Film review and poster

We next need to think about what else we needed to do to make our short film successful and after reading a bit on Mr. Ford's blog about the new film 2012 and how their marketing has lead people to believe that this film is representing real life, I thought that we needed some good marketing for our film to make people want to come and watch it .
As we originally decided we are going to do a film review about our short film to give the audience a better idea of our film and make them want to see it, however, we have changed our second idea from doing an interview about our film on radio to a film poster for our film, we feel that we could do this better because last year we both used photoshop to make a magazine and could again use these skills on photoshop to create a film poster using a still from our film to make our target audience want to come and watch our film.

Additions to Storyboard

• Graveyard shot- More close-ups


• Slower getting out of bed after alarm sounds in shots 11 + 12


• More shots of pictures of dad around her room


• After bedroom scene we need shots of her walking to the bathroom rather than just appearing there


• Close ups of post it notes


• In bathroom cupboard show 3 toothbrushes or a razor to show elements of her dads existence


• More hints of dad being dead e.g. pictures missing from the wall as she walks to kitchen


• Use a cracked mirror to show she is sad


• Quick paced shots of her getting cereal, bowl and spoon for breakfast


• Close ups of post its on fridge


• shot of girl sighing in shot 22 when she sees the milk is empty


• girl leaves bowl empty as she walks out the house to school


• before shot 28 show her waiting for the bus and not it just appearing, shots from behind and front and showing a dull day


• close ups of hands opening purse to get money and see a picture of her and dad then she shuts the purse.


• shot of her getting off the bus and walking into school


• hear the school bell and see her walking into her class


• after her class finishes bell rings again and show fast paced shots of her clearing away


• After boy walks past in shot 34 show them looking at eachother from far away as well as close ups


• in classroom close up of what she is reading and hear her reading


• on whiteboard behing teacher have written what she is feeling


• close up shots of her clearing things before knocking pen on the floor in shot 39


• after pen shot and them accidental touching close up of his eyes and then hers


• Instead of her just appearing at her house show a shot of the bus driving past her house and front of her house
• in her room a close up of her face up against the window like the shot of her on the bus
• close up of her hand knocking the photo off the side
• before she takes the photo out of the frame show the broken glass
• dont show her dad is dead on the calendar just put something like "dad 2pm"
• follow hands around and placing photo on pillow, camera stays stationary on photo on pillow as she gets up
• we need to show it is another day instead of her just appearing at school again e.g. getting into bed shutting curtains etc...
• shot of trees/house in the morning then her getting breakfast again, close up of post it on table showing her mum has left her again
• quick shots of bowl in sink, grabbing bag, shutting door
• pan of front of school in the morning
• before bell rings show close up of her at her desk looking distant
• shot of bell ringing and her picking up all her books and leaving for the door
• when buying the coffee in shot 62, have the camera coming up towards her (like the first shot in graveyard) then turns her head and boy is stood there and offers to pay for coffee
• change the note on her hand as she holds her hand out to not make it too obvious that her dad is dead and just write something like "dad 2pm"
• shots of empty school before she leaves and show her leaving through the gates
• shots of road, trees, cars with music
• shot of her walking to graveyard
• camera infront as she is walking towards the grave then switches to it following her and then switches again to the camera looking at her from where the grave is and she walks towards it and looks down.

Filming

We are going to start filming tomorrow after school, our actress is free so we are hoping to get a few shots done, some of the shots that we are planning to get are; All of the graveyard shots right to the end so that everything stays the same in the beginning and end, also the empty school as we will be filming after school and hopefully everyone will have gone. We will also try out some other shots if we have time.

bus shot

went to town the other day on the bus and so took a photo of the kind of shot we are looking for in our bus scene of the film. our protagonist will be leaning on the window looking at at what passes by :)

storyboard

okay so here is our storyboard, at the moment we are just going to go with what we have got and start filming, if we feel something needs cutting we'll cut it, or if somethings needs adding, we'll add it! :)
hope you like it!
laura and amy x x

Filming

Something has finally worked out and I have found someone who has said they will be in our film as the main boy character, he is free quite often so can work with us when we need him.
He also doesn't mind who he is in the film with which is a plus, unlike our previous main character who wanted to choose who she worked with which wasn't practical for us.

Solutions

Because our main character has dropped out of our film and we now have nowhere to film we need to find a solution and quite fast, so we have asked a few people we know and think we may have found someone to film but we just need to sort out some times when we can all be available to film, as with the problem of where to film I think I may have found somewhere where we can get to quite easily, however we just need to check this with our new main character. As with our footage being deleted we thought this may not be too much of a problem because it will not be in our film and atleast we now have an idea of final shots that we will use and how to film them.

