Flick Trick Productions: Planning

Showing posts with label Planning. Show all posts

Saturday, 9 February 2013

Bringing Flick Trick Productions to the social media

Connecting to our Audience

We decided to make a Facebook page and Twitter account for Flick Trick Productions to increase its publicity and to connect to our audience

http://www.facebook.com/FlicktrickProductions

https://twitter.com/Flick_Trick

FACEBOOK

By making ourselves available to our audience we can get feedback and support on our opening. We then know what they audience like about our opening and what they think could be improved on.

We can also see who appreciates our work in general

TWITTER

Twitter helps to get our opening noticed and publicised. People then make comments and some suggest how to improve the opening.

Saturday, 2 February 2013

Detailed Editing Schedule

We often have free periods together as well as lessons to edit (although not all of the lessons will be available for editing). I will add particular events onto our editing schedule as and when we do them. Below are all the opportunities that we have to edit after we film on the 3^rd February, until our first draft deadline set by our teacher on the 1^st March:

Date and time available to edit	Anything that we got done
Monday 4^th February between 10:10am and 11:15am	All footage uploaded to the computer and imported into imovie. We ordered all the footage in the order of our storyboard.
Wednesday 6^th February between 10:10am and 11:15am	We slightly re-ordered the footage so that it did not completely follow the original storyboard as we thought that it fitted better.
Thursday 7^th February between 11:30am and 12:30pm AND 14:30pm and and 15:40pm	Cutting clips.
Friday 8^th February between 11:30am and 12:30pm	Cutting clips. We also took all sound off as we realised the wind was too loud. We decided that we would need to add the sound separately, which means re-recording our actress’s dialogue.
Monday 11^th February between 10:10am and 11:15am	Edited saturation and added a blue tinge to the clips to add a ‘creepy’ feel.
Tuesday 12^th February between 11:30am and 12:30pm
Wednesday 13^th February between 13:30pm and 14:30pm	Emili and Sasha went to a park to film white noise for the background as well as monotone sounds by banging the slide. We also recorded foley sound for the swing by rattling a chain against a fence.
Friday 15^th between 14:30pm and 15:40pm HALF TERM WEEK WHERE WE ARE UNABLE TO EDIT AS ALL DATA IS ON SCHOOL COMPUTERS	All sound clips taken yesterday were imported and added to the opening.
Monday 25^th February between 10:10am and 11:15am	All sound clips were put into place on the opening and the opening was complete for the first screening on the 1st March.
Wednesday 27^th February between 10:10am and 11:15am
Thursday 28^th February between 11:30am and 12:30pm AND 14:30pm and and 15:40pm

by Emili Hone

Script

The script

Bonnie- ONE...

TWO...

THREE...

FOUR...

FIVE...

SIX...

SEVEN...

EIGHT...

NINE...

TEN.

We decided to only have a small amount of dialogue. This is because we want to use diegetic sound from the environment to build the tension and atmosphere of the scene and to pull the audience into the woods with Bonnie, Jack and the antagonist - making the opening seem even more genuine.

By Harry Crotty

Logo

The making of our FLICKTRICK logo

THIS IS OUR FINAL LOGO

By Harry Crotty

Friday, 1 February 2013

Health and Safety

Health and Safety Planning and Precautions

When planning the production of our film opening, we had to consider the safety precautions of filming on our location, as we had young actors involved. We visited http://www.hse.gov.uk/entertainment/theatre-tv/film.htm and looked at the health and safety guidlines for Film, TV and Broadcasting. They outlined that we must have assigned roles to prevent chance of risk, so we all had jobs that we would rotate. For instance:

Filming: Alexandra Monitor: Harry Directing: Emili Director of Movement: Melissa

Director of movement was an important role in ensuring that Health and Safety was reinforced, as it was about controlling how and where the actors moved. Specifically in our piece where they ran.

Emili visited the location: A park and forest. She checked the ground that our actors would be running on, by testing out running as well. On the filming day we mapped out the paths that we wanted our actors to move in, so that there was no risk of them falling over bumps or obstacles. We assessed the risks of what we asked our actors to do, and decided it was safe on our amateur film to keep the stunts and action to a minimum.

The HSE website

By Alexandra Gibson

The HSE Website

Blurb

DVD Blurb of 'ten'.

The film opening is key to the main events that happen further on in the film. It sets up the general narrative for the film, and initially entices a viewer. To think of creative ways to draw in an audience I thought of different ways that a film appeals to a viewer, including a DVD blurb. Aside from the front cover, the blurb on the back of a DVD is supposed to attract someone to the film, as make it appear as endearing.

"A teenage girl, Bonnie, is seen playing hide and seek in the park with her boyfriend Jack. When Jack runs off into a nearby forest things go awry when he is stalked by an unknown 'predator' like villain. As Bonnie is left innocently counting in the park, little does she know she is counting down the seconds left of Jack's life, as he is killed by the hooded villain. Unaware, Bonnie is left counting, vulnerable and solitary. More importanly, left in reach of the killer. As Bonnie is about to reach the number '10' the villain pinpoints her as his next victim, and her fate is left unknown as the title rolls."

