Storyboards

 Here are the storyboards for our opening sequence:

Zaq

Preliminary task

Below is our preliminary task, we had finished it before the Final task, however we forgot to add it to our blog. We thought the task went very well considering that we had had no experiance at all at filming or storyboarding a 2-3 minute film. We found that some shots were lacking good continuity as shirts and jackets changed position and hairstyles grew and got shorter in different shots due to it being filmed on two different days.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Planning our evaluations

We have spent the past week planning our evaluation podcasts/powerpoints. David has filmed his podcast already, only Zaq and I need to film ours now. My notes for the podcast are ready, all I need to do is book out a tripod for the night and film it at home and edit it on windows movie maker. I found that I struggled a bit on a few of the questions especially question 1 and 6 as the key terminology wasn't as fresh in my brain as it should have been.

Joe.

Audience questionnaie

To help us evaluate our final film we made a rough audience questionnaire in which it asks problems and where they would like to see the film lead on to. Below is our first handed back questionnaire.

Joe.

Costume research

We wanted all our characters to look realistic to their social groups, doing so meant we had to dress them in a way we felt expressed this. Below are images that we had asked our actors and actresses to wear for the film to look effective.

We wanted all our kidnappers to look suspicious and stay under the cover of darkness, this meant we had to dress them up in black hoodies. This then follows what many people think gang and youth affiliated people dress in, the hoodie will make them look dangerous as it obscures your vision of their face.

This snood covers the identity of the wearer leaving them looking sinister and like they were looking for trouble, which our gang were. These were easy to find and very cheap to buy, we managed to rent a snood from a ski hire shop for a day for almost no cost at all.

Below is a similar Bandana which was used by one of the actors who kidnaps our main protagonists girlfriend. This gear allowed the kidnapper to cover his face, to prevent the victim from not seeing his face and to keep his disguise. This had planned to look more realistic and made the kidnapper look much more intermediating. 

Zaq and Joe.

Location recees

Below are a few images of a bedroom that would have been used for the waking up scene, and the scene when Josh is speaking to both Aleisha and Denzel. There are also location shots of the house that would be used to film in.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Audience feedback

After the completion of our final task, we needed to get an outside opinion on our final piece. We asked around and looked for things we could change.

 By putting the film on Facebook and Youtube, we could find out what our peer thought of our film. Facebook proved to be the most useful of these networking sites as the video was linked only to people of the target audience group. The video managed to get 20 "Likes" in as many minutes on Facebook and had over 7 comments stating how much people enjoyed the video.
A few people had picked up on a few continuity editing errors as the section where Josh Diller is on the phone to Denzel the curtains in the background seemed to open and close in between shots.

Zaq, David and Joe.

"SunDown" Synopsis

" A fast paced action thriller in which a group of young mobsters, kidnap a beloved girlfriend. Feeding a growing sense of panic, the boyfriend goes on a blood boiling rampage in search to find the money before his worst fears become apparent. ''

Zaq, David and Joe.

The equiptment we have used so far

To film and edit our piece we needed specialist equipment. Below is a list of everything we used to film and edit our final and preliminary task:

Sanyo exacti HD camera
Sony Tripod
Cannon hand held video camera
Imovie HD
Apple Mac computers
Lighting booms

Joe.

Our final film

This clip below is the 2 minute start extract from "Sundown".

Zaq, David and Joe.

Starting to evaluate our film

Zaq and I (Joe) had started to consider answers for our evaluation for our final piece. We only managed to think about one question, how our film challenged or developed on ideas already created by another media institute. We thought that our film would develop on already existing idea, and that it also challenges ideas as most films made about youth culture always suggest that they are reckless and trying to cause trouble. We're challenging that idea as the main protaganist is trying to right the wrong.

Zaq and Joe.

We've done it!

We've met the deadline! Everyone in our group has worked extremely hard every stage of the way whether it be filming or editing. The final outcome in our opinion looks very good. The Final piece will be on our blog asap, when we can figure out for to upload it onto Youtube.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Change in Music

We had to make a change in music which was used in the film towards the ending. This was due to getting feedback from our teacher and which we thought of taking consideration in and to took action in changing it. Shortly, we found a new song to replace it with. We chose this music (below) as it had a tensive build up and we believed it linked well with the sequence in the ending.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbvD1HoSvig

Zaq

Rough storyboarding for new Sundown film

Below are the rough storyboards for our new Sundown idea

Zaq, David and Joe.