Memento

In class we have started to watch a film called Memento to fit in with our study of post modernism. Watching this film will help us with our short film because it messes around with time, as we are planning to do in our short film.
In the film the main character has a memory problem following an accident, so to get the audience to see the story through his eyes the film starts at the end and as the film progresses time goes backwards and starts to show how he got to that point at the end, this is done by showing an end scene then showing the scene before that and so on, i think this is effective because just as the main character doesn't know how he got to that point neither do we, this will also keep the audience watching because they want to find out what has happened and what is going to happen.
This film will help us in our practical because we are also going to mess around with time slightly, although it wont be throughout our film it is what will create an interesting ending and keep our audience watching, also in the film it uses black and white to show a change in time and we may try this out in our film to see if this is effective.

Problems

We had planned out when we were going to film and who we were going to film with, however we were let down by our main character so this is a big problem, also because we were planning on using our main characters house to film in, so as well as having to find a new character to be in our film we are going to have to find new settings to film our film in. We had a few practice shots of what we wanted to include in our film but problems with one of the cameras led to our footage being deleted.

let down....

hi amy, just a quick messageto let you know about how filming is now going to have to be postponed, so much for those 3 or 4 frees that were perfect for our filming! think it might be a good idea to find someone else for our film now as they have totally messed us around and let us down big time!
speak to you soon
laura x x

Re-presentation

the process by which the media present the 'real world' (Rayner)

the selction process is:

• the decision over what is chosen to be represented and what is rejected.
• the choices made when organising the represetation.
• the options taken to focus the audience in a certain way

all of these things we are going to have most definately thought about with our representations of depressed lonely girl, suffering quietly.

Gatekeeping

a theorist called White (1961) spoke of the 'gatekeepers' - that is the people who are part of the decision making process in the construction of media texts.

in this case, WE (me and Amy) are the gatekeepers, as we are the ones making the decisions for our film, however in a bigger scale, the gatekeepers of us are our chosen institution who in effect make decisions also on what they wish our film to show.

Richard dyer - The matter of Images

Dyer said: 'how we are seen determines how we are treated, how we treat others is based on how we see them. how we see them, comes from representation.'

when showing the representation of our lonely and sad protagonist in the film, will then be inflicted on the audience. they will see this representation and then go on to treat others that fit our representation, the way they see them treated in our text.

filming

i have now found someone who has agreed to star in our film as the protagonist :)
this means we can finally crack on with starting the filming
we have managed to arrange some days in which we can all go an do some camera work and also available locations, such as the house - kitchen and bedroom, graveyard and school.

we shall have the storyboard up on the blog very soon!

post modern media

post modernists claim that in a media saturated world, where we are immersed in media 24/7 the distinction between reality and the media representation of it becomes blurs or even invisible to us.
we no longer have any sense of the difference between real tings and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them.
media reality is the new reality.
in the modern period, artists experimented with the representation of reality.
in the post modern period, the idea of representation gets 'remixed', played around through pastiche, parody and inter textual references where the people that make the texts deliberately expose there nature as constructed texts and make no attempt to pretend they are realists.
value judgements are blurred. everything is down to taste. anything can be art, deserve an audience and culture 'eats itself'. there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute.
the distinction between ,media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a 'reality' defined by image and representations.
images refer to each other and represent each other as reality rather than some 'pure' reality that exists before the image represents it.

Die Driet Welle

in mr smith's lesson we learnt about the Third Wave collective Identity

we were given class rules:
1. sit one seat apart
2. must stand up to ask or answer questions
3. stand up whenever a member of staff enters the room
4. answer or ask a question in 3 words
5. before speaking you must always say 'Mr Smith'

we were told that from now on we were no longer unique, we were all the same and there was to be no individuality within the class.

Areas of colective identity

gender
sexuality
religion
nationality
age
class
ethnicity
disability
celebrity

a collective identity is a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project to achieve a common objective.

after doing this lesson, we then found out that Mr Smith had simply done an experiment on us and had not really gone crazy in thinking the class had to be one. he had done a much more simper version of an experiment held in America.
The Third Wave was an experiment to demonstrate the appeal of fascism undertaken by history teacher Ron Jones with sophomore high school students attending his Contemporary History class as part of a study of Nazi Germany.The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, during the first week of April 1967.
Jones, unable to explain to his students how the German populace could claim ignorance of the extermination of the Jewish people, decided to show them instead. Jones started a movement called "The Third Wave" and convinced his students that the movement is to eliminate democracy. The fact that democracy emphasizes individuality was considered as a drawback of democracy, and Jones emphasized this main point of the movement in its motto: "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride".
The experiment took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in: on the third day the class expanded from initial 30 students to 43 attendees. All of the students showed drastic improvement in their academic skills and tremendous motivation. All of the students were issued a member card and each of them received a special assignment (like designing a Third Wave Banner, stopping non-members from entering the class, etc). Jones instructed the students on how to initiate new members, and by the end of the day the movement had over 200 participants. Jones was surprised that some of the students started reporting to him when other members of the movement failed to abide by the rules.
On Thursday, the fourth day of the experiment, Jones decided to terminate the movement because it was slipping out of his control. The students became increasingly involved in the project and their discipline and loyalty to the project was astounding. He announced to the participants that this movement is only a part of a nationwide movement and that on the next day a presidential candidate of the movement would publicly announce existence of the movement. Jones ordered students to attend a noon rally on Friday to witness the announcement.

