My Media Evaluation

Finished Opening Title Sequence

So this is our finished piece, my evaluation will follow this so you can review how I feel about the planning and production as a whole - ENJOY!

Update & Sound Info

Been in Berlin the last few days so was eager to find out how the rest of my group had done in terms of filming the part I had come up with concerning the femme fatale looking distraught but this time featuring snappy shots from different angles but also containing the slow establishing shots zooming into the house.

My job was to come up with music to pair up with this part as well as create the gunshots which you can see I have done within recent posts.

So my brief when it came to the music was to keep it modern but also intriguing as we wanted to pair the hooking intro with hooking music. 


My first thought was to use Audio Bullys remix of the 1966 cover of Shot me down my Nancy Sinatra which although it tells the story of a relationship where each partner 'shoots eachother down', I felt that I could take a 10-15 second piece which also played my gun shot sounds over the top and it would work will with the beginning of our OTS...



If you listen to this video from 1:19 - 1:34, I thought this part of music would suit the establishing shoot as it is quite slow which will emphasize the slow zoom into the house in contrast to the last 6 seconds of the selected piece where it would emphasize the choppy and fast shots of the piece. After thinking about it a bit more I thought that the lyrics of the song would be too obvious and although we do hint at the ending of the story with our OTS we did not want the whole thing to be 'in the audiences faces'. The other problem with this is that it's a woman singing about something that depicts our storyline very similarly so it might seem that the voice has to be similar to the femme fatale in our piece or that it is actually her singing. The lyrics 'I used to shoot you down' also give away too much and could confuse our audience if they were to watch the whole piece as it wouldn't suit our storyline of the femme fatale driving the anti-hero to death whether it be him shooting himself or her shooting him or even someone finding out about the romance and not allowing it to the point where someone kills him to stop it from continuing.

I then thought that the best thing to do was to choose a song without lyrics but that also had the same qualities that I wanted so I started searching youtube...



If you listen to this video from 0:57-1:12 you can hear a part that would be perfect to our piece in a hugely simplistic way. It was originally created by Bernard Herrman for a movie called 'Twisted Nerve' which creates the problem that it isn't actually modern music but the whistling within the piece is very timeless and therefore it can be considered an 'ahead of its time' way of creating suspense in a very chilling way. This song has also been used on many other modern films and is favoured by Quentin Tarantino for his films 'Kill Bill' (2003) and 'Death Proof' (2007) showing this song is suited to what our OTS is trying to do - bring old fashioned film qualities to modern cinema. The chosen extract does have a climax to pair with the choppy shots but it might not be quick enough so when adding the sound to our final piece I can play with the speed of it to suit it.

Our Questionnaire for Final Audience

This is a printscreen to show the questionnaire that me and Jessie had previously created but published on facebook.

I created an event and added Melissa & Jessie as admin and made it public so that it would come up on all of our friends walls. This will ensure that a vast amount of people see our questionnaire increasing the chances of getting a lot of results back as we cannot promise that everyone will want to fill it out.

Edited Gun Shots

So my plan was to use iMovie HD to edit my manipulated gun shot sounds so that they sounded muffled. It was my aim to effect the audiences senses with this muffling effect but also to resemble what our femme fatale is hearing and how her senses are also being challenged because of how she is feeling at the precise moment in our OTS. I used audio fx on iMovie, changing the pitch, I chose to use three gunshot sounds to emphasize the repetition of the noise within the femme fatales mind to create the sense that she cannot escape from it. These are the finished sounds:

Sound Experiment...Sounds!

Untitled from Kieron Marchese on Vimeo.

This clip shows the three sounds, A, B and C after I cut the in between noise. From this experiment so far I have eliminated B (the second sound) because it is too high pitched and slap-like. My plan is to now go onto editing Sound A and C using Audio/Video FX on iMovie to make it more like a gun shot whether that means increasing and decreasing the pitch, slowing it down or speeding it up etc.

Sound Design Experiment

As the soundman for out OTS I will be conducting an experiment on how we will create the sound we need - a gun shot. So I have decided to conduct an experiment with the following equipment:

• A - Oxford Dictionary with Metal Corners
• B - A Plastic Ruler
• C - A Boot with Hard Sole

With each item I will be smacking it onto the table whilst recording the sound, I will then upload it to iMovie and extract the audio slowing it down to make the realistic sound of a gunshot. I will then compare the sounds and choose which ones sounds the best.

