The experience of creating this film opening has been a successful and enjoying, yet stressful time period. Over the past four months we have been planning, analysing, filming and editing.
I studied Media Studies at GCSE so I knew that the coursework was going to be hard work and very time consuming which came as a shock to the members of the group that had not studied it before. However, none of us were prepared for all the equipment and software that was awaiting us. Everything was new to us and becoming used to it was like learning a foreign language, difficult but time worthy. There was only one solution for this problem and that was to play around with the filming equipment and use the editing software on the Macs. This is why we had to complete our Preliminary Task.
When we first began planning for our film opening we decided to start by looking at different openings. We looked at the different conventions of the different genre's. We looked at Hitch, a romantic comedy. With this opening we found that the setting is sunny and there is joyful, upbeat music playing in the background. We also watched opening of films with different genres including thriller, horror, sci-fi and comedy. When we were researching the conventions we found that as a group we could find more information on thriller/crime films and that it was be the easiest genre for us to film. We found that most opening of our genre had the credits at the beginning of a scene, with footage behind them. This is where we challenged the conventions. We decided that we wanted our credits with just a plain black screen because we wanted the full affect of the music to take place with no distractions of filming, e.g the audio that accompanies the filming.
We decided that the film would be targeted at young adults over the age of 15. This is because the storyline involves a teenage girl around that age, therefore it is reinforcing the plea for young girls to be extra careful whilst alone. Ways that the film would be advertised could be on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in shopping centres, buses and tv advertisements. This is because the target audience would be surrounded by the advertisements.
So with that we began brainstorming idea's. We came up with two main idea. The first would begin with a scene in a police briefing room where there would be a man in a suit presenting a case to police officers of a missing girl. Then it would cut to the police officers faces as details are exposed and then it would show CCTV footage of the girl who is a prostitute.
The second was the idea we went with (but developed and changed tremendously), a girl going missing and being held in a cellar. To decide between the two idea's we discussed the pro's and con's of each idea and the ease of how to film because of accessibility to setting's, costumes and props. After we had compared both we realised that it would be incredibly hard to find police officer outfit for about 12 people and as four young girls we would not feel comfortable at night filming with some dressed as prostitutes, whereas the second idea we would easily be able to dress a young girl and as I have a cellar at my home there would be no trouble with using that many times to film. I think if we were to do this again we would come up with more idea's and think more about which to choose and once chosen, not to make any drastic changes.
When we were filming in the cellar we found that it was extremely hard to find enough space to make it possible to film numerous different shots. We had already filmed a pan of the victim, zoomed into the eyes of the victim from different angles, how else was we going to incorporate a variety of shots in the tiny space without breaking the 180 degree rule? This was when we decided to do a point of view shot from the victim watching the person that had abducted her walk down the stairs. To make it obvious it was a point of view shot, the member of the group filming used their fingers to create the illusion of eye lids, this also showed how dazed the victim was. At the time we didn't get the man to say anything but then as we watched the footage back at school we thought he should say something. So with that we decided to film a male voice saying "look at me" and then we altered the speed of the audio so that the voice sounded deeper and slower. This added in more content for the audience to develop more emotions for the film.
We began editing in early December, we were all slightly uncertain with Final Cut Express but we had the knowledge that we used when creating our Preliminary Task. I think before we began editing all of our film together we should have made sure that we all understood the software and the basic steps for our editing. However, we now know that if we are faced with new software/programme's then we should make sure that everybody is at the same stage so that we can learn together prior to beginning the editing, this would make the whole process extremely more straight forward and less problematic.
Overall I think our film opening was successful. We all worked well as a group, we all contributed to the filming and editing, even though some members were stronger at certain aspects of the production. The one thing that the whole group would do if we were faced with a similar task again would be to make the idea as simplistic as possible and to stick to the idea. We made our task too complicated than it needed to be and we changed practically every detail that we had originally planned with the storyboard. I think we are all much more confident with using the equipment and software so if needed, we are all quite happy to use them again. Looking back at how we struggled with the preliminary task whilst editing and coming to terms with all of the new equipment and how we were whilst creating the opening, it made me realise how much it helped us gain the foundation knowledge before the task.
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