Final Version of Stolen

The clip above is the final version of Stolen, although it was much more of a challenge than I thought due to the issues we had with casting and music I am really pleased with the outcome. By completing the evaluative questions at the end of the project, it enabled us to refine certain aspects of the production but also to develop our knowledge and understanding of what target audiences of our age want to see. If I were to repeat the same process there would be slight alterations with the way we prepared the scenes although that would be due to the experience we now have.

Experimenting with sound

After putting the main part of our film together we were planning on having a boy in our school create a short soundtrack for us which would have been produced specifically for the scene although due to the amount of work he had and the time limit we were under this was not possible.

This meant that I had to look for a copyright free piece of music which would be easy to loop and manipulate to fix our film. These are some of the things I found in the process which we debated over:

(how do I put the sound in?)

After agreeing on one track I was then able to adjust the music making it fit in with the scene and help build more tension.

Storyboard

By creating a storyboard it allowed us to have a vision of the film before we started shooting, enabling all of us to match up ideas and know what types of cuts and angles we wanted. We created two different storyboards as the film and ideas changed due to the equipment and actors we had available. It also let change our ideas and develop them further. Through our time filming we stuck very closely to the storyboard we created as it allowed us to stay on track making the days of filming much quicker. Although, we did take the same shots from different angles which will differ from the original storyboard.

Here is the animated storyboard created, we have used the same time gaps which we wrote from our scene creating a realistic view of what is going on in the scene.

EB

Creating the Ident

In my last blog post i mentioned how I was intending on using Movavi which is a screenshot recording app, but after trying it out and seeing the many factors i had to take into account( such as the cursor being in the recording, and also it being hard to edit the speed because of its format), I instead thought it would be easier to use Motion.  I had never used it before and it was a different type of software which at first was quite overwhelming to use, as there were many different tools etc.  I started by drawing the final design of the ident on illustrator and after we were happy with how it would look I put it into motion.  Then i used a pen tool and recorded drawing over the doodle in white.  This covered up the design, but then i used the Behaviour 'write-on' which meant that when it played the lines were revealed instead of covered up.  I found this very tricky and time consuming though as i had to perfectly draw over the lines in a thin pen, so if i messed up one small part of the line i would have to start the whole doodle again.  As the doodle is all one line this meant this was a challenge.  I then changed the speed of the doodle, so it was all fluid, as sometimes i would take a break doing the line, and finally when i was happy with the final product, i exported it to put it on FinalCut.  When it was on FinalCut i trimmed it down to get rid of the the extra blank screens at the start and beginning, and thought it would be a nice idea to add a sound of a pencil scribble, which I've  seen before in animations.  I was happy with that as it otherwise i think the ident would have felt abit empty and dull otherwise.  Overall i was happy with the finished product and found it satisfying that what i had pictured in my mind was actually created.

                ( Here is the ident off Motion, without the music or it being slowed down)

IW

Vox-pop

I filmed a vox-pop to help with the audience research for our thriller.  We chose some one between the age of 15-25 to use as we found that to be our target age through our initial audience research post.

It helped us find out what films and what type of thrillers people prefer. It gave us more depth and more of an idea of for the audience research for our own thriller. It also tells us what would make some one want to watch a thriller and what makes a more interesting thriller.  It was important to ask both closed questions and open questions to get a better idea of the our target audience.

AC

Final Cut

The clip above shows the final cut for our opening for a thriller. I found that begin able to put the titles and ident in helped a lot with the finishing of the film making it look much more finished and professional. Having to change actress was extremely hard and unexpected but I think that we handled this issue well and enabled us to rethink some of the shots we used before and either change or replicated the position of the shots making the second time round a lot quicker to film. Through the process of shooting this short clip I learned a lot about the whole process and let me develop my skills to a higher level.

Facebook page

The best way to get feedback and keep people updated with what we do is through a Facebook page we created at the beginning of this project, first showing the ideas for the location, asking for peoples input. We shared two different rough cuts of the film onto this site as well meaning that the followers were able to share and discuss different ideas for the soundtrack. The issue we found with having a Facebook page with our friends was that the feedback was limited as people would be too embarrassed or shy to comment. It was still helpful to us to post them as we knew how many people were watching and to promote our title sequence.

These are some screenshots from the Facebook page:



After these photos we have put up the final copy of the film and have changed the name from 'The following' to 'Stolen' as we thought it made for a more dramatic feel.

EB

Rough Cut

This is where we managed to get up to before the girl who stars in this dropped out. We decided to re-film half of the shot only using another girl as it was the easiest and best working solution. The scenes we used with the man do not have to be re-shot due to there only being one shot with the man and the girl in the same shot although we filmed this in different ways allowing us to film a shot reverse shot suggesting they are responding to each other. We have not synced the sound taken from the boom or inserted a soundtrack meaning that we need to focus on the filming but nothing else.