Editing

So we have begun editing with Melissa at the front of the group but we are already experiencing some problems, we initially decided to use Final Cut as it is a more sophisitcated program but unfortunately not even the teacher could work it and on the Macs we have it is not the most efficient program to use. We experienced many issues from the simplest things of uploading our footage to adding black and white filters. Print Screens can be seen on Melissas blog of us attempting to use Final Cut [here].

However, we have decided to stick to using iMovie as it can do 99.9% of everything that we want to do when editing our footage. Although, there is a clip that unfortunately has Jessica in the background of so we will be uploading this specifically to Final Cut as the program can crop clips.

Assesment Criteria So Far..

This is the marking criteria for the highest levels as I am aiming to achive quite highly, to assess my work so far I have gone over the criteria and highlighted it in blue if I feel that I have achieve it and amber if I feel like I am in the midst of achieving it. The ones that are left black are ones I need to focus on starting and getting done.

VIDEO
Specification for -
Level 4 48–60 marks A*/A High B

There is evidence of excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:
-holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
-framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
-using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
-shooting material appropriate to the task set;
-selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
-editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
-using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
-using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
-using titles appropriately.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING
Specification for -
Level 4 16–20 marks A*/A High B


-There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.
-There is excellent organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.
-There is excellent work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.
-There is an excellent level of care in the presentation of the research and planning
-Time management is excellent.

Lighter Refilming

Unfortunately when looking through our film we noticed that in the shot of the lighter dropping you could see Jessie in the background, Ellen has tried fixing this using FinalCut to crop the shot however this effected the quality when expanding it to fit the screen. I therefore took the role of going up the city to refilm this part. This has made me realise that when filming you can never have too many shots, after all it's better to be safe than sorry! So I took about 10-12 different attempts at dropping the lighter to make sure we had at least one to choose from that worked perfectly.

We Filmed

So as director I think we had to get some filming done as fast as possible so I arranged a morning for all of us to take and go up the city and film on Elm Hill. It went well because of our previous dummy filming that me Jessie and Ellen had done. There was a few changes in the filming that I had instigated such as having a shot of a 'moving subject' where our femme fatale walked into the shot when walking towards our Anti-Hero, this was to break up the continuous shots we had of her walking towards the camera with the camera back tracking her which could potentially bore the audience and did nothing to achieve our modern take on shots. Of course the camera was in the hands of Ellen so taking a look at these shoots on our Mac will be the next step to see the full quality of them before we start putting them together.

Another job we have is to film the very beginning of our OTS in the room of our femme fatale which is on the top of our list!

Re-Assessing our Authentic Costumes

Although we were very organised in giving out our roles I don't think we did it soon enough as we found it very difficult sticking to our brief in being conventional in film noir costumes. When arriving at Jessies in the morning before filming we were set on taking a modern twist with our costumes in stead as this would be more practical. As a director I did express my ideas and gave the briefing as long as we had flowy and elegant clothing for underneath on our femme fatale then we would be fine. I did manage to get a hold of a fur coat for our femme fatale to wear and Jessie and Melissa had a good idea in giving our Anti-Hero my denim jacket as a more modern twist. Ellen had her input in styling also, grubbing up his top with mascara to look like oil stains while Jessie focused on the femme fatale. I had previously briefed our actor on the basics of his costume:

As this is Jessicas's role, this is the link to her post on styline:
Jessica's Post on Styling

Revising Shots and Inputting Sound

I spoke to Melissa briefly as she is in charge of editing and also Ellen as she is camera operator and have expressed my ideas concerning the introduction of our OTS.

We initially decided to make our OTS modern through the editing and shooting but I felt like we weren't achieving this to its full potential. At the beginning of our OTS our femme fatal is shown distressed and upset, our aim for it to act as a hook begging a lot of questions in the viewers minds as to why she is in such a state. Because this won't last for very long and probably only last up to 15 seconds as a whole I have discussed an idea that would excel our aims..

Instead of the close up of just our femme fatales face following on from a high angle shot to show her low status at this point I believe that having something a bit more fast pace would draw the attention of the audience in more immediately. My idea was to have lots of choppy shots from different angles of our distressed female to establish her character as very unstable - shown through the different shots at different angles and different distances - this in turn would make the audience feel unstable and therefore becoming in touch with her feelings. This hooks the audience because it makes them have to concentrate to establish their view of each shot before it has quickly changed, it also acts as a preview into how the film will end so it sustains the storyline and doesn't completely spoil the ending.

