Evaluation of my 2 minute film coursework

This is my evaluation of our 2 minute film and the final part of my coursework. I enjoyed doing this peice because it was interesting to look back on how we have progessed from our preliminary task to our final film and how far we have come. I think I've learnt a lot from this course and from doing this evaluation I have seen just how much I have gained from the work.

Media - Evaluation

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.

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)

Our voice over

We started to record some of our voice over the other day by using three people to read our script that we roughly made. Abby was the news reporter, Emily was the mother and Charlotte read the parts of the police officer. We recorded it on garage band just roughly to see what it's like but we may need to re record in the future if it doesnt properly fit.

From using the idea from Plan B's song, Suzanne, we decided to distort the girls surname on the news report using effects on garage band. By doing this is makes it sound more real as if we cannot say her full name for legal reasons and makes it seem more eery.

We also recorded the part for the beginning of the rolling tape.

We put the rolling tape and a small bit of the news report onto imovie to see what it's like and we will complete it when we go back to school after Easter.

This is the draft with parts of the voice over in it:

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.

New draft

After watching the different film openings to look at the different types of credits and their positions in the films we decided that we should follow the opening to a film that Charlotte had recently watched "Step Brothers" We all agreed that the order of their credits worked well and we liked them so we made ours similar to theirs.

This is the link to the opening of Step Brothers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sczh_KjjFNU

We decided that our production company name could be "mac one" for the simple fact that we are working on the first mac at school and we came up with a simple 3 letter combination of LBC for another distributor.
We put all of our names at the beginning as well to see what it looked like but after putting it on youtube we decided they looked better a bit more spaced out and we also need to give eachother roles in the production and add that on

Here is our next draft: