Preliminary Task

Final Cut

This is our final sequence.

Shooting

So, on Tuesday we went and shot all of our footage. We are now working on producing a rough cut for the end of this lesson. The shoot itself was quite successful. When we got to James's house we decided to shoot all of the outside shots as soon as possible in the hope it wouldn't get darker. Unfortunately it did get darker and we have now found that it is difficult to see what is going on in quite a few of the shots we have. We are experimenting with the Final Cit software to see if there is any way of making the characters visible. If we are unsuccessful in this we will have to find some time when we can go back and re-shoot.

Ali had an accident during the shoot whilst filming outside. We forgot to take into account how difficult it is to run along a garden path in the dark, whilst holding a camera. Ali was the unfortunate camera man who fell and cut his knee, luckily he was okay to carry on with the shoot. 

After we had finished shooting outside we moved inside. Here we encountered another small

 problem. Our shoes were covered in mud from shooting outside and as this wasn't a problem for Ryan and Ali as they were behind the camera it was a problem for James and Sam. We had to be careful not to shoot our feet because we would be robbing a house in our socks. We experimented with lots of different shot angles as we wanted to get as much footage as we can. We included a point of view shot from one of the protagonists. I held the camera up to my face for this and just repeated the scene the way we had done it before. We eventually got everything we needed and it was the end of the shoot.

Whilst I was writing this Ali has put the finishing touches on the rough cut and we have decided that we will most definitely need to go back and re-shoot some footage. This will probably be done at the weekend as Ryan and Myself both live in Bottisham, as does Sam, our other actor.

Title ideas

We began to think about names for our film. We thought about things to do with our film and thought we should base it around the word "Family" in some way as this is the basis of our film. Here is a list of ideas for names we have: 

• It Runs In The Family
• (The) Family Business
• Father & Sons
• The (Insert Surname) Family
• Brothers In Crime

The Shoot

Last night James, Ryan and Ali went to James's house to do a second shoot for the sequence. This shoot went a lot better than the first one and we managed to get everything we needed. We did have some worries about shooting in the dark but we have found that we can edit this on the Final Cut software so there isn't really a problem. We did all the outside shots first, which made our shoes muddy so we had to be careful not to film feet when we were inside as we weren't wearing any shoes. We would like to thank James's parents for letting us shoot and would like to apologise for making them eat dinner on their bed. We have uploaded the footage to the computer and have began the editing process.

This is our test footage which we filmed in the DT block. It gives a basic representation of what one of our scenes will look like and different camera shots and angles which we will use. The story is not an accurate respresentation of what it would be, it is just test footage.

Half Term

We had planned to film over half term but unfortunately the opportunity for filming never came up. There was never a time where we could have people filming and also the actors for the sequence. We will now be filming everything on Tuesday 24th at James's house. This is the only time we can get actors for the sequence and enough members of our group for the filming. Unfortunately Michael will not be able to make it to the filming but James, Ryan and Ali will be filming.

We have a consent form from Sam who is in our sequence:

Animatic

This is our final animatic it is going to be similar to our final title sequence as the scenes will be approximately this long and the music will be similar to this. However the shots maybe different because once we do our test footage we may decide to change it a bit more.

response to feedback

We are overall very pleased with the feedback we received about our blog. The positive feedback we received said that our blog was good, in depth and gave a good idea of where we were headed. Negative feedback was also constructive, we were told to go back and look at the micro-elements of the opening sequences we analyzed.

In responce to our feedback, we are going to keep up the work on our blog, but will go back to look at the micro-elements of our title sequences.

It is essential to receive feedback because it lets us now how we are doing. We may think that we have a very good blog, but it could be that we don't have all the things we need on there. It may also be that we understand what is going on in the blog but it may not be clear to someone else looking at it, from not in the group.

Ryan and James: Our thriller blog was quite good. Ram did quite a lot of work on our blog when we did our thriller project. I would say that our blog for this project is slightly better because we have a clearer view as to what we are supposed to put on there.

Michael and Ali: Our blog was lacking blog entries, which meant that if someone looked at it they wouldn't be able to see all our ideas. Also we didn't upload many videos and pictures up so this meant the blog didn't look as good.