From the comment below you can see that the issue has been raised that because our femme fatale is a protaginist within our film the audience should establish a relationship with her and therefore would conventionally spend a long time looking at our distressed character however, because our storyline progresses to the point where the audience fully realise how our femme fatale feels about being trapped these choppy shots allow this preview without them feeling too sad and slow paced. The fast paced shots also foreshadow the action that will come within the film.

I then thought of how we could contrast this against the very beginning of our OTS and at the same time set the scene in a very mysterious manner (something that would stay true to our crime, romance drama) - the idea I had was to use the back of Jessies house as the aesthetics aren't too modern and zoom slowly forwards closer to the door of the house. Following on from that I thought it would be a good idea to then zoom up the steps and then towards the door of the room that she was in, this would act as an initial hook that sets the location and the scene, giving the audience a chance to be as though the camera is their point of view, walking to our femme fatale and becoming part of the movie as quite a personal experience. The slowness acts as a false sense of security when it is then contrasted against the fast and choppy shots.

As my role of being in charge of sound I also thought of something we could add in the beginning to make our OTS more dramatic and give the audience a taste of what would happen if they were watching a full length film. As we have thought of our whole story line and our basic storyline is our femme fatale driving our Anti Hero to death after a period of crime and lust gone wrong I thought a way of foreshadowing this would be to have echoes gun shots repeating during the shots of our distressed femme fatale. This will mean that I will have to take up the role as a Foley Artist and reproduce the sound of gun shots using props, record them and add them on during editing.

Dummy Run

From the very beginning of this video you can see one of the problems it has helped us notice. You can hear other peoples conversations very clearly which distracts the viewer from what they can see on screen. Because of the very intimate settings of the café we will have to try and work around this and capture a time when it is quiet or as my idea stands at this point in the OTS we are supposed to get a sense of the femme fatale being in her own world so no sound could work quite well at this point or just quiet background noise of the café.
The second problem you can see is that when we are backtracking the femme fatale rummaging in her bag the camera is very shaky, experimenting with shots will have to be done to overcome this. We could even put the camera in one place and zoom out as the femme fatale walks towards the camera to give that back tracking feel but with a more steady frame.
When it comes to editing it is clear that letterboxing could also be an issue because of the different clips, I will have to talk to Melissa about possible leaving all letterboxing till the very end to avoid any problems with different sizes of letterbox styles.

Doing this has given us a good opportunity to gage on how long it will take to film as well as how many different shots we have to remember. It will help us because we can refer back to our film or visually remember it instead of just a shot by shot list (which we will also have there to help us).

Planning for Dummy Run..

Ok, so tomorrow we are going up the city with the camera with the plan to do a basic run through on filming to understand what we will have to do when we go through it properly with our actor and actress. Doing this exercise will help us get a feel for angles and composition in our actual location. We will star in it ourselves and because we are filming it at about the same time we will actually film it means that we can get an idea of lighting and natural sound that is present without any changes on our behalf.

This has also helped me put my directorial role into play and as director I have made sure that people are aware of the times we are meeting and where we are meeting.

First Directorial Move!

I took my first step as being a director today. Previously I had looked over our storyline and our animatic and had come to the conclusion that we weren't fulfilling the brief we had set ourselves at the beginning of this task.

Whilst we are capturing the conventions of film noir through setting costume, title and the order of events within the film we said we would break the conventions and make it more neo-noir through editing and sound. I believe that we could tweak some things to achieve this brief fully so I spoke to Melissa today, chief of editing and discussed a few ideas I had about the beginning of our OTS when we see our Femme Fatale who is trapped in her stereotype looking extremely distraught and upset [a finishing outcome of our storyline and entire film shown at the beginning]. We only wanted one high angle to show how powerless she is and one close up of the face to show how upset she was I think it would be much more effective for the beginning to be much more choppy and fast paced to immediately hook the audience as well as commit ourselves fully to our brief. This would also allow the audience to immediately relate to the female as the fast paced different angles give a sense of uneasiness and inability to focus which is exactly what she is going through. I will also have to discuss this with Ellen as she is in charge of the camera during the filming process as well as Jessie who is specifically researching into cinematography at the moment.

Another idea I had which is within my specific role is adding a gun shot during the shots of our distressed femme fatale as it would bring the audience even closer to her character and really strengthen the fact she is leading the narrative at this current moment - they get into her mind as she is hearing the gun shot too. It would act as a definite hook creating many questions in the audiences mind foreshadowing events that they will later see but cannot be entirely specific.

