 7 days a serial killer starts his work by killing people according to the 7 deadly sins, gluttony, greed, sloth, lust, pride, envy and rath.
You saw throughout the film how he killed these people and at the end find out his reasonings behind them.
I thought it was a really good film and really enjoyed it. Although many people in the class afterwards were saying that they thought it was a poor ending, I disagree and think it was really powerful. The fact that the audience are left to just imagine what it looks like inside the box I thought was really effective and the way that you can really empathise with Brad Pitt at the end and understand his anger and upset.
There were many things in the film which were used to add to the atmosphere and help you understand the characters. The lighting for example was low key and for almost the whole film it was very heavy rain which made the film very dark and gloomy to add to the mood and effect of the film.
There was also a part in the end when the two detectives are driving the killer to the destination he has told them and there is a conversation between all three men. This is a vital part of the film as the killer tells them his reasons behind all the killings and how he believes he was chosen by God to do this and how he admires the two detectives for their work. As this conversation is happening the camerawork is very clever to show the audience the different characters. Whenever the killer is talking, he is shown through the wire bars as if to show he is bad and should be away from people. When Brad Pitt is talking he is sometimes also shown through the bars to show he is just as bad as the killer in his attitudes, but when Morgan Freeman talks he is shown normally without the bars to show he is good.

There was also a part in the film where the detectives find the killers flat and one of his rooms is a dark room with lots of photos of his victims hung up. This looked like a really effective shot with a red tint so I think this has once again made our group think about maybe putting a red tint over our own dark room scene when editing using imovie.

Stalker/obessive films I have watched

Over the last few weeks I have tried to watch some films to do with stalking and obsessive people to help with our film when we are editing.

First I watched "Obessed" With Beyonce Knowles and Idris Elba.

This was about a woman who got a tempory placement at a job. She ended up becoming obsessed with her boss at that placement and tried everything she could to stay at the job and got a permenant place there. She was convinced in her head that she had a relationship with this boss and always tried to be with him and would do anything for him. As the film goes on her obsession becomes worse and she becomes jealous of her boss's wife (Beyonce).
There are interesting camera shots in this film such as when the woman is watching the boss's house which we included into our filming when Sarah's dad was watching Charlotte leave her house. I thought it was quite a good film and think it has helped me to think of some ideas to put into our editing now.


The next film I watched was "The Watcher" with Keanu Reeves.

This film is about a serial killer who watches or stalks girls for weeks until he knows everything about their routine such as when they wake up when they leave the house when they eat when they sleep and most importantly when they are alone. Then he finds them and kills them by slitting their throat with a piano wire. He starts to play a game with a certain police officer by sending a photo of his next victim to him in the morning and says if the police officer does not find the victim by 9pm the same day, he will kill them.
I thought it was a really good film, even though it had quite a disapointing poor ending and think it will really help with our ideas.
There was a part in the film where you saw him developing photos of his victims in a dark room. In our film we are still not sure whether to put a red tint over our dark room scene or not. In The Watcher they have a red tint and I think it looks really effective so I will show my group and see if they agree.
Here is the trailer for The Watcher and you can see the effective dark room scenes in it breifly



Finally, the last film I watched on this subject was "Single White Female"

This film is about a woman, Ellie, who breaks up with her fiance and is so left to live alone. She puts an ad in the local newspaper asking for a female room mate. The woman, Headra, who she eventually chooses to move in with her starts to act strange around Ellie and becomes obsessed with her and her life. She wants Ellie for herself and does not want her to get back with her fiance or to ever leave her. She cuts and dyes her hair so it is identical to Ellies and starts wearing her clothes. She sleeps with her boyfriend and pretty much steals her identity. When Ellie finally realises that she needs to get away from Headra, she does not let her leave and tries to kill her.
I thought it was a really good film and would recommend it and I also think it had interesting camera angles when she was watching Ellie and when Ellie was trying to hide from her in their apartment which we could try and use in our film when we edit.