Class feedback on blog

Positive

• In depth - constantly updated
• Mood board detailed + informative
• Good analysis
• Stuff
• Frequently updated, with some good info.
• Good research
• Lots of pictures
• Good animatic and logo
• In depth
• We're very proud of you :)

Negative:

• Narrow down film genre examples
• Die Hard is not related to Juno in anyway (but that was our homework)
• Confusing
• Animatic too long (supposed to interpret actual length of shots etc)
• Whilst analysing narrow down inspiration to micro elements
• Relate analysis to genres

Animatic production

We have just finished putting our animatic together. We had to completely start from scratch due to the fact that we changed our idea at a late stage. We drew the pictures last lesson and used the camera to get them onto the computer. Ryan then took them into photoshop and cropped them and cleaned them up a bit. James and Michael put the animatic in order on Final Cut Express. We have inserted title cards where we would be having titles and have tried to make it an accurate interpretation of what the final cut will be like once we have filmed it. It doesn't have any sound as of yet but ryan is working on it. We may record some dialogue and add it to the animatic but we haven't decided yet.

Synopsis for title sequence

The genre we have chosen to do is a crime caper. So the two main films we are taking influences from are Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (Guy Ritchie, 1998) and Fun With Dick and Jane (Dean Parisot, 2005).

Our idea is of a family suffering from job loss to the credit crisis. They decide to start stealing things they can sell on to people. The idea of a family resorting to crime is similar to the story of Fun With Dick & Jane. We have decided to jump straight into the story rather than setting up the narrative with a back story, this would be told later on through flashback or the family just talking about as natural conversation.

Our sequence will open with some titles and a voiceover of the father figure telling the plan to his children. The plan is to break into a neighbours house and steal their big television while they are out. We will only hear his voice, after he finishes talking we will cut from the titles to the sequence. We will start with a young/teenage boy climbing in a window from the outside. We will then cut to the inside to see him fall through the window. He will fall below the view of the camera and then stand up. Once he has stood up it will pause and we will hear a voiceover from the father figure introducing the boy. He will then go to the back door and let his father in. When we see the father it will pause and there will be a voiceover of him introducing himself. They will then move into the hall and talk a bit. We will then see a young boy on the stairs. He is the other boy in the family who has followed them. We may introduce him, we aren't sure yet. They will then begin to try and steal the television but will encounter a problem with the plugs. There will be too many plugs and they can't figure out which one is the television's. The family will then pull up and they will have to run out through the back garden and over a wall. The title of the film will then come up.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels title sequence analysis

The sequence shows a man selling stolen goods on the street. We can immediately tell it is London because of the man's accent. The man is giving a talk to try and intice people into buying his goods. It is obviously going to be in quite a run down location because the selling seems to be taking place in some sort of alley. As the man talks it switches from him to titles. As the titles are on screen we can still hear the man talking. The sound is diagetic throughout the sequence. As for non-diagetic sound we can hear a song in the background gradually getting louder. This builds tension in the audience and let's us now that this sequence is building up to some sort of climaxe. The man's accomplice then tells him the police are here and they both start to run away. And this point the music is playing loudly as part of the chase. As the two men run down stairs it goes into slow motion and a voice over starts to introduce the first man. It then goes back into full speed for a brief second before the other man appears and throws his suitcase. It then goes into slow motion again and introduces this man. After the title of the film appears as if it is being typed. I thought the idea for introducing characters was very good. It sort of gave the same feeling you get when you meet a new character in a book and i really liked it. I also like the idea of slowing down or pausing the clip to introduce the character. I also like the idea of music slowly building up and the bursting in for some sort of climaxe. I think these are two ideas we will defintely consider for our sequence.

Crime Caper mood board Ryan Breeze

We have decided to change our idea for our opening sequence; we are now going to be filming a crime caper. We decided to do this because we thought that our last idea wasn't very good. Our new idea is to focus on a dad and two children and how they are struggling through the credit crunch, the dad has also lost his job and the family are very short of money, they then resolve this problem by stealing.

This is a crime caper mood board. A crime caper is usually an action packed film involving someone trying prevent/steal something. Usually the item they are trying to acquire is a large sum of money or something that could be sold. They also usually feature a team of people, like a leader who is calling the shots, a technical person and a transportation person. A classic example is 'Italian Job' where they have a team to move the gold and a team to open the van and load it also with Michael Caine calling the shots. Another point is that crime capers tend to be quite realistic so that the audience can relate to it instead of being aggravated by its lack of realism.

Mood Board

For our media project we have decided to film a British social realist. Our mood board shows some examples British social realists including 'This is England', 'Kidulthood/Adulthood' and 'Green Street'.