Final location choices

I think we've now all decided that our final locations will be:

-Elena's spare room for the scene inside, we hope to all go to Elena's and film the entire scene next week sometime. 

-Grovelands Park for the scene in the wood, we are hoping it wont be really busy and full of dog walkers! If it's too busy there we may have to move on to Hilly Fields and shoot the woods scene there ..

All ready for my big day..

So the wedding dress came... Woo. I had to stand in the queue in the post office for what seemed like a millennia! I excitedly ripped the bag containing the dress open to find a large, white, frilly weird smelling dress. No seriously, it smells like a mix of elderly home and old charity/vintage shops, but I kind of like it. The dress took me a full half an hour to iron and I used half a can of starch spray in the process. Then a week later the veil arrived all the way from Shanghai oh god. As you can see from the picture I'm clearly too excited by all of this and I cannot wait to film!

Films I need to see next year...

Ebay bidding war

I HAVE NEVER EVER BEEN SO HAPPY IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Okay. I won the bidding war I managed to get myself into on ebay and we now have a wedding dress to use in our film, praise the lord above! I will post some pictures of it and of the veil I bought when I get it through the post. The anticipation is a killer though, can't wait! 

Possible location

I went to Grovelands Park yesterday to take some photos for photography. While I was there I realised that it would be quite a good location for the woods scene in our film opening (excuse the quality of the photos, they were all taken on my iphone...)

Plasticine Storyboard

Finally this video is on youtube! We did upload it last week but it got blocked because we used some copyrighted music, oops/sigh... So Khadija and I got a bit keen a couple of weeks ago and decided that a paper storyboard would be a bit too boring so we were going to make it out of plasticine instead. I drew up the storyboards on paper anyway so that we would have a guide to look at while filming the plasticine storyboard. We also thought that this would be quite handy when it comes to filming our final footage because we are having quite a few extras in our film and we don't want to have to keep bringing them all out to film a few seconds of footage. Therefore, we made this mock film where we put our ideas into life and tried to show all of the different shot types and camera angles we are going to use.

Whole group vlog, wow!

Finally a vlog with all three of us, yes! I'm not entirely sure why we did this vlog though, we just thought we'd better have one all together. Anyway moving on, we're just talking about the things we need to sort out in order to start filming. Excuse the part where I talk about the cancer research building, I'd obviously had too much coffee...

Last week in media...

(Warning contains spoilers...)

Last week in media we watched 'Se7en' I was dreading seeing this film because I just cannot survive horror movies and I'm pretty sure I'm the biggest wimp alive! After seeing the film I have decided to re-evaluate my hate for 'horror' films because this wasn't scary. I love watching crime documentaries and dramas so this film, being about a serial killer, was right up my street. The killer in this film believed that it was his job to do God's work in ridding the world of people that commit the seven deadly sins (see picture), so he killed five people that he believed were undeserving of life.

The first death and sin committed was gluttony. The man died because he ate so much spaghetti his stomach split open! I thought that this murder was disgusting, it seemed as though all of the man's veins were visible and it was clear that he had been there for some time. 

The second death and sin committed was greed, the man was forced to cut off a pound of his flesh and he then proceeded to bleed to death.

The third murder and sin committed was sloth, the man was deprived of food for a whole year and kept alive with drugs and medication. I thought that this scene was particularly gruesome and memorable because when the police discovered the man, we were lead to believe he was dead, but then he gasped and opened his eyes! well done to the make up team for making the man look like a decomposing corpse!

The fourth murder was someone that committed the sin of lust. A man was threatened with a gun and forced to have sex with a prostitute while wearing the contraption in the picture, um yeah yuck!
















The fifth murder was of a woman who had committed the sin of pride. The murderer cut off the woman's nose and gave her two options, a phone to call an ambulance so she would survive but would live with a facial disfigurement. Or a bottle of sleeping pills so that she could commit suicide. This 'murder' confused me because I'm pretty sure that as the woman chose to die, her death wasn't actually a 'murder' as such.

*Queue confusing plot twist*
So the victim of pride seemed to be the last of the murders, but alas, there are still two more sins left and no more bodies. John Doe, the murderer, takes detectives Mills and Somerset out into the middle of nowhere and explains to them that there is a surprise coming at seven o'clock that he absolutely cannot wait for them to see. Then lo and behold a delivery van arrives. The delivery man states that he was told to arrive at seven o'clock and he hands detective Somerset a brown cardboard box. The box contains the head of detective Mills' wife. John Doe then goes on to explain that she in fact is the victim of envy because he wants to have the life that detective Mills leads. Detective Mills' wife wouldn't agree to it so John Doe killed her. Detective Mills is angry and upset that John Doe has killed his wife so he then proceeds to shoot him more than enough times to kill him which is clearly just a waste of usable bullets. So now we've all come to realise that John Doe was the murder victim of the sin 'wrath' and the role of the murderer has now fallen into detective Mills' hands. Confusing, I know. 

Concept vlog

So we've finally come up with our concept!

Vlog

This is a vlog with me and Khadija talking about the filming of our plasticine storyboard.

Productive media morning

Khadija's brilliant brain came up with the idea that we should film our storyboard using plasticine figures so that we could see what sort of angles and shot types we will use when filming our final film to avoid any time wasting when on location. Here are some photos from our little experiment:

Weather conditions

We were hoping to film some of our film opening in some foggy woods, to do this we've realised we're going to have to get up relatively early so that the fog doesn't rise. There were a couple of foggy mornings last week and being the early bird that I am I managed to get a few photos:

                        

Practice reverse shots

This is one of the shots we took when we went to Forty Hall!

