Initial Idea for Film

As we carried on disscussing ideas about our story, we gradually had a clearer idea based on:

A Teenage Girl called Hannah who becomes paranoid because of her surrounding and her foster parents.
Hannah' foster parents don't like her and want to find a way to get rid of her and they do this by driving her crazy
and playing with her mind and causing anxiety and paranoia. The foster Parents (Not yet named) start to put thoughts into Hannah' head and start to take control of her emotions, life and soon keep her feeling trapped and unwanted.

When Hannah decides to report her Foster parents to the police, they don't believe her because she has been reported
to police by her foster parents already! This then leads Hannah into becoming insane and causing herself to do bad things such as changing as a person and leading herself to kill her foster parents.

description: opening scene (draft)

-close up of leaves rustling through the wind
-gradually hearing footsteps
-Long shot of Hannah running
-A close up of Hannah turning around
-Police Sirens begin
-Hannah turns a corner and stops to take a breath
-Hannah pulls out a bloody knife from her pocket
-Hannah shakes in panic and drops the knife (Falls down)

(FADES OUT)
2 Weeks Earlier

-Extreme close up of Hannah' eyes
-School bells rings
-Hannah Meets up with her friends
-Hannah' friends ask if they can go to Hannah' House
-Hannah has a FLASHBACK (Hannah crying on her bedroom floor, as her foster parents start shouting and calling names at Hannah) FLASHBACK ENDS!
- Hannah reacts badly to the suggestion and starts to feel tense and yells at her friends
-Everything becomes too much and she runs out of school in tears (Hannah is unaware that she is mentally ill)

So far this is our brief idea of what we hope our film/story line will be about. Obviously there will be more detail as I update my blog after talking with my group and clarifying and making sure we are all happy with this story line.

Coursework Planning/ Target Audience (Research)

As we have now had experience with both camera work and team work in our preliminary task, we have now got into our final coursework groups. In my Group I will be working with Louise Mann and Mergime Shala. Throughout the lesson we discussed and planned Ideas for our final video.

Coming up with a genre wasn't extremely hard, we had our minds set on either a drama based movie or horror. Our minds were set on both these genres because we all thought we could be more experimental and creative when it came to planning a story line. After a long discussion of possible story lines, we decided to come up with a physiological thriller (sub-genre) story line.

We want to have the story line based on a teenagers perspective, and have a certificate of at least 12+ or 15+ (this is still in discussion). We have an idea based on a foster girl who is drawn to paranoia because of her surroundings and possibly her foster parents. We want to be able to brainstorm more of our ideas but this is what we have briefly spoken about in the first lesson.

Target Audience:
As mentioned above, we are hoping that our movie will be a certificate of 12+ or 15+. We have been looking at these 2 particular choices of certificates/target audience because we think that Thriller genres usually fit into these particular audiences and because we think our story line is very tense and physiologically scary, it makes us feel as though our film belongs into those certificates. We will look at this into more depth once we create questionnaires for our target audience!

To help us look at our target audience in more depth, we decided to look at the audience in two different perspectives: Demographic Description and Psychographic

Demographics description:

Looking at the demographic description of our target audience allowed us to get more detail out of what kind of audience we wanted to attract as well what suited the audience genre wise.

Age: 12+ or 15+ (As mentioned above)

Gender: Both Male and Female appropriate films

Social Class: Social class is mostly based for middle class/working class people and this is because our film idea is based around that type of social class too.

Ethnicity: All Ethnicity's

Profession: Any profession

Psychographic description:

Looking at the psychographic description was a little more complex as we had to look at our ideas from another persons perspective (our target audience).

Interests: since our movie is a psychological thriller, I would say that our audience' main interest would be issues involving mental problems or teenagers and the issues they go through.

Values/Morals: The main values that an audience will have will most likely be based around the social group represented in the movie and this also goes for their morals and beliefs in the situations presented in our media product.

this is helpful and helps us observe the importance of making a movie in the correct and proper manner that suggests that we have taken all types of aspects into consideration.

Research into typical conventions of filming

As part of researching conventions in a film, I worked in a group of 4 which included, Louise, Mergime, Ellis and myself. We were all working together analysing the movie: Austin Powers: International man of mystery. We looked and analysed the film and made notes on the different things we noticed.


Institutional Context:
As a group, we found that the main use of written text was mostly based in the beginning. We found out that the film company logo was 'Pathe' and It is important that the audience know about the makers of the movies behind the scenes as we come to learn about how big or small the budget is for the movie and helps us know that the quality of the movie could be at high/low standards.


Identifying Genre:
The main genre of the 'Austin Powers' movie is Comedy and we see that this is a major genre as we are quickly introduced to a funny opening sequence to the movie.


Mise-en-scene:
Setting: Based in the 60s and in the UK
Costume: Mostly casual 60s clothing
Props: Office furniture, telephone box, cars etc.
Camera Work: There is a lot camera work including- Tilt shot, Pan shot etc.
Sound: There was non-diegetic sound that was the theme song to the 'Austin Powers Movie'
Lighting: There was both high key and low key lighting, and there was also a use of natural lighting.
Editing/Special Effects: cuts and Movie title


Characters and Narrative:
Characters: Dr.Evil and Austin Powers
Dr.Evil is seen an evil man in a comical way and he is introduced in a scene with an enviroment that suggests he isn't a good person whereas we see that Austin Powers is an upbeat and Happy kind of person.


Enigmas: 

Why do people Love Austin Powers?
What happened to the people with Dr.Evil? etc.

Audience: The Target audience is for 15+.

Katherinessss Grouppp.. Olly Gimi

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Evaluation of Preliminary Task

As my group (Amelida, Dzung and Myself)  have now completed our preliminary task and have finished editing our video, and we can defiantly say that we are happy with our outcome. We used framing throughout the production of our short video to made sure we captured elements that were appropriate for the video. For example: we used framing when Amelida and Dzung were having a conversation so that we could capture and take in all dialogue and facial expressions used in the scene.

Match on action was mostly used when focusing on a particular part of the scene, such as when we saw a close up of Amelida's hand on the door and we then cut to the part in which Amelida entered the room, this created and showed a continuity effect, which was an advantage to the final outcome of the video. 

Another technique that was used in our video was the shot/reverse shot. This was a popular technique when filming the conversation between Amelida and Dzung. Shot/Reverse shot helped create a clear and well focused scene based on the characters conversation and once again the continuity of the video. We also had close ups and we zoomed in/out to capture the characters facial expressions which helped show the audience what was going on between them both. The 'Pan' Technique was also used to show characters movements such as when Amelida walked across the room to open a door.

The Mise-en-scene was very limited but also specific as our scene was mostly based in a classroom and the only props needed were school books. We identified a problem with the lighting as both High and Low key lighting was used and whilst editing we noticed that when we cut from one scene to another the lighting was extremely different and cut off a sense of continuity. 

I'm glad that I have had a chance of working with the camera and with editing as I now feel a lot more prepared for the actual coursework. Overall I think my group worked extremely well and the outcome of our video was great. The continuity was just right and the effort put into the work was always a high priority. I now feel ready and prepared to start the filming process again for the final part of the coursework.