rhys tech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27YIQ1xKIBM

Final film thriller opening:

.

Debra MacMillan

Age 19

Boyfriend

White

Middle classed

Lives with her mum, step dad, younger brother and 2 younger sisters in a council house in the outskirts of a big town

Studies beauty therapy and works part time at the cinema distributing popcorn

Debra enjoys going out drinking with her mates on the weekend, either to a friend’s house or out clubbing. Aims to become a hair dresser and one day open her own salon

Tyrelle

Age 21

Black

Single

Upper middle class

Lives at home with mum and dad in a nice house in the suburbs

Studies sports at university and a part time bartender

Tyrelle enjoys playing sports such as football and cricket. He also plays alot of video games in his spare time. Aims to become a P.E teacher or personal trainer.

Our target audience is aged from 15-late 20s. Lower to upper middle class males and females. Although predominately more males. We have aimed the film at this type of audience as they are the main cinema customers. Our target audience would mainly be from the working class as and at a wide variety of classes to optimise viewers. We’ve tried to achieve this by creating character that the tagert audience would be interested in. By making them roughly the same age and of the same class we hope the audience would be attracted to Bill. We have kept the violence, swearing and sexual content to a minimum of BBFC guidelines to make Bill no more restricted than a 15 so we don’t lose any of our audience and opening it to the wider public. We took our questionnaire results into consideration as this was from our target audience that we needed to cater to, so tried to make a contemporary film, with added noir aspects and stylistics.

Attarct/address the audience

We tried to make a story line that the audience would buy into. And make it based in a place that our target audience may have grown up or are currently occupant. We also made it so the audience could relate to on so many level; Abusive relations ships, Making hard decisions, Taking the wrong path in life, Growing up in a rough area, all things that our target audience may personally have encountered or know people that have.

The characters were based on people that actually exist in real life, we all know a ‘jack the lad’ and a mysterious girl. The ordinary type of people caught up in sticky situations to get out of hand, and try to make the audience feel interacted as this could happen to someone they know or themselves and can relate. And the costumes reflected the commonness of the characters of the casual clothing, to how they act.

We tried to incorporate the titles in with the shots and editing so that the audience could digest the text whilst consuming the footage but also to keep the audience interested and reframe them from getting bored of solid text. We also tried to keep the pace of the piece quite fast to keep the audience attention and interested. But not too fast that you can’t see the emotions and the ideology behind some shots eg blood on the hands and sitting all alone, feeling alone in the world. We used a piece of music that we thought would give an effect of uneasiness and that something had done wrong. Music that gave an edge on the whole piece further more leaving the audience questioning.

We hope the attraction came from the setting of your average place in England that everyone has seen, been to, lives in. And that the characters are easily related to and that people know or are just like these character. Also that the storyline can be interpreted to so many things that people also can touch into; violence, relationships, love. And that the enigma of what happened and the questions keep them hooked and really involved in the story and the characters.

individual evaluation

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our Media film thriller opening product mainly focuses and represents the younger youth; we had 4 typical British teenagers aged 18-20 acting in our product. Involving the non-glamorous and unloved side of teenager’s life this made it more easy to relate to the audience target we was aiming to get which was from the age 15-22years old. Our film involves violence, victims, love, friendships, guilt, drugs and alcohol, it shows the reality of today what happens in teenagers life so I think the audience could relate to the situation that are happening in our opening. But I do feel that all our themes we have used in our opening would represent ever teenager who watches it. Also I thought the clothing and props are used well in the scene to represent the younger youth social groups as the actors just wore what they would wear if they were going shopping or just casual clothing.