Reverse shot practice

After much trouble with youtube not working on the school macs, I have finally managed to get this video onto youtube at home! We have edited some of the footage I managed to get on one of the beaches in Wales and decided to see what it would look like in reverse. We were thrilled with the outcome and plan to hopefully use it for the opening credits or production/company name in our film opening. 

Reverse shot practice

We had quite a lot of difficulties trying to upload these few clips onto iMovie, but they weren't compatible so Khadija had to put them all onto her phone. At first she said she had some problems trying to put the clips in reverse because I don't think windows movie maker is that advanced :S. However, from this video I can see that she has put a lot of effort in to making it look good! We wanted to try some reverse shots with people in them and after trying it out with someone just walking we decided that wasn't the sort of look we wanted to go for because it was far too calm and almost boring. So together we all decided that it would look brilliant to record a fight scene and put it into reverse, and by the looks of this video I don't think we were wrong! Well done Khadija, and the song goes really well with it by the way! 

Planning session

Today Khadija and I made up some rough storyboards for our film opening, we also had a discussion with Miss Foster about the concept for our film opening and she seemed to like it *phew*. In the next week we plan to go out Location scouting so we can confirm the locations for each of our shots. We also need to visit some charity shops and vintage shops to try and find a fairly chaep second hand wedding dress. However, if worst comes to worst me and Khadija are textiles students so we could always make one! 

Concept ideas

After school today we had a very intense team meeting in Starbucks to discuss the concept for our film opening. Here we are looking all intellectual with our big brainstorming page and a large mug of energy boosting coffee! Our ideas page was a little messy to say the least, so I came home and wrote it up in neat, hopefully this idea for our film opening is better than the last!

We came up with lots of different ideas and finally settled on the idea of our character having some sort of mental illness. I went and did some research on mental illnesses and what they cause, we then used this to decide what mental illness our character would have. Here are some pictures of our planning:

Mac 3 Pitch

Last lesson we had a discussion with Miss Foster about the concept for our film opening. As you can see we haven't quite come up with the concept, we have lots of different ideas that all sort of tie in together but we have absolutely no idea how we could make a film of any length out of them! Hopefully we'll be taking a rather intense trip to Starbucks tomorrow so we can get it all sorted out. I think we need to redo our concept vlog once we've fully decided what we're doing, obviously there are a lot of changes to be made! 

Inspiration

This is an example of the sort of reversed film we're hoping to create. I think reverse film is very effective because it makes the viewer really think about what's going on as they have to try and re-reverse it in their head while they're watching it. It all sounds a bit confusing! Anyway, we've reversed some shots of the sea in Wales and when the internet is back up in school we'll be able to upload them onto youtube. Today we filmed a shot of the clouds moving, it's such a simple idea yet it looks so effective when sped up, we reversed the clip but it practically looked the same as in non-reverse so we're not sure! 

Inspiration

I've been searching for the opening scene of Fight Club for the past hour now (dedication at it's finest) but I give up! We wanted to show an example of a film that begins with the ending, so hopefully I'll be able to think of another film that uses a similar concept.

Today we were trying to think of some ways in which we could show the character in our film opening as having some sort of mental disability. We thought that it would look good if the character was filmed standing next to quick flashes of herself. Fight Club is a good example of this sort of technique, the main character suffers from insomnia, his fragile mental state is represented in the flashes he sees of his alter-ego. Hopefully we will be able to achieve something like this!

Photos

Here are some photos from today's escapade:

Forty Hall

Me with the makeshift dolly (my skateboard) on the way to Forty Hall

Once again with the snazzy media rucksack *face palm

Looking cool with the makeshift dolly (my skateboard)

Elena in the process of breaking the shed

The shed is now broken! 

Realisation that this is not a good thing

Me accidentally 'throwing' Elena to the floor 

Trying to drag Elena across the floor *sigh*

Elena being all dead and creepy

Me trying to look guilty :S

Fifth Vlog!

Finally we have a vlog with Elena in it! Miss Foster was ill today so we decided to go out and practice filming some of our ideas, we were going to try a tracking shot of me walking so that we could see what it looked like in reverse, but my skateboard was making the camera a bit shaky so unfortunately we had to ditch that plan. Instead we filmed a bit of a 'fight' scene to see what it would look like in reverse, this just resulted in me throwing Elena to the floor several times while getting some very strange looks from passers by, oops! 

Mind map

I did a little mind map of some ideas for our film opening, hopefully there's something there that Elena and Khadija like :]

Wales photos

So our group have decided to do some sort of horror/psychological thriller type film opening and while in Wales (surprise, surprise), we came across a small city/village type place called St David's. To my greatest delight there was a very old and creepy looking cathedral there, so I managed to film some of it and I also took some photos so we could hopefully gain some inspiration. 

Fourth vlog, Wales

Prepare for the exotic location vlog in sunny... Wales. I've come to the conclusion that I really need to stop starting a vlog with a cheesy "Hey" or "It's me", because who else would it be? Force of habit I guess! It was a bit windy as you can hear, but a great experience, luckily it was a nice day! 

Being thoughtful at the top of a 'mountain' (hill really...)

The snazzy media rucksack being all photogenic and such

Wales!

I'm in Wales at the moment and I've been lugging the snazzy media rucksack along with all of the equipment up and down hills and mountains like the dedicated student I am. So far I've made a vlog at the top of a big hill and I've done some filming at the beach which we might be able to use. I'm off surfing tomorrow so I might be able to get some good footage there!