Fatal Infatuation

We have it! The title for a Film Noir, it's been a long time coming but we felt that with the progression we make in creating the OTS and researching into the different techniques, we would come up with a title that naturally fitted to our storyline.

I think that although the title gives a lot away to the viewer it doesn't tell them enough for them to feel that they don't need to watch the movie. If anything it pairs well with our OTS in hooking them to the movie, begging the questions of how does the infatuation become fatal and how fatal turns out in the end. The title works well in English terms as it is almost alliteration with the two F's working together as a memory aid, another thing that works extremely well for a title of a movie so that people remember the movie, with it rolling off of their tongue. Examples include Doctor Dolittle, Fantastic four, Peter Pan, Dirty Dancing, Man Made Monster, The Sixth Sense, What Women Want etc.


The next step is to look at typography, we do have an initial brief that included the Title looking very bold and at the same time have a bit of a rugged feel that looked slightly torn up. After today's lesson we thought that perhaps having the Fatal bit in more posh and feminine writing against a bold and rugged font of Infatuation would look really good together and forshadow the storyline of the two different stereotypes coming together.

   

From these posters you can see that the conventions of fonts within film noir is captured through the boldness of the titles and the freshly painted effect that comes with the fonts they have used. Depending on the movies the font looks as though they capture the storylines such as 'Dead Reckoning' having a more dark disfigured font where as Laura has focused on the font being quite feminine which supports the movie being based around the female protaginist.

'Fatal' Ideas:

'Infatuation' Ideas:

Studio Logo

For our studio logo we wanted to go quite modern, using primary sources we came across a bright green finger print, although a finger print is something that has been around forever the bright green colour brings it to being quite modern as well as the bolder lines. In a way it represents what we are trying to do as a company and bring something that has been around for a very long time and make it modern and very current. It also represents us putting our own fingerprint on the genre of Film Noir and changing it to how we want it to be. 

Tim Burton - A Great Director?

The first thing that I notice when I think of Tim Burton as a director is that he has to be brilliant on the relationships he has with his actors as he is renowned for working with Johnny Depp in most of his films. For an actor to be able to work with a director on numerous films he must create a brilliant working atmosphere. 

He also puts his signature stamp onto the films that he directs, with his dark and melancholy style featuring within every film. Another reason why I think Tim Burton is such a great director is because he is not afraid to use all his skills - his artistic side is another thing that Burton is great at and putting this into his films is 

something that makes them so great.

                                  

      

You can see from these images that the drawings from Burton's art book (The Art of Tim Burton) have a similar style to the animation he created - The Nightmare Before Christmas

Burton attended the California Institute of Arts and I believe it is his artistic eye that has worked well in his creating such great films, he uses his eye to perfect composition and his mind without barriers to create the characters and the story line. Abstract story lines such as Beetle Juice and Edward Scissorhands are some of his greatest - 

It is good to know why famous directors are great at what they do, this helps me in knowing how I can achieve my role.

Final Audience

First of all here is a link to Jessie's posts on results which features a photo of our questionnaires results as she took the lead in putting the results together.

After distributing the questionnaire through facebook it was clear to see our gut instinct wanted the same connotations out of a film noir as we expected. They favoured the genres of romance and action tapping in well with our storyline based around the forbidden love of our femme fatale and anti hero taken on a massive journey through crime and action.

Our audience revealed that they don't visit the cinema that often, going only once or twice every few months so our plan is to distribute our OTS online, possibly through a link distributed across facebook. Another question we asked was if they were likely to buy a film on dvd that they enjoyed in the cinema. The answer seemed to prove that if we were to release a feature length film from our OTS that creating DVDs would be pointless when it came to making a profit therefore showing that a better way of making an overall revenue and therefore an increased profit would be through advertising. For example posters, soundtrack albums or even featuring product picks. The ban has been lifted on advertisers paying for their good to be seen on British TV proving that this could be one of the directions we take in making money by featuring products that would relate to our audience in our film.

Our audience also revealed that they would prefer a more modern take on music as well as how they would like to access our movie which links back to the question on how we would distribute our film. There was a mixed reaction to whether it was through social networking or on a video sharing website however we have narrowed it down to being online which means we could take both these options.

We will use all of this information to help us create an OTS that our audience would be perfectly happy with.

