My Pitches for my Final Piece

For my opening sequence I have come up with a couple of ideas of what I am going to create

My first pitch is of a teenage thriller film in the same kind of style as the films 'Scream' and 'Urban Legend', where it begins with a teenage girl saying goodbye to her friends and entering her house which is empty. Camera shots will be from the point of view of someone spying on her from the outside. then she will become paranoid and slightly jumpy at the knock on her front door and then see her open it to reveal that she knows the person at the door. She then invites the person in and and after the door shuts the audience hears a gun shot and a body drop to the floor. To make this seem real, I will add sound effects and use lots of point of view angles and at times make the camera a bit shaky to make the audience believe it is a person looking at her. Also I am not going to reveal the identity of the man as it would give away the mystery of the story. I would need to film this at night to create the creepiness of the film so that it doesn't look silly when she's getting paranoid about being home alone.

 

My second pitch for a film is of a teenage girl who saves the world everyday, but also has to go to school. I think this would be for the audience of teenage girls as the character is around their age and it would involve a lot of girl talk/problems such as being an outcast at school or not having the perfect relationship. I could get various camera angles and maybe film a typical morning for this girl where she could wake up in the morning, go to school and then have a call to save the world just before one of her maths classes. I would need lots of special effects to film this and maybe a green screen. It would give me an advantage to film this during school as that would be the location and the right time of day. Films that relate to this genre would be a mixture between a film like 'Kick-ass' and 'Superman' where both main characters live a double life and maybe a bit of 'Mean Girls' or 'Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging' to capture the girly aspect of the film.

Prelim Task - Evaluation

Introduction
For this task we had to create a short scene where camera shots had to include, match on action, shot reverse shot and a 180 degree rule. In our group, (Vicky, Jack and I) we thought up several ideas of what we could do for our scene. We came up with:
- Bumping into somebody at the supermarket - camera shots would be walking into the supermarpket for the match on acton, having the two talking back and forth also getting P.O.V shots over the actors shoulders for the shot reverse shot, and then the 180 degree rule being they stay at the same side of the isle facing the same direction. We found this would be difficult to film as we did not have access to a supermarket and we felt that we could come up with something more easily accessed.
- Wearing the same clothes as somebody - The location of this could have been set anywhere, at school, in the street or at the shopping centre. Camera shots would be walking out of their house/into school/into the shop for the match on action, the two talking into each other
- Forgetting to invite somebody to a meal - This could take place in our cafeteria or make the photo studio look like a restaurant. This way, we could be out of the way from people getting their lunch. Camera shots would be walking into the restaurant and have the two sitting talking
- Walking into the wrong gender toilets - We could produce this at school in some gender assigned toilets. Camera shots would be the person walking into the wrong gender toilets for the m.o.a and having someone in the toilet tell them they are in the wrong toilet for the shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.
We decided on choosing the scene 'Forgetting to invite a friend to a meal' as this would be the easiest to film and fit all of the shots in the scene.


The Crew
Vicky and I took on the roles of actresses, as it was really hard to try and find 2 other actresses because of lessons and not having the spare time to help out. I played one of the friends at the meal and Vicky played the character who was not invited but turned up to the restaurant not knowing that they were there. Since we needed 3 actors to play characters to star in the scene and someone to film the scenes, we found another actor who had the free time to help us out, Liam Smith to play the other friend at the restaurant. As a guy would not get involved in this kind of situation (gossiping about friends) Liam's character was described as a bit feminine to help capture the essence of the scene. Jack took the role of being the cameraman in this scene, and since he was not an actor, he had to direct the actors and give them their stage directions to make us all fit in the screen properly and told us when the angles did not look right and we needed to retake that shot.






Preparation
To fully prepare ourselves for filming, we created a storyboard which helped us with stage positions, props and camera angles. We did this by drawing out the scene from a wide shot and then wrote underneath what camera shots would look good when we were filming. This also helped us with stage directions as it gave us something to go off of when Jack was directing us around the stage and it also helped us find what kind of props we would need to make it seem like we were in a restaurant. We found the location to film this inside the school in our photography studio. We thought this would be the best place to film our scenes as it was out of the way of other students and we could change the lighting, the colour of the background and also it was a quiet place to film so we didn't have many distractions. We also created a script to give to the actors to base the scene around although we had to improvise slightly as our scene would be too short. Also we turned the menu's into scripts incase one of us forgot our lines. We did however have a few distractions when other group were acting their scenes outside, we had parts of their dialogue from their scene filmedin ours which didn't help us much.


Filming
When we had set up the scene and was prepared to start filming, we got straight into filming as we had already got basic experience from filming our Opening Remake, we felt like we knew how important it was to not waste time and get straight into filming after getting prepared. Whilst filming, we did come across a few adjustments we could make to improve the scenes. After doing all the filming for our previous task of re-making a film opening, I realized how important it was to plan and manage the time that we had. This encouraged us to plan everything out and follow the plan when filming the scenes and to remain professional through out filming. 


Editing
After learning how to use the basic skills on Premiere Pro while creating my Cityscape edit and the remake of the Reservoir Dogs opening, I felt more confident when using the program, so when we came to edit the Prelim, it didn't take us as long to edit as it did to edit Reservoir Dogs or the City Scape edit. We didn't need to use any special effects or more advanced functions and just used basic tools to edit the footage we had.