Shooting Schedule/List

We wrote a shot list which simultaneously was our Shooting Schedule because it showed us what shots we needed and we could tick of which we had already done.
Always referring back to the list we had a plan and something to follow. We wanted to shoot similar shots (p.e. same position) first and then move on to the next category of shots so we did not have to pace around with the camera etc.

Institution

Fox Searchlight Pictures is a film division of 20th Century Fox , established in 1994. It specialises in indie (independant) and British films, alongside dramedy and horror, and is variously involved with the production and/or distribution of these films.
In the early-to-mid 1980s, prior to the creation of Searchlight, Fox previously released independent films under the banner of 20th Century-Fox International Classics; the most notable of the releases under this banner include Bill Cosby: Himself, Reuben, Reuben , and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Fox Searchlight's Slumdog Millonaire won the Acedemy Award for Best Picture at the 81st Academy Awards as well as a further 7 academy awards. Other Fox Searchlight films receiving Best Picture nominations include The Full Monty, Sideways, Little Miss Sunshine and Juno. Because all these films are clever and trying to also give the audience a message we thought our ambitious film would suit Fox Searchlight. Additionally, they produce Low Budget films that are good quality and being backed by Fox they also have the finance to successfully market, advertise and distribute films to a larger audience than the niche audience that would see a film if it was on a smaller completely independant label. Allthough our film is Horror we would like to appeal to larger target audience than just small scale fans of low budget horrorfilms.

Target Audience

The main audience for films at the cinema are 16-25 year old male/female because they have more disposable money. When you are around 40 you probably have a family and no time to go out.Due to the fact that our thriller is more sophisticated and a psychological not extremely gory it also attracts older people who like that subgenre i.e thriller/horror to get out of their houses and enjoy themselves. Therefore, a secondary audience for our film is the older horror-thriller fans who enjoy a night out in the cinema being scared. We would aim our marketing and advertising at this audience in terms of teaser trailers on the internet and in the cinema if we could get a cinema distributor like "Hammer Horror" and posters as we feel this would benefit our film financially at the box office.

Storyboarding

In order to be prepared for our shooting day we drew every single shot in a comic style on our storyboard sheets which we unfortuanetly lost after our shooting day. We also added arrows and little cmnts to clarify where the camera would move and what else would happen. And we wrote a shotlist to have our shots detailed written down and not only as images.
The shotlist and the storyboard are very important for a shooting day to be organised and to have a plan. Otherwise it would end in a chaos. Additionally, the other people (Luke etc) who were not involved in our planning got an idea of how we wanted what to be. I liked having a rough plan of what we were about to do.

Research Sources

As I said before we used the "Napoleon Dynamite Opening Credits" to get ideas how to incorperate titles in our scene even though it is not a horrorfilm. The way the opening credits are presented also tells something about the film. For Example that it is a quite light-hearted film and rather funny than serious. In our opening credits we also wanted to establish what our film is about and incorperate the titles as effectively and creative like "Napoleon Dynamite Opening Credits". Besides, the way the opening credits are presented you can tell that "Napoleon Dynamites" is a low budget film aswell
We got a lot of inspiration from the "Se7en Opening Credits" for the research. "Se7en" shows a lot of fast paced research and many words and writing which is a effect we wanted to use. It does not reveal too much about the film but it does give a rough idea what is going to happen what it is about and also what genre it is. By telling the audience what genre it is they can decide wether they want to see the film or not. I think "Se7en" and our opening scene show quite well that the genre is Horror/Thriller and the fans of this genre (mainly 16-25 year old males) are also our target audience.


We also looked at the research part of "The Ring - Part 5" (starting from 4:20 to 6:50) to get more ideas. For example typing into Google. The research in this film establishes a perfect atmosphere of looking things up in the past in an library. Obviously, we were determinded to create at least a similar environment.

Idea Developments

Felix, Elly, Leaya and me came together as a group and presented our ideas to eacht other. We talked, and decided that Leaya's film was the best idea and would have a good opening sequenceand it would be the easiest to make.
The name of her film was 'Class of '73', and the story was about a girl being given an assignment to research about her ancestors. So she decided to look into the death of her great aunt. She found out that her aunt was murdered by her football team boyfriend. She also discovered the year book of the class of 73 and found his photo, she realises that he looks a lot like the school janitor at the school now.