Also the main character is a typical cocky, popular, good looking, stylist and who can get the girls this makes me think that male teenagers who watch this could look up to him wanting to be what is described as him. Our opening doesn’t really represent the older audience. However when they watch this they could probably relate to the situations that happen to the British teenagers as this could be their views on typical British teenagers now a days. I feel that we did a good job at making our product represent teenagers well as we looked into our films that represented the same audience such as films like Skins, Adulthood and Kidualhood. Also we used our props, locations and actors to make our film relate to our teen and young adult audience as much as possible.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our main audience we were trying to attract to our film opening product was teenagers particularly ages between 15-22years old. Also I feel that our product could be seen for the lower middle class audience as this is likely who will be buying our film as it’s a low British budget film.  A reason why we have picked the audience to be aged between 15-22 years old is also because these ages are the highest population in Britain. Our film is also certificated as a 15 instead of it be an 18 this lets the ages 15-17year olds still see it. To make it a 12 certificated film we would have had to cut out the language, blood, violent and drug scenes to make it safer for the aged 12 year olds to watch this. We choose not to do this as the film mainly relied on these scenes and the film would not have been as affected to the audience as we wanted it to be to. But then it could have benefited our film as it would be viewed by a wider rage of aged audience but then could be a disadvantage as well.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Our film opening would be an independent British low budget distributor such like film4 and our film could also be seen on E4 and channel four as many other films that are shown on these channels are for the young youth group such as the film Skins and inbetweeners. It will be co-produced by a British company which will be a low budget film which Film Four is so this would be a brilliant company to show our film “bill”. Also I think we have chosen a British base company as in our film we have used a lot of British culture such as the actors are British and the location etc.   

Our film would be shown in small and independent cinemas such as the Ipswich such as the cinema cineworld. As teenagers and young adults will be seeing the film “Bill” we would not want it to be too expensive and cineworld is perfect as it’s a lower price then say theatres so this would let the audience being able to afford to go see our film “Bill”.

What we used to create our film “Bill”:

Preproduction:

We used Communication technology to communicate with each other to let know what times places to be at this made it much easier and less worried because we was organised. Also as we could contact each other we could let the group know if one of us was going to be late letting the group start with out them this meant we didn’t loose any time and our film was not rushed when making it.  We used face book, emails, MSN and phones to text and call each other to keep in contact with each other.

GROUP NOTES-SHOOTING

 

During shooting we decided to make a few changes:

When we shot the street scene we decided to take more shots than we had planned, we planned to take a total of 4 shots, however we decided to take a wider variety of shots in order to have a greater choice, in total we took about 8 or 9 different shots for that scene.
Because of this when we started editing we had a wide choice of shots and so we could keep continuity and interest in that scene as the shots weren’t too long.

When we shot the main part of the opening we kept to the main storyboard of ideas, however we used different shot types again in order to create a better, more interesting clip.
We also tested different coloured light filters in order to create a better lighting appearance but decided that the natural colour of the light appeared the best.
Also during the first long shot we filmed, we used a piece of card with strips cut out in order to create a Venetian blind effect. We did this in order to keep to the stylistics of classic film noir apparent in our contemporary noir opening.

Pre-Production

For the pre-production work I created the questionnaire and gave them out which helped us have a rough idea how to make our film opening connect with the audience. Also I helped fill in the group roll sheets and call sheets. Also I helped make up the script for the voice over.

When we were filming I used the camera and shot scenes I wasn’t in for example the one of the flash scene when the man is beating up the girl. I also acted in the film opening as I was the girls friend who was walking down the. For this I wore simple clothing which I would wear everyday such as shopping. I didn’t wear anything over the top as we tried to make Larni look like the main character I was just an extra who wasn’t seen anymore after the street shot. Also as a group we planned the storyline and picked the location.  

                                       

Group notes

Tuesday march 8th

- We added Light ray effects added to the flashback of the dead body give mysterious look to it.
- We added car sounds to the main (street) flashback create an urban effect
- We lowered the sound from the main flashback because it was a windy day and the sound gear picked up too much unwanted noise
- We moved the flashbacks of the dead body to make it fit to the character, because it didn’t fit in because it didn’t make sense being flashback straight after flashback.
- We added an effect called “over drive” To the flashback of the fight scene and we changed the white and gray colours to create an effect so it was clearly a flashback.
- We shortened the fight scene and sped it up to make it appear more violent and more physical to the audience.