it was quite scary to think how easy it had been for Mr Smith to change the class in the space of just one lesson the way he did and to make us follow the rules. and just like the kids in America, could we have become a group of crazed facists by the end of the week?

we then watched a film that had been created on the basis of the experiment.











at the moment i dont really see what collective identity is going to be in our film, as we only focus on individuals.

Settings

I have had a few thoughts about the settings of our film.

We have a shot in or storyboard where the girl is in her room and she is looking out of the window whilst she is feeling alone, i thought we could use the view from my bedroom window for this because the view is quite plain looking over fields and i think this would work because it gives the feeling that she has no one around her or to turn to. Also if we needed to use a bedroom to use for the girls room we could use my bedroom because the colours may suit the feeling and it is quite a wide room so we would have room to film in it.

At the beginning of our film the girl is in a graveyard, we will film this in lutterworth because it is easy for all of us to get to and is a nice setting because we also want trees in this shot and there are a few here.

Also in our storyboard there is a shot of the girl on her way to school on a bus, we were not sure how to do this but we spoke to Mr Smith and he gave us the idea of using one of the school buses because we could film it just before the end of school when no one is on it, this would work better than using a service bus because we may need to film it a few times and would have to pay every time.

A few of the shots are filmed when the girl is at school, this will be easy to film because we can just film this in school and find an empty classroom to film in.

If we were going to film any of our shots outside i thought we could use the park where i live because it is quite quite and slightly run down, i think this would be good because it is not like a stereotypical park and would emphasise that our character is lonely.

We have had a few problems because we have had a few ideas of things we want in our film, e.g. a bathroom cabinet with a mirror, we are not sure how we are going to film this because none of us have the type of cabinet we want but we only need it shortly so maybe we could ask someone else, if not we could just change it to a bedroom cabinet with a mirror and use one of ours.

I will now take some pictures of the settings and see if they will look good in our film.

music

finally managed to embed my music onto blogger :)
i have been looking for some slow piano tunes that could be used in our film and found three possibles ones from competch.com that are not under copyright and so could be used :)

Cryptic Sorrow - Kevin MacLeod

Wounded - Kevin MacLeod

Sovereign - Kevin MacLeod

Another idea...

As i was writing out the character profiles i thought of another reason why the boy could be following the girl by adding another twist.

We have said that at first we are going to make the boy look as thought he is up to no good by following the girl to the grave yard and make him look a bit eerie on the way the camera angles follow her as thought creeping up on her and looking through the eyes of the boy, then as the film progresses we were going to have the boy in the background of the shots of the girl and have him looking at her, when she drops her pen on the floor he will then go over and help her, this then will make it seem asthough he fancies the girl.

Here's the other twist i thought of, The girl has a photo of her dad with her all the time but it is torn half and it looks asthough someone has been ripped off the other side next to her dad, towards the end of the film i then thought we could end with the twist that the girl is in the grave yard again and she is holding the picture and the boy holds his half of the picture next to hers and the find out that they are brother and sister. almost like the twist in 'Parent trap'.

Character profile: Boy

This character is going to be our secondary character in our short film. He is going to be in the background most of the time but he is still going to be an important role in our film, this is because he is going to help the girl through her tough time even though its not made obvious to her or the audience till the very end.

The boy at the beginning of the film is going to seem like he is stalking her and as the film goes on it seems more and more like he is. He is always in going to be in the background and we may make his facial expressions seem as though he is a bit strange by the way he looks at her and by making her look nice so we can incorporate in the male gaze, however, as we have mentioned before there will be a twist to his role in our short film and we will see why he has been following her.

Character profile: Main girl

The main character in our film is a girl who is going to portrayed as the stereotype of lonely, this is because she has lost her dad and her mother is never there for her and is basically 'just a post-it note', by making the mother like this the girl would feel more lonely because her father was always there for her and now she seems to have nobody.

The girl as we know is lonely, to show this she will always be seen on her own in the shots and have a sad expression on her face whils not having the best time because nothing good really ever happns to her.

However, we seem to break her being the stereotype of lonely because all the way through the film there seems to be a boy of her age following her or watching her, this is where we will use aspects of the male gaze because she must be attractive to the boy to make him keep following her or watching her, this seems quite eerie at first but towards the end there will be a twist to his role in our short film.