After a while we thought it would be a good idea to change the girl into a young woman, who is trying to make it as a journalist and this is her first real job. She is asked to research into a really interesting big story and comes across an old newspaper article about some murders in a school, and the killer was never found. We liked this idea a lot better because we wanted a more psychological thriller and not a typical American Highschool Thriller. We explored ideas on how to get a more tense, interesting opening sequence. And we also decided that we wanted to incorporate the titles as much as possible like in the Napoleon Dynamite Opening Sequence to show that we actually have thought about every single detail for our opening sequence.

My First Horrorfilm idea

Media Power Point

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Thriller and Horrorfilms

The creator of a thriller's main objective is to pierce through the audience's layer of security and safeness, making them feel as scared or uncomfortable as possible.
Thrillers rely on fear, apprehension and suspense, and usually play upon your basic childhood worries and fears. Thrillers create tension by raising questions and presenting enigma codes to the audience, which makes us want more.
Tension is also created through the use of delay, so that there is a sense of relief when something finally happens.
There are a variety of different types of thriller.
One of the most commonly used in movies are psychological thrillers which explore people's minds, dealing with issues such as schizophrenia, getting inside the mind of the killer. At the end of these movies, the secrets are usually revealed.
Another very common type of thriller is horror. This type of movie involves a great deal of blood and gore, making the audience feel shocked and repulsed by something that they are not supposed to see. The audience indentifies itself with the fears or terrors of the narrative. Mostly the fear of the unknown (darkness) or the body being ripped apart/mutilated. From simplistic or basic messages (the virgin "good" girl surviving at the expense of her rebellious "slutty" best friend) to the more nuanced or subtle fears of stranger/hitchhikers breaking our boundaries or the condemnation of any deviant (i.e. non christian) religions. Perhaps the most lucrative genre in the film idustry horror draws in huge audiences justifying the continual re-invention, re-making and franchising of every successful horror product.
Supernatural thrillers are also used. These play on the audience's fear of ghosts and things of the paranormal. They sometimes deal with the concept of demons and the devil. A typical example of a supernatural thriller is 'The Exorcist'.

The key theme of thrillers/horrors can also be voyeurism. The word voyeurism derives from the French word 'voyeur' which translates as 'someone who watches.' (usually without their object of interest knowing that they are being watched) People who make thrillers use the idea of voyeurism to create a creepy storyline. The voyeur in these films is usually a stalker, watching the person or people he is about to kill or torture. There is a lot of irony in this as we (the audience) know the killer is there, yet the killer's victim does not. In some cases, the style of filming forces us as an audience to become the voyeur. This is when we are made to watch a character being killed, tortured or placed in an equally terrible situation. This makes us feel slightly uncomfortable as, again, we are seeing something we shouldn't be seeing.

Continuity Editing

Continuity editing is an invisible style of editing in narrative film and television. The purpose of continuity editing is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and to establish a logical relationship between shots. Basically, to ensure that the selected shots are put together in an order that makes sense to the audience – so that they can follow the story as clearly as possible.
In most films, cutting to continuity is, which increases smooth transition of time and space. However, some films incorporate cutting to continuity into a more complex classical cutting technique, one which also tries to show psychological continuity of shots.
The montage technique relies on symbolic association of ideas between shots rather than association of simple physical action for its continuity.Continuity editing can be divided into two categories: temporal continuity and spatial continuity – literally TIME and SPACE.

The important ways to preserve temporal continuity are avoiding the ellipsis(an apparent break in natural time) , using continuous Diegetic sound, and utilizing the match on action technique.It would also be necessary to shoot the whole film in one take in order to keep from having to edit together different shots, causing the viewer's temporal disorientation. Digetic sounds are noises that are naturally in a movie (e.g. doors, cars). Continuous diegetic sound helps to smooth temporally questionable cuts by overlapping the shots (SOUND BRIDGES, connect frames).

Match on action for example is, a shot of someone throwing a ball can be edited to show two different views, while maintaining temporal continuity by being sure that the second shot shows the arm of the subject in the same stage of its motion as it was left when cutting from the first shot.

Disolve or a fade is an smooth cut where the first frames fades out and is over layed with an other picture that fades in.