Editing continued

After school today, Thursday, we spent our time looking at shots that we could shave a bit of time off. We managed to sharpen up the shot reverse shots between Josh and Aleisha and Josh and Dixon. We lost about 5 seconds total from all our editing work which meant we could have more room for the title sequence.

Joe.

Adding the production company and the titles

Today during our double lesson we focused our attention on adding the titles to our film sequence we had already decided on the name of our production company so now we only needed add it on. This seemed like an easy job at first but then we realised just how difficult it was to position the titles exactly where we wanted it to be. Finally we managed to get it into the right position and now the film looks almost professional.

Naming our production company

We needed to pick a production company for our film, we had to decide on a name that sounded cool yet also had something to do with the film itself. In the end we settled with 3Dimentional productions. This will be added to the film before it starts to make it look more professional.

Joe.

Music choices

We have watched our edited work so far and have all agreed that we need a soundtrack as it sounds bland without one, and many people don't want to listen to the sound of passing cars and the wind whistling. The soundtrack will also add to the atmospheric feel of the film. We have decided that the fast paced sense of some of the shots would also need a very fast paced music to keep up with the quick feel.

Joe.

Casting pt 4

This is Joe

We thought that Joe would be good for a Kidknapper or as the role of an unscripted friend of Josh Diller that would help him to get the 50k, however the film opening is too short to have this part so we would have to leave Joe out, his acting skills are also not on the same level as the others. Joe was also considered for the role of Dixon but did not have the right physicality to play that role.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Casting pt 3

This is Zaq

We wanted to cast Zaq as either Dixon or the bossman. We thought as Zaq's ability to use the camera was better than everyone elses that he should stick to being behind the camera rather than infront. Zaq would have also made a very good kidknapper as his height shows dominance over the girl.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Casting pt 2

This is David

We thought he would be ideal to play the part of Josh Diller as he suits the role better than any other person we asked, his acting ability was great and he learnt lines in a very quick time period. We thought that because of the fact he was from Mitcham he would know how a real person from there would act, leading him to be the best candidate for the role.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Editing after hours

Zaq, David and myself stayed after hours to day to carry on editing the work we have so far, we managed to cut a number of the clips shorter and sharpen up the transitions between some of the shots. We managed to cut the music down aswell to make sure that it fits in with images being shown.

Joe.

Editing work continued

During lunch, David had carried on from my work editing last night and has made a real improvement by adding the kidknapping scene and music onto our film. All we need to do now is add titles and a few more shots and we're done. David had put a lot of time into the editing of this and you could really see it in the work that he's done.

Joe.

Filming the kidknapping scene

The group, with the exclusion of myself (Joe) went to Mitcham to film the final scene that we needed, the kidknapping scene. I'm told it went very well and from what I've seen of the shots, David and Zaq did an extremely good job while they were filming. David called in a few favours from a couple of friends and asked them to be in our film, most of them were media students like ourselves so knew what was to be expected.

Joe.

Poster analysis by Joe

This image is the Poster of "Running Scared". Just from looking at the poster we can already tell which genre the film is, as we can see there is a gun extremely close up to the camera. There is also a cartoon like image of two men stood in a gun shoot out. This definately gives the feel of an action/thriller film. We can tell how significant everything in the poster is due to its position in the frame and how close it is to the camera, the gun, being the main focus of the film is at the foreground and Joey gazelle (Paul Walker) is very close to the camera aswell. The colour scheme gives the poster a cartoon like look, the blues could signify how the characters are feeling, depressed and anxious that they may not get the gun back. The use of only 3 colours brings out the red in the titles, they have used red as it could signify blood, it is also a very good contrasting colour and draws the eye to the words. In conclusion, I think the poster does a very good job at showing what it is trying to present, the film, and the genre of the film. The colours are a very good contrast which draws the eye in and attracts attention.

Joe.

Tuesday- 3 days to go!

As there was only 3 days to go we decided to split up, as this would maximize our work rate. Zaq and David went to film the kidknapping scene in Mitcham, and I (Joe) stayed in school after hours to edit what we had filmed so far, at the rate we are going, achieving the deadline seems very realistic.

Joe.

Monday filming

On Monday we filmed at my (Joe) house for the opening scene, the phone call scenes. Filming this was fairly easy as we had storyboarded and scripted what David's character would say beforehand. One suffered from just one problem however, the battery life on the camera stuggled to keep up to pace with us and we needed to charge it every 10 minutes. We filmed the car scene with Dixon (Andrew), a friend of David who owns a car. We filmed the shot reverse shot phone call scene at my house which was a struggle as we would have to interpret what the girl was going to say on the other end of the line before we had actually filmed it, so any slip up in the scripting could result in the whole scene being hindered.