The girl through out the film will be thinking as will the audience that she is lonely and has nobody but in the end she finds out that she mite not be as lonely as she thought.

shuffle....

whilst writing my last few posts, i have had been listening to my ipod on shuffle. a song by 'The Fray' came up called 'Never Say Never', i really quite liked listening to the track and the feel of the song was very similar to the feelings i want the songs in our film to portray. i think this was because the use of the piano throughout with the rather slow tempo was effective. i have been looking at several pieces of music similar to this , which i hope to share with you soon, and I'm really finding that the piano is becoming an effective instrument to portray the sad feel of our film. 'The Fray' certainly uses piano frequently in its music and so this little stumble upon this track in my shuffle has turned out being quite inspirational and so i shall continue to look for some sympathising piano tracks. however i do not want to use any music that has words, but it was not the words i was focusing on in 'The Fray' track but the use of the piano.

further thoughts...

after thinking further into this idea of the mother, whilst watching the film 'Matilda' with my younger sister, i came to realise that the mother character in that was a lot like i saw our mother character being like, but just not ever being shown in the film. a certain point in the film made me think this, when everyone leaves the small child, Matilda, alone for the whole day in the house. before the mum leaves she gives the girl some instructions on how to get herself some dinner and then leaves her to fend for herself. obviously the point being tried to make in 'Matilda' was the fact that the girl was much to young to fend for herself and this isn't what we are trying to show in our film. however the same principles are there about the mother not being there for her daughter and this is what we are trying to show in our film. Matilda is also shown with having no friends and being on her own just like our protagonist and one of the reasons for her loneliness is her mother's neglect.

character profile: mother

i have begun to think in more depth about the characters of our film. i have particularly been thinking about the mother, and how we are going to never show a person but show messages and requests left by the mother for our female protagonist to find. in effect her mother is simply post it notes. this shall emphasise greatly on the protagonists loneliness, and really bring to home how close she was with her father. her father being the one she spoke to about her problems and the one she made most contact with.

from the amount of messages left, it shall show that she is very rarely around for her daughter and so wrapped up in her own world and thinking that communicating this way is better than nothing but in actual fact it is a lot worse. half of the time we show the girl not paying attention to these messages, showing that she doesn't really listen to them.

her mum will be shown as thinking that she is looking out for her daughter but the fact that she is never seen in the film and purely represented by a post it note will show that in actual fact she is never there. the mother could be seen as a binary opposite to the father, if the audience are told in some way that the father was always there for his daughter and the one spoke to her about everything.

Laura,
Next lesson shall we get a tape and film a few shots like timelapse and match on action, we could use this to get a better idea of how to do the shots and to see if they would look good in our film and then we could add the shots we will use in our storyboard.
wb.
Amy x

The male gaze

Laura Mulvey (1975), "Visual pleasure + narrative cinema". Laura Mulvey believes that 'The male gaze' means that the audience of a film have to view the characters through the perspective of a heterosexual male.

The male gaze for femenists is:

How men look at women, How women look at themselves and How women look at other women.

The Male Gaze:

The camera lingers on the curves of the female body and the events which occur to the woman in the film are presented mainly in the way the man would react to these events or want the woman to react.

In our film because our main character is a female i think we may have to look at the male gaze to keep the male audience interested because the film is aimed mainly to women and this could make our film not as successful, i feel that because our character is 17 we could incorporate the thought of the male gaze by having a girl who is pretty to look at but not having it to obvious because this may ruin our film and not stick to the story line.

Stereotypes.

Stereotypes as we learnt in the lesson are important to a film because it helpes people be able to relate to the characters in the film and understand the film and different groups of people in the film easier.

Tessa Perkins in 1997 said that stereotypes contain a number of assumptions that can be challenged, using different assumptions: They are not always false e.g.- Cowboys do wear cowboy hats or in terms of our film, young girls tend to be emotional. They are not always negative e.g.- Lonely girls do not always commit suicide.Not always about minority or less powerful groups e.g.- Our girl is unfortunate in what happens to her but she is upper class.They can be said about your own group e.g.- another girl thinks our girl is lonely and maybe depressive.

Problems with a stereotype can be that they over look an individual, place people in groups or people are often exaggerated in their stereotypes which create caricatures.

In our film we are going to use a stereotype of a young lonely girl. I feel that the stereotype of someone who is lonely is that they are quite depressive and keep themselves to themselves, in our film we are going to make our girl fit the stereotype so that the audience can see that she is lonely but we will not make her into a caricature becasue we think this could ruin our film by making it seem too depressive. Our character may break the stereotype slightly because she doesnt keep herself hidden, however, she will be a quiet person.