We looked at the weather forecast to check which day would be the best day to do it:
We decided to do it on Wednesday 23rd November because by looking at the forecast, it looks like the best day to do it. We don't want to do it on a rainy day because it would be harder to film and everything would get wet which we don't want. The sunniest day would be best as it'll get dark as early as we need and we could plan more easy as we would know what to expect. The equipment would also not get wet and the actors would also not get wet and too cold.
We also made a 'To-Do' list to make sure we did everything needed to:
We did this list but made it into a 'Visme' to present it more interestingly:
We tried doing some different shots which may be effective in our opening sequence. Shots where the focus changed from one person to another will be good at creating a mysterious atmosphere and make it quite eery. These are our first attempts:
We also considered how the lighting would look when we filmed the real thing in the forest and when it was dark. We thought that the filming may look grainy and unclear so to improve this, we bought a light from 'ScrewFix' to improve the lighting when filming in the dark:
Off:
On:
To practise with it, we did some test shots inside a dark room:
This is the film without the light:
And this is it using the light:
As you can see, the light makes a huge difference and really helps when filming in the dark. It is very effective as the light is bright enough to make a good enough light to be able to improve the camera quality but doesn't change the time of day it needs to be set in. It just makes the night light enough to film. Learning Comment:
From doing this task, I have learnt how to focus and defocus a camera on whatever person I want. By doing this when filming, it makes it clear to the audience who they need to focus on and who is most important to watch in that moment and time. It helps a lot with our opening title sequence and when we will be filming it because by defocusing a background away from the main character, we can show a person watching 'Lilly' but without letting the audience figure out who he is which is the aim of our film and this makes it scarier and more suspicious. Also, from finding and using the light we bought has taught me how to make filming look more professional in the dark and how professional directors do it. Using the light will make our opening title sequence look better and add a more eerie effect.
We tried out some different fonts for our title. These are the ones we tried:
Learning comment
I have learnt how important typography is in an opening title sequence. This is mainly because it shows the genre of the film just by the font of the credits and we used this to reflect our horror and coming of age genre. We knew this was important to do as it adds lots of effect to the opening title sequence and makes it more of an atmosphere that we wanted it to be. It also has to be eye-catching so that it sticks in the audiences' minds and therefore makes it more successful. Not only this, we also learnt how important it is to get the order of the typography right and we learnt which was right by looking at lots of successful films to use their order for ours.
Learning Comment:
By doing this task, it allowed us to show the audience what we were planning to do and why we were doing it. It also helped us because when we were planning, we were able to go back to this task and remember what we did and therefore could write about it in other blog posts. It also allowed us to show what the purpose was for everything we did and how important everything was to make it look right and create the right atmosphere.
What have I learnt?
I have learnt that everything within our film is extremely important in order for it to work and look professinal. Everything needs to be planned and worked on carefully.
Learning Comment:
By doing this task, it allowed us to tell people about which actors to use and also why we actually chose to use them. Also, by finding out more about the actors we chose than we already knew was extrememly helpful as then we could adapt the character we formed to fit their personalities or looks. For example, our very first idea was to use two girls but as we found a boy to be one of our actors it made our opening title sequence even better as it made it different and would easier attract both genders as there is both a boy and girl as the main characters. We also gave the actors clothes to wear which we think would have suited them more to what they looked like. For example, we gave Jack (one of our actors) darker colours to wear as this is what he usually wears so it suited him more.
Just like 'Task Fourteen', by making storyboards it allowed us to refer back to it when actually filming. We could use the pictures in it to know what the actors should do, what to film and in what order. Also as the story board gave us a step-by-step story of what we were aiming to do, it was very easy to film because we had already planned it. So it took less time to think about it and more time to actually film and get it finished. By making two lots of storyboards (a draft and a final one) it allowed us to change it all around without ruining it and crossing things off. It made each one clearer to read. It also allowed to change what we wanted and if we changed our mind we could just make a new one. As you can see, there are some differences between the draft and the final storyboard and this is what we did when we changed our minds about maybe the order of the film or what to put in it.
Learning Comment:
From doing this task with the script it allowed us to know what we were doing whilst filming and what we wanted our actors to do. Because of that, it made it easier to do and took much less of a time. However, from reading the script through on the day we decided to change it a lot and make it much more thorough and long than we wrote down on the script.
LEARNING COMMENT:
By doing this task, I learned what sort of things we needed to include in our film to suit the 'Coming of Age' genre and by doing this it helped us. For example, we now know which sort of clothing we needed to provide our actors with. This would be just general clothing like jeans and a top as teenagers would wear. We did this to show a 'teenager' look, as if we made our actors wear a long dress, this is less popular for teens to wear and therefore allows the audience to relate to them. The task also allowed us as a group to talk about what genre we need to do and what age group our film should be aimed for and now we have decided, we can include things in our film to suit that. For example, as we decided to make it a 15, there can't be much swearing involved and now we know this, it is easier to work from.
The first thing we done to come up with an idea was create a mind map. This is it.... It was helpful creating a mind map as we could clearly see all out ideas and it made it much easier for us to choose what idea was the best as we had the most concepts and thoughts on the horror plot than the prom one. After doing this we then pursued the horror coming of age film.
We also videoed us talking about our ideas for our opening title sequence:
Our mood board for opening title sequence:
We had a discussion about our idea and made a powerpoint to collect all our thoughts together in an organised way. It also will act as a kind of checklist for us when filming as we can clearly see what we want each aspect of the film to be like from the different slides.
We took inspiration from the 'Pretty Little Liars' Doll house episode because Spencer has flashbacks to her experience, which we are aiming to do in our sequence:
We want to recreate the idea of flashbacks in our opening sequence we like the effect of the slightly green and distorted image used in the scene. Learning Comment: From doing this task we decided what final idea we were actually going to do. This helped because by having a final plan, now we can actually start to plan our opening title sequence. Also by doing a basic mind map, we were able to have many ideas to chose from so that we could chose the film idea which would get us the highest grade and amount of marks. Again, by making a quick powerpoint with all of our ideas in, we can use that to focus on the things we need to prepare for/do. Finally, we watched many short clips on where to get aspiration from and by doing this gave us more ideas that we can now use in our film.