Cross-cutting is a technique which conveys an undeniable spatial discontinuity. It can be achieved by cutting back and forth between shots of spatially unrelated places.

A jump cut is a cut in film editing in which two sequential shots of the same subject are taken from camera positions that vary only slightly.

Prelim Post Production Blog + Account of Editing

Storyboard we used for our short film.

- Final Cut server edit Proxy from the server, into final cut pro.

- Log the shots into log bin.

- create new folder - 'Log Bin'

The logged shots are the best shots from each sequence.

'I' for marking in. 'O' for marking out.

-Modify shot, name it, and save it into log bin.

Key terminology to use:

LOG BIN referring to the folder you created to keep your
chosen shots

MODIFY SHOT referring to the function in the MODIFY menu allowing you to rename or label each shot (wide / mid etc)

TIME LINE referring to the layers of either VIDEO or AUDIO which you lay down your shots.

Before arranging the shots, it is necessary to log the shots. This is because the edit proxy is a single video and we need to have each shot individually. To do this we create a new folder to organise our shots in, this is called the ‘Log Bin’. We find the beginning of a particular shot on the main video, selecting the best take of the shot if we have made a few takes, we press the ‘I’ key (in) on the key board to select the point at which our shot begin and press the ‘O’ key (out) to select the point at which our shot ends. We then select ‘modify shot’, give it an appropriate name so we can select the correct shot quickly, and save it into the ‘Log Bin’. We only save the shots into the ‘Log Bin’ that are appropriate for use and free from errors.

To edit our footage, we first access it from the ‘Final Cut Server’, where the rushes had been uploaded from the camera tape. Open the edit proxy (digital copy of the footage) from ‘Final Cut Server’, into ‘Final Cut Pro’ where the editing takes place.

Close up's a dragging attention so the character with most CU's seems to be the main character to the audience. Because Saskia was our good character we gave her the most CU's. The finishing shot is Saskia sniffing the line of cocaine. She is dominating shown during the whole scene and because she is more or less Ben's victim we wanted to be on her side due to the fact she embodies the good.

We had to record our sound seperately in the sound-proofed room ......................

Premilinary Task Evaluation

Location

We undertook the task of filming our preliminary task. The location we filmed in was room NO4, although it was limited in terms of facilities, we managed to create a setting that resembled a drug addict’s home or basement.
We set up a table with various different objects on it such as a line of fake cocaine, a rolled up £20 note, a gun and a table light. I played quite an active role during the filming, we worked as a team, and making sure we each contributed in all areas at one point.
For example, one person would be the director, one person would be filming, and another would be in charge of continuity of the props, whilst the other was checking markers were correct, and that the actors were doing their job.


Lighting

We chose to use focused hard light on our actress Saskia, to emphasise her vulnerability – showing every worried expression in her face. Our lighting was arguably a spotlight, creating shadows that had a fantastic effect for the overall mise en scene we intended on creating. Not only this, but Ben our “bad guy” was shown in hard light to make him appear more manly and aggressive which was vital for this shot look believable. It was important that we used a fill light as well as a keylight so that the remaining part of our set was not in darkness.


Filming

Holding up a steady shot was not as simple as we thought it would be therefore I thought the best way to film our piece was using a tripod. To make sure camera was level in every frame we had to "bubble the tripod" which means to twist the knob underneath the top of the tripod until the oil bubble moves into the centre - indicating that it is then stationary and ready to use properly.
One aspect I remebered to check was that our lighting could not be seen in each frame. As for angles of the shots, we needed to consider power and neutrality. Low angle was most effective because one of our objectives was to reduce the power of Saskia and increase it for Ben. The rule of thirds principle is useful for framing shots. We learn that the frame is made up of nine squares and that the off-centre areas are where the eye is drawn to. Therefore this came in useful when we were positioning the camera as we purposely avoided the centre square to aid concentration to the chosen subject. I also made sure the cameras never crossed the 180° line, it was vital that it didn't because otherwise our actors would appear to be switching places mid sentence during the editing process.
Furthermore, to make the editing process easier we took each shot several times, this gave us a professional edge as part of the objective was to be perfectionists in everythingwe did. For example, if someone walked past the outside window whilst we were filming then we would repeat the take. The factor that made us feel more professional than anything else was the terminology we were using. To say wordslike "standby" "rolling" and "cut" was at first quite awkward and embarassing, but after some time we came to appreciate the significance of these terms and if to take the task seriously if we were to produce a good end product.