EB

Casting, Archaetypes, Certain look of characters

Possible Archetypes for the girl 

• Child: Could be a literal child or just living like one. Ex: Wally McDoogle, Peter Pan 
• Innocent: someone who is inexperienced and exposed to evil. Ex: Dorothy Gale 
• Slave: Does not belong to himself. Ex: Dobby the house elf 
• Survivor: Pulls through no matter what happens, doesn’t give up
• Victim: Was hurt by someone or lives in fear that someone will hurt him. Ex: Claireece “Precious” Jones

Possible Archetypes for the man

• Introvert: Lives inside his shell to prevent anyone from seeing the real him. Ex: Gabriella Montez (High School Musical)
• Manipulator: Plays with people and situations to get what he wants. Ex: Scarlett O’Hara
• Masquerader: Pretends to be something he is not
• Monster: A depraved beast. Ex: Gollum, Grendel (Beowulf)
• Temptress: Uses power to make others weak. Ex: Megara (Hercules)
• Tyrant: wants be in control at all times. Ex: Captain Hook
• Villain: wants to destroy/trap the hero. Ex: Evil Queen in Snow White

AC

Idents

An ident is a image that a television channel or film production company uses to identify its self. It is made up of text of the name of the company. It is usually and animation or another form of moving image. It is usually shown before a film starts. They can be of a movie studio or production company

Examples of film production company indents:

 

It is important that an indent has very clear to read text. There is often a lot of movement, making a more exciting logo. There should be an iterating movement in the animation of the ident. For example, the stars circling in the Paramount ident and the female lifts up her torch, referencing the Statue of Liberty in the Columbia ident. They often have a very epic to them, for example, lions, show lights, mountains. They last from bout 15-25 seconds long each.

 However we want a more modern and sleek feeling to ours. Rather than the more traditional ones such as '20th century fox' and 'columbia'. We like the sleeker look of 'Metro Goldwyn Mayer'. It looks good with the black background contrasting with the gold logo. We can put a lot of effort in this ident by putting in sound effects, music and animation. We want to make sure ours isn't to long that it will get boring for the audience. We could have loud, dramatic and kind of epic music to make it more exciting. Or we could have a sleeker feel by having it simpler and just have sound effects in time with text. This would make a very short ident.

Often independent production companies, often have slightly more themed indents. This is because these companies specialise in making certain types of films, e.g. thrillers. The independent production company, 

Gunslinger make social realism films. This is their ident;

As our film is dark psychological thriller and we want out ident to set the theme of the film. As idents are played at the very beginning of the film, they do have the power to set the film. This means that we don't want a ident that gives a very happy and relax feel. Darker colours and red will work to our advantage.

AC

Editing so far

So far we have shot the first section of the scene which is situated inside meaning that we can get on with editing while we decide a time and day to carry on with more footage.
The editing of the film has been interesting and easier that I thought although there have been a couple of debated on how to show certain things and when to cut to the next frame.  The best part about this part of the project is that you are able to merge together separate clips creating a story as it all comes together.
The thing I am finding particularly difficult at the moment is editing the sound as it is hard to connect the film to the sound although every time we filmed a clip we used the method of clapping before hand making it a lot easier to match the sound taken from the video recording to the sound on the camera. A lot of the sound in this opening is atmospheric and sound of movement. I didn't realise how important this sound was as there is very little dialogue used.
So far we have not managed to match music to the film although we are setting up a meeting with Aletia as she is able to create simple musical soundtracks to use as a subtle background noise. The crucial thing about this is increasing the intensity of the music at the right points in time to fit the scene and build suspense. If this is wrong it is very noticeable and can be distracting.

Planning ahead

Next, we were planning on filming the rest of the indoor scenes on the following weekend although the girl which we are using is not able to film on this day meaning that we need to work are;ind her schedule. Our plan is to film through out the week hoping that we can get to my house from school in time before it starts to get dark.

Although this is not ideal, we might have to film the indoor scenes in the weekend afterwards. We are bale to film the outdoor scene in the woods through the week. This means that we can edit all of the wood scene before we continue filming in the house getting a lot of the editing out of the way and so we can foes on the soundtrack.

Days Filming

We started filming last Sunday at around 1pm shooting all of the scene which is located inside. We were unable to complete all of the footage although we completed all of the shots which Conor starred in making it much easier to shoot the rest of it. There were some difficulties with some of the equipment that we wanted so we did not have any lights. Although this was not ideal my house has lots of windows allowing natural light in making the scene more realistic and less set up. In this case I think that this factor did not effect our filming too badly. The  only issue that we had with the lighting is that we did not take into account that at around 4pm it gets significantly darker meaning that we had to end filming early.
We were not supplied with a boom pole making parts of the scene difficult regarding the sound although listening back on it, it seems to have worked fine. The main hurdle which we did not anticipate would be not noticing the boom coming in and out of shot which was made obvious when blowing up some of the footage on the computer.
Over all the filming was smooth and easy to do, we shot everything at least twice using different angles and making sure that we only needed to film more and not go back to other things we previously shot saving a lot of time. We spent from 1 till 5 in the evening. It was interesting to direct and shoot a film as you have a vision in your head which you are attempting to portray on the camera.