Tuesday march 15th


- We put a fade on the shot where Ashley is opening the bathroom door and we also put a fade on the flashback where the door is being opened in order for the shot to swap over nicely and smoothly from the present to the flashback.
- We put on the title of the film “Bill” and also the production titles such as “ a teleport production” and “BXU” which are our production companies.
- We added a bit of non diegetic music at the beginning of the scene, this is our start off point for music in the scene.
- We deleted the close up shot of Ashley as it appeared too quick on the edit and so was unappealing to the eye.


Tuesday march 22nd


- We recorded the voice over and cut and paste it onto our film noir style opening
- We typed out and researched the audience views via a questionnaire


Tuesday march 29th


- We changed the colour on a clip of Ashley as the colouring stood out compared to the other clips as it was too red/orange. Because of the colour difference we altered the orange clips with a colour altering effect.
- We placed the voiceover clips in the correct place so it made the best out of the scene, we placed a large section of the voiceover on a large shot so that the clip appeared less boring to the audience.
- We decreased the volume of the music where the voiceovers were also playing so the voiceovers were audible.
- We faded the music just before the voice clips so the alteration in music was not too noticeable
- We added character titles in so the actors are known within the opening sequence, we placed the titles over the shots on an invisible background so the titles linked in well with the opening scene.

Research and Questionnaire

We created a Questionnaire to see if we could use the information we go from it to help with our film noir opening. As this would let us know what the audience are interested in seeing and what they dislike. We randomly handed them out to people and have found out that most of our audience were aged 17- 24 none were above the age 31 one, because of this result we tried to make our film noir opening a 15 as the audience age we are trying to connect with would be 15-25. Also a good twist in a film and a cliff hanger is always good and this I what a lot of people said they enjoy a film having. This is why we added a twist to our opening making the audience guessing on what has happened who has died and why. The results to the question what is your favourite genre of film were brilliant to us students who are doing a film opening as the most answered was Thriller and noir. The audience like a good storyline and characters, we are going to think of the best storyline as possible make it exciting and also will plan out our characters from how old they are, clothing, makeup and face expression. 

Story board

Script/Screen play

 

Group Members roles

Chantelle:

Larni:

Rhys:

Ashley:

Actors

Larni: female character

Ashley: main male character

Rhys: other male character

Chantelle: other female character

The exchange:

Exchange exercise:

In groups of four we will be doing The Exchange exercise which was to film a short (ours was 45 seconds) sequence of a film thriller which was called The Exchange, had to involve somehow an exchange of an item this could be anything at all from an envelope, tape or even a kidnapping exchange from one character to another. Using the style film thriller, this could be shown by the costumes, shot angle, music and location. This will also help me improve on using the camera equipment and editing and I will learn how to put over music as this will be the first time of putting a sound track over our filming.

As our group we wanted to make our 1 minute film thriller to look like a noir film as we could then look back at this task and see what does and don’t make it look noir and could use this to help us out with our final film opening. We followed the typical film noir location and therefore we filmed ours in a run down street next to a car park also there was a lot of wire fencing making it look a very dodgy place this was brilliant as we exchanged an envelope with money in it, we wanted the audience to think that it was a dodgy situation a girl giving a man an envelope full of money.

 I was the lady character in The Exchange I wore jeans and a long brown coat; we wanted the girl character to look simple and normal. The man character wore black trousers, long grey coat and black shade glasses; this was to make him look like he was in charge of the situation which was the money given to him. Also the lady looked like she was a bit nervous when she gave the money making him look like an important character. As the film idea would have been him being a drug dealer and the lady as his client. But as a group we did find out when we showed the class it that they laughed at the male character this could have been because of the glasses maybe we made him look a bit to serious especially as the audiences didn’t really know who he was. So in our final opening thriller that we will be doing we will make sure we don’t make this mistake of using humour as when humour is brought into the characters it loses the noir thriller feel to the film.

