Moodboard

I have decided to gather pictures from our overall final idea to visualise what we intend to do and what we hope to achieve in the opening sequence.

Target Audience-22-30, primary-males,like socialising and horror film, well educated.

Actors- Ciara and James-James will be OCD and Ciara will be distressed kidnapped girl

Kitchen-OCD,neat,tidy,clean

Characterisation-Geeky,tidy,gelled back hair,suits,looks very ordinary

Shed-number four,ECU of girls hands etc,polaroids

Camerawork-close ups, Extreme close ups, medium close ups,Long shots, disorientation

The Cast

Distressed Girl, Girl Number 3: Ciara

• Ciara will be playing the distressed girl locked in the shed
• She has won an oscar at an early age
• She achieved an A* in GCSE drama
• She loves acting and is looking forward to taking up her role
• She is convient because she is in our group so she will be there at all times when shooting is taking place; eliminating the chance of delayed shooting due to unreliability

Charlie Smiles: James 

• James is a keen actor
• He likes acting and volunteering to act in our sequence immediately
• Like Ciara he is part of our filming group so he will be reliable and available 
• He is looking forward to getting into his role 

Editing

House scene

In this clip, before the man is cutting his toast he is removing his cutlery from the plastic bag. A series of jump cuts are used here. This looks extremely effective and contradicts the idea that everything is perfect. It highlights what he is doing and reinforces that what he is doing is extremely strange.

Shed Scene
Psyco Shower Scene


Similarly here, a series of jump cuts are used but for a slightly different effect. The jump cuts here make the audience feel uneasy and add to the scariness of the scene. The editing style is effective. We could use this technique in the shed scene to add to the idea of the girl feeling disorientated and scared.
We realise as Media students that using jump cuts could be quite risky as our examiner may not realise that we used them to add to the effect of the piece, and instead think that it is just poor editing. We will use the test editing time to see how effective these jump cuts are and use them if they look good and professional.


Vacancy

Vacancy, Section 8: Slow reveal of female victim

The first two minutes of this section of the movie uses a similar style of editing that we want to use in the first section of our sequence. Not much is giving away, we see CUs of her face, and her surrounding but and no long shots are used. In doing this we aim to achieve a sense of mystery, we want to hold something back from the audience so that they want to continue on to watch the film. 

The pace of this section here is also slow, we want to use this idea of a slow reveal to create a sense of long suffering pain and misery. At the same time, we want to show a lot in this section, we need to reveal to the audience elements of the story but at the same time be cautious not to give too much away. 

Other effects 

When editing we also what to create the effect that this girl, who has been captured, feels lost, uneasy and disorientated. In order to achieve this we want to use 

• blurring out shots to give us a sense of her surroundings from her point of view. 

The second picture of the first row could be similar to a shot we shoot. This still seems slightly blurred. This will add to her sense of disorientation, making the audience feel uneasy. 

• jump cuts as mentioned before
• blank screens. A blank screen would add to the sense of disorientation and again make the audience feel uneasy. It could be as if we are seeing everything from her point of view, and at this point she is blinking. 

Title Sequence - Credits Placement

When thinking about the placement of credits you have three main options:

• The first is to have basic, bold credits in the middle of the screen, this is the formal option to pretty much get the credits over and done with.
• The second is you could have the credits co-opirated into the actually film, e.g in a poster or replection on a window, this is a more modern way.
• The third is to have them on screen when introducing the actors/actresses, so we know which actors plays which role.

A good example of the first technique to place the credits is 'silence of the lambs'.





As you can see from this video the words are big and bold and right in the middle of the screen, this tells us that what is going ojn in the background isn't that important as they wouldn't be covering up anything that has any significance to the story.


A good example of the second technique is 'Panic Room'.






As you can see from the video the credits are in-corperated into the scene, this is more interesting than the third option and it tells us that the film is likely to either be clever or modern.


A good example of the third technique is 'Diagnosis Murder'





In this example the names of the actors only appear when you can see their faces, when it moves on to other actors then the names change. This is commonly done in dramas.


Conclusion


From the research we have done on the placement of credits we have decided to go with the first technique as it suites a horror film more than the others, technique no. 2 suits action or comedy films and technique no.3 suits TV dramas more than films. However we will not have the words in the middle of the scene as the audience needs to be focusing on what is going on in the opening sequence.

Location Stills For Our Final Idea

Here are some stills from our new location (my house)

As you can see the kitchen is much tidier than the previous location, it is more minimalistic and more realistic for an OCD person to live in.

The shed is small and cosy, it will really make the audience feel closed in on, and costraphobic. It will not look like a nice place to be in at all.

The garden is quite long and there is an easy route from the shed to the house.

 

 

As you an see there is able to be a good shot of the door from the hallway as the man enters the house. you can even have a shot of the door from the stairs.

 

Technical Research

Proposal - Final Idea

Our initial proposal was not signed off by Ms. Blackborow. Therefore, we have to create a new proposal with a new idea.
We will try to keep the sequence the same but tweeking  few minor aspects to create an overall much better sequence.

Second Proposal - Final Idea
The sequence starts with a steadi-cam shot towards the shed, snaking around the hedge and through a key hole or hole in the door into the shed.