Joe.

Monday

We have spent today getting the storyboards ready for our new idea, to kidknap David's characters girlfriend. David spent Sunday evening getting rough storyboards done for this idea and brought them into college today. At lunch we started to film the second scene, the first car scene. David has asked his friend, Dixen to be in our film. He will play David's characters best friend who attempts to get his girl back.

Joe.

Plan for Monday

On Monday we plan to continue editing and drafting for our new idea. We will speak about our plan for later on in the day to finish up filming the waking up scene. After college we plan to go back to my (Joe) house and film the waking up scene. This shouldn't take too long and we should be able to consentrate on other things after this is done.

Joe.

Final week of editing

It's the final week of editing starting on monday, we have a plan of the week made which consists of a few late night at college and a few lunches lost. We have set any re-shooting to after college and in our double free periods. Our lessons have been given to blogging and editing.

Joe.

Casting pt 1

 This is Mo Massari.

We thought Mo would be perfect for the part of "The boss" because of his intimidating height, and his sharp dress sense. Mo would make the part his own with his Lebanese acsent and his bigger stature physically than the character that David would play.

Zaq, David and Joe.

Re-shooting

We are going to re film the waking up scene again on Monday the 14th as we feel some of the shots that we have already could be improved upon quite heavily. As we had to cut out some of the shtos from the waking up scene we feel that it might be better if we re shoot the things we need as they could look ineffective without the shots that we had cut out.

Joe

Second thoughts

As we're nearing the deadline we are becoming more and more aware of the work we have done so far, so people in the group have said they are unsure about the work we have done so far, and feel that a change might be better for the group. We have discused the idea that we should change the storyline to David's girlfriend being kidknaped and he has until sundow to get the kidknappers 50k pounds or they'll kill her.

Joe

Editing continued

As we are missing a double period on Thursday we will have to carry on editing twice as much today. Today we are planning on getting the first car scene edited properly, we are still having a little trouble matching the audio to the video. If this continues we will scrap what we have of the car scene already and restart that part again, doing this would give us a fresh look at that scene and might help us out, although this would only be a last resort it we couldn't fix what has already happened.

Joe.

Double Lesson Thursday

Last Thursday (3rd) we had two double lessons of media which gave us an advantage to work and edit on our film. We started of by deciding to work on shortening the length of the film in order to meet the requirements of it being 2-3 minutes. A teacher was on hand to assist, help and give us feedbacks on how to make our work much better and look professional. We also asked other members of our class for positive and negative feedback, which could help us work on the negative points and feel confident on the positives. I believe that today has been successful as we got feedback which we needed in order to know what we could work and expand on.

Zaq

Editing

Today we all stayed behind college for around 45 minutes to continue editing "Sundown". We continued to speak about how to get around some of the problems we had experiance such as linking up the conversation in the car scene.

Joe.

Our progress so far

As a group we feel that we have made constant progress each day, we have achieved most things that we have set out to do such as coming up with an initial idea and developing it. Filming everything we need for "Sundown". Although we are missing a few shots that we will re-shoot in the very near future. Our editing has gone pretty well however we were struggling to merge some shots together, the car scene. But, on the whole we think it has gone very well up till now and hopefully we will carry on with the same speed.

Zaq, David and Joe

Rough storyboards of "Sundown"

As soon as we had come up with the concept of someone being given a set amount of time to get money back, we had to get it down on paper and draft the ideas. The pictures below are our very rough sketches of what we plan to do.

Joe.

Location research

As we had the basic idea for filming we needed to figure out the locations of where we would shoot. We planned for David's character to be an middle class young drug dealer and needed a bedroom to film the waking up scene, we have decided to use Joe's house for this scene. We then needed to find a police station which had steps that gave us enough time to have a small conversation while walking down them. There were many police stations that caught our eye in the near area, Wimbledon, Mitcham and Kingston. We also needed to find a location for the deal/car scenes to take place. We thought either Mitcham or New malden would be good for this.

Joe.

Editing "Sundown"

Another day, and another lesson of editing. Zaq was unwell this morning and couldn't make it to the lesson. David and I spend the lesson checking out our work so far and making any changes that we felt necessary. We've decided to scrap the scene where David is counting money and eating chocolate. We thought the money would ruin the concept of the film as he'd be able to pay off Mo straight away.

Joe.