By Alexandra Gibson

Weather forecast for the 3^rd February

The 3rd February is the day that we will film our opening. We have to make sure that the weather is consistent on the day, to avoid continuity problems. We plan to meet at the park at 10:30 am, so I looked up the weather forecast for Sunday for this time and into the early afternoon.

It looks like it could rain at some point, but it seems that it will only be momentary.

By Emili Hone

Our Schedule

Week beginning…	What we need to get done…
Monday 7^th January	1) Decide on our location. 2) Take location pictures and upload them to the blog.
Monday 14^th January	1) Finalise our opening synopsis. 2) Begin storyboard.
Monday 21^st January	1) Decide on whom to cast for the boy and girl characters. 2) Finish storyboard
Monday 28^th January	1) Film on Sunday 3^rd February.
Monday 4^th February	1) Begin to edit footage together to form our opening. 2) As we go along make decisions on the background music.
Monday 11^th February	1) Continue editing 2) Continue adding music
HALF TERM	1) Individually add anything to the blog that we feel needs to be added.
Monday 25^th February	1) Continue editing until it is complete.
Monday 4^th March	1) Burn the opening to disks for each of us to present and hand in.

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Storyboard

The storyboard will be vital to our filming day, as it will ensure our organisation. We can use it to reference every shot that we take, to make sure that continuity is not an issue.

Written by Harry Crotty, Mel Owen, Sasha Gibson and Emili Hone

Drawn by Harry Crotty

Sunday, 27 January 2013

Blog Background development

Designing our Background

(This was an example of what we could of had as our background, however, we decided that the photo of the park swings is more suited to our opening because of the importance of the location.

It is, however, used on the Facebook and Twitter page as the cover photo)

I used one of the photos Emili took of our location and edited it using Photoshop CS6.

Here is a step by step guide to how i did it:

First i pasted the image onto a blank canvas.

I then duplicated my layer with the picture. I know have two layers, both with the picture on it. I then with my copy of the first layer, changed the Blend of the layer to Hard Light (beside the opacity percentage)

Then i went to Image, at the top left, and to Adjustments, Desaturate. I then went to images, Adjustments a second time but headed to Shadows/Highlights

Once in Shadows/Highlights i changed the shadow amount to 40% and the Highlight amount 0%.

i then went back to the first layer with the original photo and lowered the Fill (underneath Opacity) to 48%.

Finally i played around with the Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge tool till i was finally happy.

By Harry Crotty

Friday, 25 January 2013

Secure and Paranoid Horror

After reading an extract from Steve Neale's 'Genre and Contemporary Hollywood' it has been made clear how through time, horror has developed into two catergories, secure horror and paranoid horror.

He says that horror prior to the 1960's used secure horror because it was scary enough, and from the 70's onwards horror "presumes a world in which the monstrous threat is increasingly beyong control" in order to please an audience whose thirst for the unknown is growing.

He catergories the characteristics of secure horror and paranoid horror in this table:

Secure Horror	Paranoid Horror
Successful human intervention	Failed human intervention
Effective expertise	Ineffective expertise
Authorities as legitimate	Authorities as unreliable
Sustainable order	Escalating disorder
‘external’ threats	‘internal’ threat
Centre-periphery organisation	Victim groups organisation
Defined boundaries	Diffuse boundaries
Closed narratives	Open narratives

We think this is going to help us to decide what kind of horror we are going to do, and keeping to the characteristics of the horror that we decide.

By Emili Hone

Thursday, 24 January 2013

What is our final narrative?

After a lot of idea's we have concluded on a narrative that is appropriate to our setting. Our opening's storyline will be portrayed through use of camera work and editing cutting between two situations. So, here it is:

A teenage girl and boy are playing hide and seek in the park.

The boy ventures into the woods and begins to feel another presence.

Meanwhile, the girl is counting alone in the park, with her hands covering her eyes.

The audience understands that something has happened to the boy, whilst the girl is left alone counting.

We then see the unknown presence watching the girl, and eventually sneaking up on her.

The name of the film then comes at the end of the opening.

We have decided to call the film "TEN" as the girl counts to ten, and is inevitably counting down to her own danger. It highlights the fact that they are playing hide and seek, a mysterious and secrtive game, which reflects the qualities of the unknown presence. We have chosen a cryptic antagonist because our research shows that people are most fearful of the unknown.

By Emili Hone, Sasha Gibson, Melissa Owen

Thursday, 10 January 2013

Location Photos

The location for filming our opening

After considering the good and bad sides to our location idea's, we settled on the idea of a park. We chose this because we wanted to set our horror in a location where people would normally feel safe. Our research showed that people felt safest when surrounded by people, and as parks are often full of people (usually innocent children), we thought that we would turn the idea on it's head and film our horror opening here. We will also use the woods that are beside the park to combine the feeling of being 'safe' in the park, with the feeling of being isolated in the forest.

The park entrance...

A shot of the scout hut and the field that is beside the park...

A goal post, signifying the youth that we associate with parks...

The woods that are beside the park...

The park itself ...

I then took pictures of aspects of the park that I thought had a 'creepy' essence. I edited them so that they were darker, and added a blue tone to the photos, to make them look more scary.