Whilst I continued to storyboard, Coupy began to look for music to put to our film opening. I suggested that we contrasted the trail of events by opting for a classical piece in order to catch the audiences’ attention somewhat. The website ‘Audio Network’ was recommended to the class by Mr Jackson so this gave us a starting point in order to begin our search for an appropriate piece of music.
Coupy showed me a few tracks that could potentially work, and not long after we made a short list. We listened to each track a few more times and eventually decided upon Ian Hughes’ – ‘Elegance’. The track can be heard below.
As previously planned, we intend to use this score both diagetically and non-diagetically in our film opening.
Ahh! We’ve run into what could potentially be a HUGE problem, as the actor we were originally planning to use for the part of the ‘main man’ (my dad) can no longer be with us to film on the days that we planned… So, we’ve decided that the easiest option will be for Coupy to take his place in that role. However, obviously this is going to cause problems in the filming and sound recording department, as only I will be able to handle the equipment during recording time.
Our film opening involves four characters: The main man, the dead woman, the detective and the neighbour. Each of these characters will not only need to be casted correctly using appropriate actors, but will also need the appropriate costume and make-up, if needed.
The main man:
After researching your average supposed psycho-killer I found a list of must have attributes about the guy:
Normal – The more normal looking the guy appears, the bigger the shock is impacted on the audience… Nobody likes to suspect your average-Joe.
Fairly built – This person obviously has to have some muscle behind them in order for their crime to even be feesable.
Middle aged – The majority of psyco-killers need to be coming up to a mid-life-crisis of some sort. It’s just how it works.
Fitting these criteria happened to be a guy as close to home as you can get – my dad – how convenient.
Coupy and I decided that our main man would have to be wearing pyjamas to show the audience that he is moving around in his own or his girlfriends home.
The dead girl:
Your average dead girl:
Very plain looking – this promotes the idea of innocence.
Wears white – once again, this fits in with the idea of innocence.
Due to a lack of people volunteering to act for this part, and the fact that this character only appears in one shot, we decided that I would do to play this role.
I need to find appropriate white costuming and a way of making myself look sufficiently dead (as shown in the video below).
The detective:
At this point in time we don’t know who is going to play our detective character although, once again, there are a few criteria that are actor must fit:
Male
Stern looking – these detectives mean business.
As well as this, during my research I’ve noticed that all detectives wear long coats, i don’t know why, but i suppose it has to be done.
The neighbour:
The neighbour can literally be any old randomer off the street, lets be honest! Is there a definition of what a neighbour should look like? I think not.
So, for this part, I think we are likely to use my actual next door neighbour if it is convenient for them, because it’s certainly convenient for us!
Upon discovering that I would in fact have to use the steadicam during filming, I thought I’d better get a bit of practise in. I watched a few videos on YouTube, which as it turns out are fairly unhelpful, and then resorted to just having a play with this new equipment. It took me around 15 minutes to balance up the weights correctly in order for the device to stay steady in my hand. And that’s when I had my dumb blonde moment… I had been charging the battery, so forgot to put it back in the camera. Upon putting the battery in, I discovered this added an extra few pounds to one side of the camera; thus completely throwing it off balance and declaring the past 15 minutes of careful weighing pointless.
But none-the-less, I re-balanced the device and managed to get the hang of handling it. All in a good days work!
While I was drawing up the final storyboard, Coupy was putting my drawings into FinalCut in order to animate the pictures and to replicate the camera movements that would be happening in the filmed version of events. The process included taking pictures of each individual shot that was drawn, uploading it onto the editing software and then adding a movement with a likeliness to that of what the camera would be doing in the final piece. On top of this, we added the music that we intended to use in the film opening in order to give a real feel of what the film was likely to look like by the end.
At first the story boarding process was taking a long time, but none the less was exciting because we could finally see our ideas coming together properly. After I had finished each page of the storyboard, Coupy would take a picture in order to put it into our animated version.
The more pictures and captions I got down, the quicker the process became and the easier it was to visualise what shots would look like in real life.
To be completely honest, the process of story boarding was becoming quite tedious by the end, and I was glad to finally finish after about 5 hours work.
It became clear to Coupy and I that once we got our actors to rehearse the script, the words they said just didn’t sound right – almost too clique. We also decided to change the acting roles; instead of having a conversation between a detective and a police officer, we concluded that a detective and a neighbour would be easier for us to pull off considering we were finding it difficult to get hold of a police officer uniform.
In addition to these role and conversational adjustments, we also decided to add an extra shot of the main character staring out of the window into the cold morning, in order to add some suspense.
After writing the fist draft of the script we were daily pleased with the out come, and this was a basis for us to start storyboarding. We used a script writing software called ‘Writer Duet’, which enables copy and myself to work on the script writing simultaneously, which makes the task easier as we can edit parts that we don’t like and add to others. This takes the pressure off having to write everything up at school, as we can be writing the script from the comfort of our own homes.
we have currently drafted in some dialogue for the end of the clip which is likely to be changed at a later date, as we still aren’t sure exactly what we want our actors to say. However this is only the first version of our script. We plan to make as many revisions as required in order to perfect our script before we begin to film in the Christmas holidays.
Today we began to organize our coursework project, for which we have to plan, film, edit and evaluate the opening to a film of any genre. We are working in groups of two and I am working with Coupy.
Firstly, we had to decide which genre of film we were going to create and managed to shortlist our ideas to four different possibilities:
Romance
Horror
Crime
Musical
However, later that lesson we decided that it would be too difficult to establish the opening of a film as a musical as we would not be able to open the film with any form of singing or dancing as this would be tacky and unprofessional.
Coupy and I began to brainstorm some ideas about what we would do for the opening of a crime scene and we came up with a few bad ideas, but one decent one. We thought that the story line would be about a murder and then the last part of the opening would show the investigation. We would use tracking shots to follow the murder around the house in order to create an air of suspense, and we would use fast pace cuts in order to achieve the same effect.
Jazzmin Fotherby's AS Media Studies Blog 