Research and Planning- Editing.

Letterbox from our film

Editing has been a fun experience. I have learnt various types of skills within the editing process. We learned how to put the letterbox format on to each cut of footage which is like a black border above and underneath the film footage. We did this because it makes the film look more professional as films always have this on them.

Fading the music

Another skill I learned was how to fade out music/audio. To do this, I had to double click on the audio where I would like it to fade out and then an audio adjustment box opened. You could adjust the sound on here by clicking on the audio levels and dragging them up or down. We wanted our music to fade at the end so we dragged each area down in to a gradual line to make the audio fade like how we wanted it to.

For some of our shots, we wanted to make it clear that it is a flashback so we decided to use a black and white effect on these. To do this you we had to go to colour corrector and adjust the colours to get the effect that we wanted. Also, to make these shots seem a bit dazed, we decided to insert a slow motion effect which added more to the the enigma.

Research and Planning: Risk Assessment.

Having a risk assessment is a very important thing to have because it helps you with awareness of potential risks and hazards during the filming process. Its purpose is to decrease the possibility of hazards by exploring control measures to prevent the risk of the hazard occurring. We created a risk assessment because it shows that safety has been taken in to consideration and thought through in terms of precautions to enable the prevention of hazards.

 

Here is our film opening risk assessment:

 

Research and Planning: Costume, props, actors, audience, film name and lighting.

Costume
Casual teenage girl style yet slightly scruffy clothes to show main character has been laying down in grass for a while.

• Grey leggings
• Converse shoes
• Hoodie
• Jacket

Props
Silver charm bracelet.

Actors
Simren (myself) as Crystal- main character.
Asfah as Crystals sister

Target audience
Teens & Adults. It would appeal to teens because the focus of the film is on a teenager and how she has to deal with such a difficult condition (amnesia) at a young age along with various other emotional factors that teenagers face on a regular basis such as relationships and feeling under pressure from various different sources. It would appeal to adults too, because of all the interesting psychology behind the occurrences and the story line.

Lighting/Colour
The opening of the film is shot outdoors with natural daylight, including sun but won't appear too bright on film.
The colours are quite bright (sunshine, and surroundings) reflects how Crystal is seeing her environment around her, a bit dazy.

Film Name
'The Forgotten One'

Research and Planning: Shotlist

Research and Planning: Animatic Storyboard.

Research and Planning: Storyboard for film opening.

Research and Planning: Film Production Name

For our film opening, we had to come up with a film production name. Originally, we had decided on the name 'Alumination Productions' and asked our peers on their opinions of it and they said it sounded too Hollywood. The next step forward after this constructive criticism was to research British film company names which are more simplistic but professional. We came up with some ideas of film company names such as 'Blue Moon'. However, we searched these names on the internet and they had already been copyrighted by other people so we had to continue to think of a name. Eventually we came up with 'Blurred Path Productions'. This is unique, easy to remember, professional and it also has a slight link to our film which we thought worked well and would appeal to the audience and genre of the film.

Research and Planning: Titles/Credits research.

During research for title's and opening credits for our film opening, we watched a variety of film openings; yet they were not much help because they were too over the top than what we wanted. We wanted to portray a more simplistic mood with titles that fade in and out with a basic but striking font. We came across the 'Man Of Steel' opening credits. The credits are very simplistic and flow well, so for our own film opening, we used these credits as inspiration to pursue what we wanted to achieve through our titles and credits. We also analysed the order in which the production company name appeared and when the actors' name's appeared so we could get an idea of how to structure our own credits/titles. The 'Man Of Steel' credits also had a variety of different shots in which they displayed different credits on which is similar to my groups idea. However, in the 'Man Of Steel' credits, the title of the film appears at the end of the opening sequence, but we cannot do that as we are only making the opening of a film and if we did put the title at the end of our opening it would look similar to a trailer which is not what we are intending to show.

Here you can see that the visuals are changing each time someone's name comes up in the credits.

Here is the 'Man Of Steel' opening:

Research and Planning: Music

We did some research in to different film soundtracks and what kind of soundtrack would best suit our film opening. We decided that we wanted a slow paced piece of music without any vocals in it. As we were researching, we came across a piece of soundtrack called 'On Thin Ice' from 'The Dark Knight Rises' official movie soundtrack. It fitted in perfectly with our opening. However, we were not able to get permission to use this in our film opening. We had to find an alternative piece of soundtrack. Our teachers informed us on a website (Moby Gratis) which had a variety of different music and which we were allowed to use for free; the link for the website is http://www.mobygratis.com/ . Although the music was free, we still had to wait 24 hours to get our license to download the track, therefore we ensured that we did this before the first cut deadline. Here is a link to the piece of music we decided to use which is called 'Live Forever' which is full of enigma :

http://www.mobygratis.com/catalog?title=live+forever&field_album_tid=All&field_instrument_tid=All&field_tempo_tid=All&field_type_tid=All&field_mood_tid=All&field_genre_tid=All&=Search

Here is a link to 'On Thin Ice':

Research and Planning: Location

Here are some photographs of the location of our film opening. We chose this location because it is isolated and has a mysterious feel to it due to there being nobody else around. It adds to the mood of loneliness and feeling lost which links to the character Crystal and how she constanly feels this way emotionally and physically in the opening and throughout the rest of the film.