We tried out as many different shot angles such as Dutch tilt etc. As we wanted to have a few to choose from when editing and also could see what they looked like. We used a close up as the lady and male feet meeting each other. Mid shot when the envelope is passed over to the male. Over shoulder when the male character is checking the envelope to see if the money is in there. Also this shot of him doing this was filmed as a low angle, shows the audience that he is powerful as it looks like he is looking down, giving it that intimating feel to it. The first shot is a wide shot showing the whole location I found this worked as the audience know straight away where they are.

When we was editing we realised that we had a problem with continuity. As the lady was holding the money in her left hand but when she passed the money over to the male character it was filmed in her right hand. Because of this we didn’t have many shots to choose from for this bit of the film as some of the shots we could no longer use because of the continuity problem. Obviously this was a fault we did but I guess we learnt from it as we know not to do it again and make sure when filming keep everything the same or it just looks weird and stupid to the audience.

The sound over piece we added to it I thought went well with it as it was a simple slow beat and wasn’t anything over the top and it just worked and our feed back from the class agreed and said it went well and it made the audience wanted to know what was going to happen, the music contributed to this.

Preliminary exercise

We had to get into groups of 3 to do have our first attempt at filming which was our Preliminary Exercise which we had to do film someone walking down the corridor into a room and sit down and have a small conversation with someone else whiles keeping the rules of thirds. This was only a 30 second to 1 minute clip using 6-9 shots. This was just a simple exercise so we could get use to using the equipment and to get to look back it to see our mistakes or how to improve it. We had been taught the 180 degree line rule so we used this in this exercise so we could see how it worked. Whiles when we were filming we got to use different angle shots and distance. Also got to see which looked better and got to get use to using a camera as this was the first time I had used a proper filming camera. Also I acted in it as well so I had to do the shots that I wasn’t in for example when the other actor was walking down the corridor when I wasn’t in shot I filmed a close up of her feet and also when she opened the door. This experienced helped us a lot on editing and filming and the next time we filmed we would know what we were doing as this told us what we did wrong and how we could have improved it.

Synopsis and storyline to our film noir opening:

Synopsis for opening
Open with a man sitting in a corner, head in his hands covered in a hood. The man appears emotional as he throws objects from nearby over the room. He sits in the room as he thinks. As he thinks he has a flashback, seeing a man walking down a road and seeing a girl, their eyes meet and the problems begin. The film goes back to the man in the room he has various flashbacks which could link to the story which will follow, leaving an enigma for the audience.
Synopsis for rest of narrative
Later on the man is getting ready for a party with some of his friends, they talk about the girl he saw earlier that day anf he finds out from his friends that her boyfriend is a physco drug dealer.
At the party the guy and girl begin to talk then they get together, the boyfriend bursts in on them and hit’s the guy then proceeds to chase him out the house where he catches him and they both fight. During the fight the guy picks up a metal pipe that’s laying on the ground and brutally attacks the drug dealer, killing him in the process.

idea and synopsis and treatment on opening:

My idea of an opening of a film

A Girl wakes up in her mate’s bed, her hands covered in blood she looks around clueless as she doesn’t know why she’s there and doesn’t remember anything from last night. As she sits up she reaches and has a drink of water as her throat and mouth is dry as she had been drinking a lot the night before. She starts to panic and her bag is next to her so she starts to rummage around in it trying to look for her phone so she can call someone saying to her self “fuck”. As she is stressed because she has no idea what has happened she covers her face with her hands realising that her face is very painful when she touches it. She slowly walks to the mirror still covering her face, breathing heavily and hands start shaking. As her face is stinging and she is in more pain because she’s touched it. Breathing even more heavily as she starts saying to her self repeatedly “please no please no please no” When she removes her hands whiles looking at her face she screams and starts crying.