What does a director do?

Basic definition; A film director is a person who directs the actors and crew in the making of a film They control a film's artistic and dramatic aspects, while guiding the technical crew and actors.

After doing research into the role of a film director I have come up with the key qualities that should be present in the role of the director:-

• They must be able to give direction to the crew that they are working with and be unafraid to give their opinion in order to shape the final piece to the best it can be.
• They should understand the qualities in which they are looking for in actors/actresses and be able to explain why they have casted certain people.
• They must understand the characters completely within the film so they can tell the actors/actresses how they should portray them and the way they feel, understand what they would say in the situations they are in and confer with stylists on make up.
• They should have an overall understanding of the sub-roles within the entire crew and why decisions should be made within those roles.

Directors put their stamp on all the films they make, there are certain things that run throughout all the different films that they direct. Audiences choose to go see films specifically directed by them because they want to see these different qualities. They work closely with actors/actresses to achieve the best that they can, they must be a people person and have the ability to get on with everyone to prevent any setbacks within the film but at the same time it is crucial that they have a team who realises the importance of their role and has the ability to take direction.

I think my artistic eye will serve me well. I might not have past experience in media as a subject but the 3 years I have studied in photography will help me in visualising what we want and using the aesthetics in our location to help me create the best composition. The fact I have done Drama at GCSE will help me in using my actors to symbolise different things, I will be able to put into place the skills I have learnt for example, showing higher status within peoples positioning, facial expression and eye contact but also support the actors in, well, acting. Tone of voice and body language are things that I will have the ability to discuss in depth with them.

Roles - Who is doing what?

After a discussion in todays lessons we have deligated roles to one another, they are as followed;

Director - Myself

Sound - Myself

Camera Operator - Ellen

Mis-en-scene - Ellen

Editor - Melissa

Lighting - Melissa

Stylist - Jessica

Cinematographer - Jessica

As Melissa was absent in todays lesson we will confer with her these roles and if changes need to made they will. These are all of our main roles that we will focus on and now research into solely. When filming we will all put these roles into practise but have stated that we are all there to help one another and will not hold back on giving one another our opinions to better the OTS as a whole.

My plan now is to research into the role of a director as well as a soundman to know what I have to do to achieve doing the best I can within these roles. I will do extensive research into sound and eventually have chosen the sound we are using as well as sampling it on my blog.

Initial Audiences Results

You can see from this frequency chart the results in hard figures from our iniial questionnaire. We have then gone onto placing the results into three different pie charts to give more of a visually interactive way of seeing the results.

From looking at this pie chart we could tell that we had achieved are aim of handing our questionnaire out to the audience we believed to be the market who would most appreciate our OTS [18-25] - having just over half the participants falling into this category.

This is where our results really matter, we took the sample of 18-25 year olds and asked them in which format would they prefer a questionnaire if they were to take part in market research. From this you can see that the females in this age bracket preferred the format of a social networking site such as facebook. This means that when we do our main questionnaire to make sure what we include in our OTS is what they want to see, we will get our answers over facebook as a large proportion of them wanted it in this format.

This is the same graph as our last one but instead is for the males in the age bracket. Again you can see that the preferred format was social networking from a large proportion again.

Conclusion: From these graphs we have decided to now do a questionnaire over facebook asking them a series of question that will be the last definable factors in the decision of our target audience as well as the format of how people would like to see our OTS etc. Although there is a small proportion of results from each gender that liked the format of a questionnaire handed out on the sheet we have decided that over social networking it is a very efficient way of people recieving the questionnaire as well as us recieving our results.

Semiotics

Semiotics are basically signs and symbols within the OTS.

There are three different types:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; or mean.
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures.
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them.

We are using semiotics within our OTS by emphasizing the woman's confidence and power by having her smoking and there being close ups of her smoking a cigarette to create a sexy effect, referring to her sexy femme fatale stereotype. [The cigarette is our semiotic] 

Another Semiotic we are using is red lipstick for our femme fatale to apply at the end of our OTS. It was my idea to do this as I think it is very good use of a semiotic... Why?
Because within our OTS the femme fatale, as I have previously said, is trapped in her stereotype and eventually drives our anti-hero to death (in the full length film) because she taunts him until he commits suicide. At the end of the OTS, after the conversation with the anti-hero (that she shouldn't be having because of her high status) the applying of the lipstick is supposed to signify her restoring her femme fatale stereotype and as soon as she puts it on she is back to how society wants her.