Research of opening scene by Joe

For my opening scene I have decided to evaluate the first five minutes of Running Scared (2006) produced by Media 8 entertainment. The Film follows a drug deal that has taken a turn for the worst, Joey Gazelle (Paul Waler) is instructed to disposing a gun that was used to shoot a dirty cop. Things start to get even worse for Joey as the neighbour's child Olek steals the hidden gun and uses it to shoot his abusive father. Joey needs to get the gun back before the police find the kid.

The Film begins with the prduction companies, Media 8 ent, New Line cinema being shown on the underside of car tyres.upbeat music plays while the titles roll, the titles are stopped by the diegetic sound of a gunshot where we get our first shot of the characters . We see an establishing shot of both Joey and a young boy, Olek being held in his arms wearing a blood stained shirt. We are led to believe that the boy had been shot and is dying. During the two mens frantic dash for their car, contrapuntal, soft and calm music is playing. As the car starts to drive we see repeated amounts of fast cuts to give the impression of speed. We are given many clues as to Joey's job and where he lives, we see close-up shots of a gun and New Jersey licence plates. At 1:06 there is a great shot of the car's reflection in the traffic lights, the camera then tracks downwards from the reflection and is then linked up to a long shot of the men in the car.

We see the titles "Running scared" which is a cartoon-like close up. The camera zooms out of the graffitied title and we come to a window 18 hours in the past. This scene consists of a drug deal which quickly turns violent as a group of 3 masked men break in and start to hyjack the drug deal. After the worst of the shooting is done, Joey and his mob find out that the 3 masked men were actually dirty cops. Joey's mob scramble for their car and make a quick getaway, as the men are driving away from the scene of the crime Joey is told to "take the piece(gun)." He is then told "Don't F**k this up, your head is on the line here." This car scene is very similar to our own car scene.
I have chosen this film as there are a few scenes that are very similar to ours, like the car scene and a drug deal gone bad. The use of shots during the car scene are mainly close ups of reactions like eyes and weapons like guns and baseball bats. We tried to incorporate some of the shots that this film had used like a close up of the eyes in the rear view mirror.

Joe.

Poster

 I have chosen this to analyse this extract from  'In Too Deep' which was shown in 1999. It is about an An undercover cop goes too deep into the Cincinnati drug trade. The local drug lord, a man who calls himself God, controls all of the action in Ohio. As the cop moves up the ladder, he befriends the gangster, learns of his violent tendencies, but also sees him as a benefactor to the poor, a dedicated family man, and one who staunchly defends his friends. The cop's commanding officer fears that he has become too close to the gangster and will be unable to regain his identity, a fear that comes close to reality when the big bust ultimately happens. I have chosen this poster as it relates to our project theme of 'drugs and crime'. The concept of a 'local drug lord' which relates to our film. The undercover cop in a way relates to our film as david the main protagonist comes out of the police station on bail. The link below is a scene when they test the main protgonist to aim and fire at a 'snake' in the neighborhood . This links up to the   


Zaq

Friday Afternoon

Our aim for today is to carry on editing and make our film looking better. We appericaited our class members feedbacks yesterday which is allowing us to work more in depth on the negative feedback to make it look better.

Zaq

Research into production companies by Joe

I felt that as a gangster/urban film that Cipher Films would be a great production company to work with as they have produced films that are similar to our own such as "Kidulthood" and "Adulthood". I also thought that either Cipher Films or Columbia Pictures would be perfect for us as Columbia Pictures have helped to produce many of the Guy Ritchie films such as "Snatch" and "Lock stock" these films are also similar to ours and their experiance in this genre could help us out.

Joe.

Re shooting the final scene

As we have filmed on two different cameras, one being full HD and using a mini SD card and the other being non-HD and using a mini DV tape we can't connect the two onto the same film. This means we will have to re shoot the final "Sundown" scene. There were a few problems with the things we had filmed on the mini DV tapes aswell with the sound quality being not as good as the other clips.

Joe.

Editing "Sundown"

Another day in class and another day of editing. David, who has been doing a very good job so far at editing has continued again. Today we spent the lesson trying to action match the two different car shots, this is harder than it sounds as we wanted the shots to jump between one another but for the audio to be one consistant sound. However we came up with a few problems with timing the speech to peoples mouths moving in shot.


Joe.

Second day back

Another day back in college, unfortunately Zaq has to be on an art trip, so it's up to David and myself to get down to work without Zaq's assistance. We spent the lesson thinning the clips down again to the bare minimum amount that we need. We had a little trouble uploading the clips today as the "P" drive went down for most of the lesson.

David and Joe.