Then this is where the flashbacks begin, the first one showing you someone ruining her face, punching and slicing with a hand knife. This is showed using effects so it looks like each time she is getting punched it looks like the screen is flashing this would add an tense feel to it when the audience is watching. Also when filming this, the camera will be held by someone and it will make it look like one of the characters from the film is filming it. It’ll be filmed shaky to make the shot strange, odd and will show how the girl is distressed and is helpless. This is important that this is shown to the audience from this flashback shot as later on in the film the tape is found by the girl and this is how she finds out who has done this to her and why. The story is carried from here using a variety of flash backs and leaves the audience on the edge not know what has happening, so the audience will be thinking what has happened? Who did this to her? Why did this happen to her? Is she going to find out? Is she the good or bad character?  

The girl character in the opening scene will have long blonde hair, a lot of make up which is smudged and will be wearing a short black dress. This may show to the audience that she is the eye candy to the film, people love her because of he looks and this is shown later in the story as other characters are jealous of her because of how beautiful she is. This could also show the character that she worries about the way she looks and dresses like that to show of, maybe scene later as she is shown to be a flirt and tries to impress the boys from the way she looks. It is important that she is dressed like this as it gives the audience a feel to her character even before the film has started so they can judge the way she is just by what she is wearing.

Contempory Neo Noir Films:

contempory

Brick (2005)

StoryLine:

Brick is a neo noir film and the writer and director is Rian Johnson, made in 2005. A lonely normal high school boy called Brendan’s ex girlfriend Emily goes missing. Brendan becomes obsessed trying to find Emily and gets himself into crime and danger and won’t stop till he knows where or what has happened to her. He finally finds her dead in a tunnel and before when she was alive she told him that she was in trouble and that her killer had something to do with “Brick” and “pin”. So Brendan investigates who killed her with help from a few of his mates but this is when you see him get himself into trouble but wont stop till he finds out who killed her because he’s still in love with her. He finds out that her death involves drug dealers you find out at the end of the film why she is killed and who by. I really enjoyed this film it had a very neo noir feel to it and I loved the twist at the end.

Effects:

When the car drives fast past the main character they have used an effect to make it speed up to give the illusion car quickly approaching and looks very slick and stylist.

The flash backs are faded to give the impression of time changing and adds tension like when he passes out and wakes up where jump cuts are used.

Double Indemnity:

Double indemnity was made in 1944 and is a classic American Film Noir. The plot to this film is a successful insurance salesman gets talked into a murder and insurance fraud scheme. A lady has a rich husband and she makes him get life insurance with the salesman. The lady and the salesman murders the lady’s husband making it looks like he has fallen of the back of the train by accidence. The plan is for the lady and the salesman to collect twice the amount of insurance from the company.  

 In the first scene you are shown that the movie is in black and white which is very typical for a film noir. A man dressed smartly with a hat and pipe in his mouth returns to his office looking like he is in pain he doesn’t speak at all. There is just music in the back ground that spends up and gets faster till he picks up the phone. Starts to tell the audience why and how he got in the situation he is in and this is when flash backs are brought into the film. He admits on the phone saying” yes I killed her” this leaves the audience guessing on why, what and when he killed her.

The main female character is Phyllis Dietrichson, when you first see her on screen my first impression was she’s a blonde, stylist dresses very elegant, rich and she’s a stay at home wife. Also she’s half naked when Walter Neff comes round and meets her for the first time this shows that she is just an item and is scene as a sex symbol as the way she is looked is important to her roll she plays. Even when she goes to get dressed she put on a dress showing her famine character. You wouldn’t have expected her to be a murder which you find out later on in the movie as she looks very innocent and venerable. as the movie goes on the audience are shown that she is a strong character impression of her totally changes from the first time you show her as she convinces her insurance agent who is Walter Neff to help her murder her own husband because she isn’t happy being with him and want his money shows a powerful side to her, not the typical female character you normally see in films.   

The main male character is Walter Neff, who is an insurance salesman. He is the first character that’s introduced to the audience of him in the office looking like he’s in pain. He is dressed smartly and is in all black wearing a hat as well making him looking like a stylist classy salesman.  

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjt6KDdh6PA