Group Research Task - My Contribution

You can see from this printscreen the information I have added to the prezi, whilst I added it Melissa was also online [as you can see from the little red avatar] from a different location working on the presentation - this is a great way for us to create presentations together as a group from our own homes. Throughout the week we will hopefully be online together at different points until it is finished!

Similar Audiences - Titanic

In the midst of our research into our audience we had discussed who we thought would like our movies. It got  me thinking about films that have a similar audience to ours and the movie that crossed my mind was Titanic. I thought about how although the initial audience may be women [as the storyline is based around romance and the struggle of a relationship that so many women can relate to and enjoy watching as they feel they can connect with the characters] the movie does have a very broad audience overall. The action scenes appeal to the men whilst the romance keeps in touch with the women. There are many other reasons why titanic has such a wide audience; 

The struggle and divide between the lower class and higher class means that people of different classes in the audience can relate to the different characters. Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) is a prime example of a character who breaks conventions of what an audience expects, her high status doesn't stop her from being friendly to everyone, an important character in the movie who sets a pleasant tone but also reminds the audience of their pleasant feelings to the two leads, Jack and Rose. Molly represents the audience in some ways as her views would fall similar to the typical viewer but she has also been specifically given a quality that sets them aside from the rest of the characters - her more plump look immediately gives her a less threatening vibe, setting her aside from the rest of the higher class passengers abroad. This is something that was carefully thought out for her character to emphasize her qualities as the real Molly Brown is much more slim.

The male role in a movie is one that you have to think of carefully, the male audience can sometimes be more touchy or easily offended than the girls and to create a character that can threaten them would put them off of a movie. An exception to this rule would be James Bond as it does not have this effect on men, I would put this down to the fact that the series of movies are so iconic that men have grown to idolise James Bond and not be ashamed for it. In a movie like Titanic, the good cop bad cop theory is put into place and a man such as Carl is a good example of someone who the audience love to hate. Jack, on the other hand, is a character that is introduced as a happy go lucky man with nothing to show for himself other than his drawings, he doesn't threaten the audience with rich and pompous characteristics. He shows no judgement which many would at the time of the film, being friends towards people of all backgrounds and all classes throughout the film. Another reason why men like him is that he does not shy away from any action in the film and is many a time rushing down corridors with Rose by the hand, like a hero.

Moving onto the female audience, again, a very touchy part. Women are famously known for being judgemental towards other women in television and movies. Picking holes in one another comes very naturally whether its the way they act or the way they dress, women are much more analytical and at the same time critical compare to men. The character of Rose is perfect for this movie, she is introduced focusing very closely to her social class through her costume and facial expressions being very pristine and posh. Within minutes we are aware of how trapped she is in her social class to the point she is driven to attempted suicide, because her character is so vulnerable it is easy for us to be sympathetic towards her and when Jack comes along and saves her from herself it can only be pleasant to watch their growing love on screen.

After realising this it became more apparent how similar the movie is to our storyline, our femme fatale is trapped in the stereotype that is sexy, promiscuous etc. and our anti-hero is a lower class male who lusts for her. There relationship is very Jack & Rose under different but at the same time similar circumstances. We wanted to break the conventions of a romance appealing to a female audience which is what Titanic achieved, film noir had a very specific audience at the time, focusing mainly on adult males, Titanic is a model frame of a movie that reflects how we are breaking this convention and making a film noir modern in this day and age but also modernising the target audience.

Prop Ideas

Just a simple post after looking at sites like Ebay and Amazon to find out the price points of the two props we will have to purchase if we cannot get a hold of them otherwise...



Cigarette holder for our Femme Fatale: £1-£4



Zippo Lighter for our femme fatale: £10-15

Continuity Task

At the beginning of the year when we were first getting to grips with the course we were set to do a continuity task with the briefing;

Filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whoem she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180/degree rule.


Evaluation:


We first came together as a group to decide where we wanted to go with our continuity task and it was pretty unanimous that we wanted the back story to this task to base itself around death and romance. This helped us create the script that was used within the piece, which can be seen on Ellen's Blog[click here]. There is also a series of shots that Jessie took in preparation for our continuity task which can be seen [here]. As you can see the main aim was sticking to the 180-degree rule which we achieved as there are no points within the short film that positioning of characters swaps around or flips because we crossed the line within the rule with the camera. The second aim was to feature match on action which again we achieved as you can see at the beginning where our first female walks through the door and although it is interrupted by a reaction shot of our second female, she is then shot coming through the same door following on from the action of her hand twisting the handle. The third aim was to feature shot-reverse-shot which can be seen when our first female looks down at our second female and the camera then represents her eyes looking the second female up and down starting from what she first looked at - her feet.

