Scripting "Sundown"

While scripting "Sundown" we all needed to make sure we kept the basic idea the same. We worked our way backwards, we knew that the plot would be a young drug dealer loses drugs and needs to get the money back by the end of the day. All we needed to do now was fill in the gaps between. Below is a rough version of a script, many of the things will be improvised and edited on the day of filming however.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Development on the 24 hours idea

Now that we had the basic idea of what we were trying to do we could get some of it down on paper. the picture below shows our rough idea of what we will be doing. The picture contains most ideas that still need to be taken furtherto be made into something plausable.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Initial ideas for film

Here is a picture of the mind map we developed while looking for an initial idea, once we picked an idea, the circled one, we then developed it further by getting all themes that we thought could work general idea.

Zaq and Joe.

Re-shooting scenes

As we didn't manage to film all of our shots that we needed on Friday, we're going to have to reshoot another time. The original plan was to film of the 29th but Zaq has to go to an art trip in London and won't be avaliable. So our idea now is to re film on thursday 3rd, this gives us time still for editing and for filming.

Zaq, David and Joe.

First day back

First day back after half term, and our first lesson of editing. Todays lesson we looked through the clips and thinned them out, looking for the clips with outtakes and bloopers so we can create space and name the clips that we're going to use for the final piece.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Third day of filming

We came back to film for another day as we thought we should get as many clips as possible, we re-shot the whole car scene with Mo and used Zaq instead, we only did this as the audio quality and the shots we used the first time round were not as effective as they could be. We parked the car that we had been lent in a location in New Malden that looked the same as the location in Mitcham. We may still need to film atleast one more scene, the part where Mo says that david has until "sundown" to get his stuff back, we will film this over the weekend from the 26th-27th and come back for editing on the 28th.

Zaq David Joe.

Second day of Filming

We returned for another day of filming to re-shoot a few of the waking up scenes on the 23rd, this was due to some of the shots being not as effective as they could be. We thought the second day of filming went well considering what we had planned for the day. Unfortunately, the weather was awful and we had to call off shooting the police station scene, we are now going to film it on Thursday the 24th. This will give us plenty of time to consider re-shooting incase some shots don't work very well. David has lined up someone to play his mother/member of the family with more power over him for Thursday.

Zaq, David and Joe.

First day of filming

Our first day of filming was Monday 21st, we started off by filming a waking up scene, to establish who the character was. we tried to get the mise-en-scene as realistic as posible by putting props like hats, baggies and condoms all over the shot. After filming this we met up with Mo Massari, a very good actor in our media class. He kindly said he would play the boss in our film. We traveled to Mitcham to film the car scene, a friend of David said we could use his car for a bit. We found the first day of filming to go very well however the camera ran out of batteries half way through and we had to switch them round. Our next day of filming will be on Wednesday 23rd, we'll film the police station scene, we will do our best to try film a real location however we might get told to stop, as filming the police is illegal.

Zaq, David and Joe

Filming continued

Unfortunately we were a little late to collect the cameras and tripods, we missed them by one person! So all cameras had been booked over the half term. Very kindly Tom, Fraser, Sohpie and Tyra have lent us theirs until Wednesday, as two members of their group are on a trip and cannot film. Big thanks to them, we wouldn't have been able to film it without them.  We are also using Joe's video camera when we give Tom back their video camera on Wednesday.

Joe.

Filming

Now we have to story board complete, we can now start thinking about places and times to film. As we need a police station in the film, we have chosen to check out most local stations and take some pictures, Mitcham seems to have a decent location. All we need now is for the weather to be right, we have chosen to film on Monday the 21st. However, if the weather seems to take a turn for the worst we'll have to delay this. Attached is our schedule for the week.

Joe.

rap

as we initially come up with the title sun down we decided to base the rap around this title.
The first verse goes like this:

I only got until sundown
If i dont get this money im going to get gun down
How am i going to raise all that money in this small town
runing away is not an options thats too late now.

I believe this first verse will be extremely effective in terms of opening up the movie.This will indicate to the audience the seriousness of the position the protagonist is caught up in.

David

Title for the film

We decided the name of the film to be called "Sundown". We chose this name because the main character only has until sundown to get the boss's money back.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Songs

We thought this beat would be ideal for the build up towards the protagonists sticky situation. We thought this instrumental would be good for rapping over to portray how the character feels during the situation.

David

Developing ideas

Our main focus during the development stage was on an idea put forward by David and Zaq, they suggested that we could follow the life of a young drug dealer, that loses his bosses drugs and money, the boss gives him until sundown for the young man to get his money back. the developing stage consisted of story boarding and just writing down anything that comes to mind.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Mind mapping ideas

We separated ideas by sectioning them off in different genres, we only used the genres that didn't seem to be impossible to film, like westerns and war films etc... The genre we found that was the most full with good ideas was action/thriller, we came up with different ranges of things from kidnappings  to bank robberies.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Intial ideas

Thinking of initial ideas for us was quite an easy stage, we just mind mapped genres, and wrote down anything that we could think of. All ideas were taken into consideration and developed further if we liked the sound of them, we used voting to decide which ideas would be developed more heavily that others.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Editing-The Fish train

Editing our preliminary task was more difficult than we had imagined, we struggled to get used to the basics of using an apple computer, which none of us had used before. Although, after a bit of practise, we were getting through all the clips in no time at all. We did come across a few problems though, the computer we chosen had a bit of a malfunction mid way through and stopped uploading our clips, meaning we had to upload them all again. Editing was the best part of the process for most of us, as it was more relaxing and slow paced. During the editing we found that many of a worries while filming became apparently, we noticed that random people would just turn up in shot out of nowhere, many of them we managed to edit out, but we struggled on a few. Dealing with the audio was also another problem we had, as we were filming at a real location, a train station, we had to always time our filming to miss the announcer saying when the next train was coming, we left a few in to make it seem more realistic and to make the diegetic sound me believable but some were unavoidable and cut through our speech, we found a way however to fade the audio and to suppress some sounds over others. In all we think our editing went rather well considering the wide range of shots that were available to us. We learnt alot during our time editing the preliminary task, espeically how to add transitions and create audio bridges from one clip to another, we felt these skills will come in use a lot when we get to edit our final task.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Filming-The fish train

On the first day of filming, just after we had the basic idea of the storyline and where we should film, we headed to New Malden train station, getting there we realised that the camera had ran out of batteries which meant we had wasted quite a big chunk of our time. Instead of filming on a camera that wouldn't switch on, we took a few stills of the location where we would be filming, these turned out to be useful as we knew the location more than we did before hand and had a better understanding of where we should be filming to keep in with the 180 degree rule. Coming back the next day we had a vague understanding on what we should be filming, we started off with a few new ideas like incorporating props, such as Space Raiders crisps which later turned out to hinder our editing as random packets of crisps would turn up in shot after we had scraped the idea. Filming on 3 different days turned out to be a real challenge as we had to rely on everyone in shot to be in the same clothing, the weather to be consistent and for passers by not to stand in shot. We did have to come back and re-shoot some things as we thought that we could improve on them and what we had already was lacking depth. Reshooting turned out to help us dramatically as we knew what had worked before and what hadn't.
We had learnt a lot from filming during this preliminary task, many things were just petty like keeping in touch with the 180 degrees rule and wearing the same clothing if you film on two different days. Although, what we think we learnt the most was the importance of having a good quality storyboard before going out to film.

Zaq, David and Joe.