Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I hope you enjoy seeing how our production has evolved from the initial ideas to the final product. You can navigate through the different sections by clicking the links above and you can filter posts by the month that they were posted using the archive in the right sidebar.

Evaluation Question 1

Examples of some of the conventions we’ve used can be seen in the film ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. During the first minutes of the film there is a news report, within the dystopian genre this is used to make it clear to the audience what disaster occurred before the time in which the film is set. Also during the first minutes of the film Mad Max is seen alone on a desolate landscape which is another convention of Dystopia. We have also decided to challenge the famous convention of an anti-hero; an anti-hero is a protagonist who does not show conventional resemblance to typical conventional heroic characters. This couldn’t be seen through the typical aspects of an anti-hero as the film opening wasn’t long enough for us to explore the idealistic features of the character, his courage and his morality, though it can be seen through other conventions we have used.  One of the conventions which supports the convention of an anti-hero is that he is an isolated character that is alone throughout the opening and is also being chased by scavengers, this connotes that the character is too fixed on his own objective and too stubborn to let anybody help him, which is all true. We have also effectively followed conventions of our sub-genre: Thriller. We have considered Thriller conventions carefully whilst editing our production, our use of quick changes in camera angles were a great way of showing disruption to the audience. The setting itself is also conventional of a Thriller as confined spaces make the character seem isolated trapped within this area (which is what we were aiming for and succeeded in our aims through our set of an abandoned toilet).

(Hubert has completed this evaluation task)

Evaluation Question 2

(Hayden has completed this evaluation task)

Evaluation Question 3

I (Will) completed this evaluation task

Evaluation Question 4

(Hayden completed this evaluation task)

Final Production

This is the final version of our Film opening, since the draft version we have made a number of small tweaks following advice from our teachers and feedback from audience members.

Credits:
https://freesound.org/people/rhodesmas/sounds/321723/ (CC Attribution)
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/178374/ (CC Attribution)
https://www.freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/94816/ (CC Attribution Non commercial)
https://www.freesound.org/people/FoolBoyMedia/sounds/321089/ (CC Attribution Non Commercial)

Evaluation Question 5

We all worked on this task collaboratively

Evaluation Question 6

I (Will) completed this evaluation task

Evaluation Question 7

Hubert has completed this evaluation task

Audience Feedback

Hayden has completed this word cloud to show what our formal and informal target audience are appealed by and what they think could be improved or changed.

Production (Draft)

(Please note, this is a draft version.)

Credits:
https://freesound.org/people/rhodesmas/sounds/321723/ (CC Attribution)
https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/178374/ (CC Attribution)
https://www.freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/94816/ (CC Attribution Non commercial)
https://www.freesound.org/people/FoolBoyMedia/sounds/321089/ (CC Attribution Non Commercial)

The Establishing Shot

In this establishing shot you can see: a rucksack, tin cans, newspapers and typical toilet facilities. The use of the rucksack connotes that he moves from location to location, representing the lawless society and the binary opposite of good vs evil. Secondly, the use of the tin cans connotes a food source but the fact that they are empty represents the lack of nutrients and the characters struggle to not face hunger (which follows a conventional theme within a Dystopia.) Thirdly, the newspapers connote an abandoned toilet because this subverts against a typical modern day toilet as you would expect to see most of the mirror. We were initially going to use blood but we did not have any in time. This would have been more effective in creating suspense and making the opening more gruesome. This setting is connoted as grimy, which is positive because we want to connote a negative future. Also, it emphasises the lack of buildings because he wouldn't be sleeping in this location if there were better options. Furthermore, the colour of brown, white and green also helps to exaggerate the connotations of a disgusting location and I think they work well in producing a darker overall result, possibly resembling the Thriller genre more. (By Hayden)

Shots that we decided not to use...

Shooting Schedule

Hayden has created this interactive version of our shooting schedule, showing what we filmed and when

Cast Decision

Creating a "radio voice" effect

This evening I looked up online tutorials on how to make the voice over that we are going to use during the beginning of our production sound like it is being broadcast over a radio.

I watched the following tutorial on youtube which describes using the "Equalization" and "High Pass Filter" effects to create a typical radio sound.



I am going to apply the advice given in this video to make our voice over sound authentic.

Actor release form

Storyboard

Now that we have compiled our shooting script, I have drawn this storyboard for our production.

BBFC Regulations

Shooting Script

Preliminary Task

This is our preliminary task which is a continuity task which is made according to these instructions from our teacher : "a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule."

While making this I forgot that the DSLR will not auto-focus for each shot and as a result, some of the shots appear slightly blurry, I have learnt from this mistake and I will be careful to ensure that all shots in the main production are focussed correctly.

Thanks to Dan and Nicky for agreeing to take part in this!

Music: "Romantic" - Bensound.com (Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Dialogue Script

This is the script that we are going to be using for our production, we have decided to try to keep dialogue to a minimum firstly because we felt that too much dialogue would ruin the atmosphere of the opening and secondly, dialogue needs to be clear and so it might not be possible to use the sound from the inbuilt microphone in the camera, in which case we would have to record the dialogue separately and then ensure that the sound is synchronized with the video, on the technical side this could present us with some difficulties which is why that the speaker of the first block of speech will not be visible and the rest of the dialogue is short and simple.

Target Audience Profile