Once inside the shed the camera will sharply drop down and snake along the floor. As the camera snakes through it runs into her feet. There is then an extreme CU of her bound hands and then her eyes. We see her eyes dis-orientatedly rushing round the room looking at photos stuck onto the walls.

The camera cuts away to close ups of some of the photos, as if from her eyes, to reveal more detail of the photos. We can see that they are photos of other girls in her situation. The shots won't be held long, and the cuts will be very tight, in-order to help dis-orientate the audience and bring them in to the same feeling as the girl.

We then play the clip again but in rewind, to take us back through the hole, and down the garden towards the house, but all moving backwards as the shot is being rewound. The shot ends up back through the garden door and into the kitchen. In the kitchen we are introduced to the second, main character.

As we first see him, he will be staring down the garden to the shed at the end of the garden, as if he was in a pyschotic trance. The toaster will then pop, as this happens his mind set and mood will change into a more ordinary everyday character. The camera pans around the entire kitchen and we get a sense of the neatness of everything. However, the room isn't just tidy its obsessively neat. We finally see the guys clothing, which is also pristine.

The man turns and opens the fridge, we get an over the shoulder shot of the fridge as he bends down to reach for the butter, and all we can see is the fridge perfectly organised. Once the toast has been made he sits down to listen to the radio and eat his toast.

As the radio is turned on a song comes to a close, and a news announcment comes on. It describes how the third mystery dissapearance of a third girl took place the day before.

The man walks to his calender, circles a third date. The two dates already circled are representative of when the other two girls were kidnapped. We then get a cut away to a close up of the clock, which strikes eight. The man picks up his keys and walks back through the house to the front door, and leaves. As if any other normal day.

The screen cuts away to the Title of the film then the sequence ends.

Teacher Feedback To Proposals

Teacher Feedback to First Proposal

Here is a lists of points our teacher made about or First idea, and how we could improve our idea:

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  We were trying to tell two stories, we have a character with OCD, and the same character him kidnapps girls, it's too complicated with both stoies
  
  
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  Our teacher loved the fact we had an OCD character as it is original
  
  
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  She liked the kitchen scene, with the toaster popping, showing an average day
  
  
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  She thought if we had an OCD kidnapper then his kidnappings would all have to be OCD, with everything perfect
  
  
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  She didn't like our location as it was too homely and not the sort of house a person with OCD would live in
  
  
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  She thought that our 2 minute opening sequence was trying to tell the whole story to the film
  
  
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  Our teacher said that there was no sense to who's the opposite, what she meant was that there was no one challenging the kidnapper like a detective or a victim that wants to fight back.
  
  

After we got this feedback we had a group meeting and discussed how we would change our final idea. here is a list of things we have changed:

• 
  
  We have changed the location to my house, it is tidier and looks more like a house someone with OCD would live in
  
  
• 
  
  We have kept the kitchen scene
  
  
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  We have the kept the OCD kidnapper
  
  
• 
  
  Instead off starting with a shot of the kitchen we start with a shot of the kidnapped girl

• 
  
  alot less goes on in our scene now to stop us telling the whole story

Teacher Feedback to Second Proposal

After getting our feedback we all spoke about it and worked on a new narrative a new loaction and finalised the character. We then proposed again and we were passed allowing us to move on to planning for our shooting weekend. Here's some feeback our teacher gave us after the second proposal

• Loved new locations

• Questioning eyesight from the shed to the house-will it work

• Perhaps use the exterior of one shed and the interior of the other so we get a good shot from thw window to the house

• Complete transformation-really likes it

We can now start storyboarding and preparing shooting schedules

Proposal - First Idea

Here is the hand-out we gave out to the cless that went along with our presentation. It offers additional information we may not of covered in the presentation and it gives us the key point to genre, target audience, synopsis and character.

Ciara:Today we presented our proposal for our final idea. I think it went well perhaps we should have focused on how we were going to structure the proposal more. I talked about the synopsis of the opening sequence and about the target audience

James: I think our presentation went well, we covered all the main topics, including genre, characteristics (OCD), actors/location and the target audience. In my opinion we could of delivered the presentation better, what we were talking about was good but our presentation wasn't structured enough.

Spencer: Today we presented our initial proposal. I think the presentation went well, however we could have included more information on the character and location. Also i feel that we did not elaborate on the plot enough and explain the style of shooting we would use.

India: I thought the way we delivered the presentation was good as wel covered every aspect we needed to, also i think that our handout (see above) was good and it explained everything clealy.

Shooting Location Stills For Our First Idea

Here are the stills from our First Idea's chosen shooting location. It gives a variety of shots from the four main locations, kitchen, hallway, garden and shed.
However, the quality of some of the shots are not very good as they were shot in the dark. But we will be shooting in the day so lighting problems should be resolved.
Also, the location is still fairly messy, due to it being lived in, but we hope to tidy the location prior to shooting in order to get across the OCD symptoms of our main character.
I have attempted to organize the photos from the location as a walk through plan. Starting at the bottom with the house front, and working your way up, everything is placed roughly where it would be in the actual location.