WELCOME MODERATOR

Evie Hand

Candidate number: 1727

Claremont Fan Court School: 64680

Welcome to my blog!

My production team: Morven McIntyre 1744, Leila Saville 1767, Jessica Power 1716

Our brief was to create a film opening, so we decided to go down the route of a modern film that is based on the life of a celebrity who is struggling in the spotlight. Our film opening shows her everyday struggles that she has to face, especially the huge scandal she has been involved in. We wanted to create a suspenseful movie that would attract a wide target audience.

Our film will be shown below, along with the planning and construction of the film.

Editing

When to came to editing all the clips we filmed, we came to the decision that myself and Morven would take on the roll of being the editors. I decided to take on the roll of editing the transition of the paparazzi photo that smoothly turned into the magazine. Here, I knew various sounds needed to be used to create maximum effect, so I added a heart beat sound and suspenseful music. Alongside Morven, we both mainly edited the paparazzi scene together, by layering multiple sounds on top of each other, and using multiple short clips it really gave the effect of our protagonist being bombarded by the paparazzi. By using final cut pro, it allowed me to really maximise my potential of editing and make the film opening as smooth and effective as possible. I had the idea to have the film very loud and busy to create the sense of how busy and fast paced Blake's life is. However, I choose to edit the part of her watching the scene to just have the diegetic sound of the wine being poured and the silence of the room. I felt this large contrast of sound really showed that the evenings were the only peaceful part of her life, which I am proud of coming up with and editing.

Directing

For directing I took on the role of directing the scene were Blake was watching TV while the paparazzi arrived at her window. This scene took a lot of directing as we needed to film the same clip multiple times to achieve the effect of many different camera angles for the same clip. While directing this scene, I needed to insure Blake always had all the props in the same positions when swapping camera angles. I enjoyed making sure the rest of my team had the flashing cameras on the outside of the house, while I was uncharge of actually filming that was going on. For the paparazzi scene, I enjoyed directing the actors to get them to walk into my camera and cover the lens with their hand, this way it really portrayed the idea that the paparazzi were unwelcome and not wanted. I wanted to take on the role of director as I love producing and watching videos / films so I wanted to be involved in directing so I was happy with where everything was placed and positioned. 

Camera Work

Within my group, I took on the main role as camera man. I have a passion for photography and videography so we thought we would use this to our advantage and for me to mainly film, of course with the help of my other group members too. When it came to filming, I used a mixture of my iPhone and a Canon camera, mainly using my phone as the quality and sound quality is very incredible. At some parts, we filmed things hand help, so I ensured this was as still and steady as could be to make it realistic which I am proud of. The main part of filming that I was proud of was all of the different camera angles while our protagonist is watching the news, I felt it was extremely smooth and created the image I wanted.

CONSTRUCTION: FILM POSTER

Posters have always been an important part of marketing for films. We looked at other posters to help us have inspiration for our film poster. When creating the poster we thought carefully about what our film was about and how we would represent this through a film poster and make the film poster exciting to draw our audience in. We used photoshop to add in different layers using the paparazzi cameras as a background and adding in our character of Blake in the centre of the poster so our audience know who the main character is and who it will centred on. The use of body language is effective as she has her finger to her mouth meaning for someone to be quiet, this is usually something people will do if they have a secret. This represents that our film is full of secrets and suspense. We added in 5 stars to show that our film is highly rated and is a high budget film as well as the different awards that we have won. I included the title of our film, release date, and our socials. This will help attract our target audience and also help them find us online which is a highly popular place of marketing in the modern world and where most people find out about films.

CONSTRUCTION: FEEDBACK

THE HOOK:
After watching our film back multiple times, we felt that the ending didn't have enough suspense to be a film opening. After a lot of thought and consideration my group and I decided we needed an extra character that would leave the audience feeling a lot of suspense. We decided to have a threatening phone call from Blake's husband who left her an angry voicemail. We filmed this using a clip of a phone and a voiceover which we edited using the 'telephone' effect on Final Cut Pro so that it sounded realistic and like it was actual heard through the speaker of a phone. This portrayed a sinister ending, leaving the audience with a different view on Blake and the opening as a whole. We decided to use a voice mail rather than an interactive phone call as this left Blake unaware of what was happening next. This left the audience with a sense of dramatic irony as they know a piece of information that the characters don't!

MUSIC:
At first, we chose not to have any music in the background of our first scene but after some consideration we decided to add music to our bedtime story scene in order to represent a more soft, child-like environment and felt that we needed an extra part of sound to create a warmer atmosphere to fit in with the mise-en-scene. It was juxtaposed the other parts of our opening as the music is so calm and innocent, unlike Blake's scandal.

CONSTRUCTION: SOCIAL MEDIA

SOCIAL MEDIA

As part of distributing our film, we devised various marketing strategies in order to reach our target audience:

INSTAGRAM

Since we were all very familiar with Instagram, we chose it as our first marketing strategy. Since users on Instagram have an average age of 16-32 (which is our films target audience) we thought it would be the perfect social media platform to focus on most. We decided to put a brief summary of our film in the biography of our page, so viewers can see if they'd enjoy the genre and what it is about, in the hope of drawing an audience base in. Once we attracted an audience we were able to maintain them as followers, allowing us to remain in contact through our feed and profile, keeping them informed in things going on with our film!