As I hadn't previously studied GCSE Media or used a video camera I wanted this to be a learning curve for me so we expanded our task beyond the original brief in a way that also helped us understand the genre of film noir also. We featured other camera techniques within our continuity task such as tracking when the camera is behind me and the first female walking down the corridor which intrigues the audience immediately as their view is forced in the position of following the characters. My previous studying of drama helped me in bringing angle ideas within the piece and towards the end when the camera is looking very dramatically up at the first female who has just murdered the male, it was my idea to show her in a very strong position and because the audience are looking up towards her she is immediately in a position which has much more status. Composition was also something we looked at with framing from the hole in the wall giving the effect as though the audience begin as outsiders in the situation and eventually follow the characters into what is really going on. Where my face falls into the frame after being killed has a dramatic effect as it interrupts the empty view and forces the audience to look into my dead eyes making them connect with what has just happened. Editing is obviously another aspect we wanted to experiment with and although it was very basic to add the letterbox effect and contrasting black and whites we went a step further and chopped the final clip of the female leaving the room into different pieces and faded them into each other discarding the bits of film where she disappears. It gave her a very sinister feel about her as if she strolled out of the room achieving what she wanted to do, we put it into slow motion as well which signifies the importance of this bit allowing the audience to really take it in.

Capturing Location Aesthetics

So this is the video that me and Melissa filmed of our location and up until 2:18 was our initial idea of a good location as it does have some aspects that are very old fashioned such as the stone street and the bridge over the river proving that it is also very picturesque but what we didn't realise was that it had been modernised so much with seating outside the University and some shops that spoiled the scenery, something we thought we had covered during our presentation to the rest of the class but have now discovered is not the case.

There was however one good thing that managed to inspire us when we began to think of how we could rework our ideas; at about 1:15 you can see we recorded an archway with a very small tunnel that we thought would create some interesting lighting as well as make a good composition with framing being used naturally by the arch. However, the construction that is just visible at the end spoils the frame so Melissa thought of another angle we could capture it so that it looked good (this can be seen instantly after).

Not far from our original location is Prince Street, that led us to Elm Hill, a location we had discussed before as well as hearing about in another persons concept presentation. At 2:18 we began to film there and as you can see it is already a lot better, is is not a street that is used as regularly as the one outside the University that we first thought of. We filmed the location trying to capture all the aesthetics such as the cobbled street, the coffee house (that would be perfect to replace the small outside café we were going to use initially for our femme fatale to sit in), there is also very old style buildings as well as a series of lantern style lights running throughout the street and many small shops that keep to the picturesque, old fashioned and importantly; British settings.

At 6:05 you can see that we focused on another tunnel which we thought we perfect for taking Melissa's idea of the shot from the previous Archway and incorporating it here and using this as the place that our Anti-Hero is standing as he sees the Femme Fatale walk by and drop her lighter. The street, overall is perfect for long shots as well as close ups, allowing us to know that there won't be any modern aesthetics to spoil the composition.

Another good outcome of this exercise was finding out that I probably wasn't the best at filming, as you can see the camera regularly goes out of focus so this help us realise that out of the group, maybe focusing on the filming strengths of someone else is for the best!

Our Group Research Task

After our individual research into audience we have now chosen to do a small research task concerning the question, ''What do audiences do while adverts are on in the cinema, does this differ from when they are watching T.V?''. We wanted to choose a different way of creating this presentation so, although we have chosen to use prezi, we will be using a different sub feature that allows you to access the presentation from home and edit it along with a chosen amount of people (in my case the rest of my group). In our lesson yesterday we discussed initial ideas when thinking of how to answer the question and the plan is to access the prezi from home and also carrying out small but significant research including the research we have all individually done into audience theories.

Filming Location

On Monday, at around 4 in the afternoon me and Melissa went up to the city to film our location, the overall task of filming resulted in some decision making which I will go into detail with when I have uploaded the video and evaluate. We wanted to capture the aesthetics of the video so we could analyse them as a group, when being up the city we did film our original location but then checked out a different location - Elm Street. Our decision for filming that location and considering as a second choice for the filming of our OTS I will explain in the evaluation.