Video Camera

Video Cameras work like a a photo camera. The big difference is a normal Film camera takes 24 frames per seconds (NTSC) or 25 frames per seconds (PAL) which is the most common type in all countries. Because our eye is lethargic it sees a moving picture when there are 16 frames in one second.

Different moods can be created by camera movements. If the director wants to establish a rushed, dangerous or excited mood the camera should be handheld. This makes the picture seem more nervous and the situation shown uncontrolled.

!!!!!!!Everything on TV is a lie!!!!!!!

Camera Movements

Pan: horizontal movement of the camera from a static position

Tracking: camera moves on tracks to follow a subject. This effect can also be created using a dolly (a platform on wheels)

Tilt: a subtle movement on the vertical (up and down)

Crab: movement from side to side

Crane: camera is attached on to a crane so it can move dramatically up and down or from side to side

Handheld: a shaky movement. Follows the movement of the camera operator. Creates panic/realism/hectic/urgent and sudden movement

Rule of thirds

The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

180 degree Line

Point Of View Shot

A Point of View Shot allows the audience to see where the character looks at. Watch through the eyes.

Close-Up

A close-up (CU) tightly frames a person or an object. Close-ups are used in many ways, for many reasons. Close-ups are often used as cutaways from a more distant shot to show detail, such as characters´ emotions, or some intricate activity with their hands.

Two Shot

A Two shot is a type of shot employed in the film industry in which the frame encompasses a view of two people (the subjects). The subjects do not have to be next to each other, and there are many common two-shots which have one subject in the foreground and the other subject in the background.

Long Shot

The Long Shot (LS) allows the audience to see the character from head to toe. The audience can understand the relationship between environment and the person. The LS also introduces a character.

Establishing Shot

In film and television, an establishing shot (ES) sets up, or "establishes", a scene's setting and/or its participants. Typically it is a shot at the beginning (or, occasionally, end) of a scene indicating where, and sometimes when, the remainder of the scene takes place.

Over the Shoulder Shot

This is a Over-The-Shoulder-Shot (OSS). Used if you look from behind a person on an object.

Low Angle Shot

This is a Low-Angle-Shot. It puts the audience into a helpless and smaller postion. The character shown is mighter and the audience can feel like a slave.

High Angle Shot

This is a High-Angle-Shot. It takes the audience into a higher and mightier position. We look down at the person lying on the ground. We feel sorry for it or we just laugh at her because we enjoy having the might!!! >.<

Horrorfilmposter

I chose this picture because when I saw it as I was looking through all of the random pictures we took I had a clear picture of the end product in my head and I instanly knew how to do it.
I whitened and paled the whole figure so the audience knows she is not normal or rather dead and a ghost. The ghost got a big dark mouth and dark eyes to make those stick out. However, she has blood on her throat which is also not paled because if the mouth and the blood sticks out we assume that the mouth is covered with the blood additionally the ghost apparently frets humans.The low angle which is used for this shot puts the ghost into a higher and mightier position. It makes the audience looks up to the figure, feels helpless and scared. They feel like they cannot escape the ghost.
The background of the original picture is light and full with green leaves and other nature things. I used the Burn Tool to make all of the uselees background black but I left the handrail and made it slightly darker so you can see that the ghost is coming down a staircase and it also seems like the ghost lightens the handrail with its brightness in the dark. But I also burned the stairs so it kind of looks like as if the ghost is floating. The reason why I did not light the background but made it black is obviously because black is a colour which is scary because humans are not designed to live in darkness. If someones is surrounded with darkness they are always afraid because they do not know what is around them. The fear of the unknown.
The reason why I chose a dark red for the letters is simply the association with blood. I did not put anything in a HotSpot but surrounded the character with the HotSpots so it seems more important. The tiyle is on the top because Europeans and Americans almost everyone reads from left to right from the top to the bottom. So when you first see the poster the Ghost sticks out because it is bright and white surrounded by nothing. Then you want to know what this picture is about and you automatically start looking for information on the top so it works eventhough I did not really use the HotSpots.