Click here for our Instagram feed!

TWITTER


We created our own Twitter feed and posted material that was related to our movie genre and target audience. This included trailers from over films that are similar, re-tweets from similar films and tweets that we wrote ourselves, giving an insight into our films plot.


Click here for our Twitter feed!





















FACEBOOK

When creating the Facebook page, we wanted to make the title simple like our other platforms  so it was engaging and straight to the point. Like Instagram, a biography was used, once again informing viewers what our film is about. This includes enough information for the audience to understand enough about our film but not too much so that there is no big question or suspense/mystery that will cause the audience to want to find out more. We posted our film poster on our Facebook page so that the audience were further captivated and wanted to continue to follow our movie.

Click here for our Twitter feed!

CONSTRUCTION: FILMING

We planned very carefully for the day that we decided to film, we had to be extremely prepared to make sure we stuck to the time frame and were able to get it all done. We were organised and ready to film having all our props and costumes and locations ready for filming. We started off by filming our most difficult scene first as we knew it would take the longest as it was a very complex and time consuming scene to film, with all the different shot types and angles. We filmed the actors walking out the door first from behind seeing them prepare for what they are about to walk into. We did not film in chronological order but in the order of what would take the longest so we knew how much time we had left. We used both an iPhone and a Canon camera throughout. We also used flashes from different cameras to add a realistic effect of paparazzi. 

After editing our green screen scene we sent this to our iPhones this allowed us to airplay this clip onto a TV when filming. This was very successful and helped make our scene look realistic and make it look like Blake really was watching TV in the comfort of her own home. We also filmed an up-close and personal scene of Blake and her daughter Zoey in the Childs bedroom reading a bedtime story together as they prepared for bed. We thought carefully of our mise-en-scene for this scene to make sure it looked like a Childs bedroom. 

CONSTRUCTION: BBFC CERTIFICATE

We constructed our BBFC using photoshop. Due to our film opening containing mild threat and infequent, mildvoilence we have classified it as a 15. The next age classification up is an 18 which deems it to be 'stadistic threat'. We feel this does not reflect our film. Our category allows violence to be strong but should does not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury. The strongest gory images are unlightly to be acceptable.

We constructed our BBFC using photoshop. Due to our film opening containing mild threat and alcohol use. Many scenes convey a distort lady struggling to cope with the scandal she has been involved in. Younger viewers may be distraught by this, hence why it is a 15 rather than a 12.

When creating the certificate we used a 15 rating template that we found online. Using photoshop we copied a black box and pasted it onto the original name for the certificate. Then, we changed the font and size to make INFAMOUS bigger and bolder so it stood out and was similar to other certificates we had seen.

CONSTRUCTION: SOUND

For our paparazzi scene, we wanted it to come across frantic and very fast pace to connote how our protagonist, Blake, was feeling. Therefore, when editing we knew that a huge variety of different sounds needed to be used.

Initially, we though we would just use a white noise to connote a sense of Blake feeling trapped and like she doesn't want to be living this type of life. However, after playing it back it sounded far too simple and needed a lot more sound. We then realised we were missing the main part of a paparazzi clip, the sound of cameras flashing. We added in a sound of cameras flashing as well as the white noise to make it fast pace and have a very busy feel to it.

We left it like this for a while, but after lots of thinking and playing back, we knew it needed more to it. So, for a while we went around asking various different people to voice record them shouting things as if they were paparazzi so we could layer it in and make Blake seem more vulnerable towards the audience. This really improved this scene and made it seem extremely realistic and as if multiple people were shouting at her and asking questions. We still felt that it wasn't loud enough, so we added sound of a huge amount of paparazzi shouting. This really completed the sound as it now was loud and busy enough.

After this, we added a muffled sound to all of the specific questions being shouted at Blake. This added the effect that she felt so anxious and worried and was trying to block out everything people were saying.

Finally, we decided to add in one more layer of sound. This was a heartbeat sound that was playing fairly quietly in the background but it really put all the clips together and made the process of editing the sound complete!

PLANNING: SHOT LIST

PLANNING: CALL SHEET

To view the rest of the slide click HERE

PLANNING: PINTEREST

PLANNING: RISK ASSESSMENT

PLANNING: HOT SEAT INTERVIEW

For a few lessons now, my group and I have been spending time planning a hot seat interview for our main character, Blake Taylor. We worked together to think of questions to ask her and also to think of a more interesting way to present these questions. We came up with the idea to present them as if she was on a late night show and a host was talking to her.

By using various shot types, like shot reverse shot and zoomed out establishing shots where both myself (the show host) and Leila (Blake Taylor) were seen to portray the talk show feel. 

Once we filmed our hot seat interview, using iMovie we edited all together and made it run smoothly, just like a talk show would. Then, we used the 'reduce background noise' setting to block out talking going on in the background, it make it as professional as possible.

PLANNING: STORYBOARD