Unfortunately because of bad weather we have to postpone our filming. This was due to flooding around our area and because trains were not running from london. We thought it would be safer to film on another day when weather conditions are safer but also easy to work around.
After watching clips from the television series 'Skins' the character 'Effy' stood out due to her characteristics which we would like to incorporate in our film trailer. Below you can see a few clips from the series which shows substance abuse and the side effects.
We really like this shot of the girl as it shows her innocence and how she feels alone and there is no one to help her. I think that an idea like this would capture the feeling and emotion that we are going to try and portray in the film trailer.
This Picture is really interesting as it incorporates the idea of how the brain works when you have Schizophrenia. It captures the emotions that they feel when suffering with the disease. It also shows the different sides of the person and how it can make them act like different people.
This picture is really interesting as it shows the different sides of the eye. I think this could show that what we see is completely different to what she sees. I think that it explains that there is more than meets the eye. I like this concept because it also looks like loads of people/voices are trying to talk to her which is one thing that people with the disease have to face
After looking into different mental illnesses we found that we liked the idea of portraying someone who had Schizophrenia. We felt we could create a unusual spin on this and we found that it relates to the rest of our ideas.
Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and disabling brain disorder that makes people think they can hear voices that other people can't hear. They believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or plotting to harm them. This can terrify the person with the illness and can make them withdrawn or extremely agitated. Another example of this is that people with the disorder may not make sense when they talk. They may sit for hours without moving or talking. Sometimes people with schizophrenia seem perfectly find until they talk about what they are thinking.
The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are:
Hallucinations
Delusions
Thought disorders
Movement disorders
The negative symptoms of schizophrenia are:
"Flat affect" - a person's face does not move or he or she talks in a dull or monotonous voice
Lack of pleasure in everyday life
Lack of ability to begin and sustain planned activities
Speaking little, even when forced to interact.
Are people with schizophrenia violent?
People with schizophrenia are not usually violent. However, some symptoms are associated with violence, such as delusions of persecution. Substance abuse may also increase the change a person will become violent.
What about substance abuse?
Some people who abuse drugs show symptoms similar to those of schizophrenia. Therefore, people with schizophrenia may be mistaken for people who are affected by drugs.
Here is a documentary about Schizophrenia.......
We felt it was important to research into this in depth as we need to have a full understanding of this disorder to allow us to relay that information into our trailer and make people think she has this disorder.
For our film trailer, we have decided to incorporate a flashback because we wanted the audience to experience both the past and present of the girls life. We have looked at trailers that include flashbacks as we wanted to analyse how they show the flashback, and also the type of shots that they use. We concentrated on film trailers in general instead of our genre social realism. We felt it would give us a broader idea of how flashbacks are incorporated within different types of genres, and then decide what the best way would be for us to include our flashback. Below are some examples of trailers that we looked at which have flashbacks in them.
We discussed as a group the concept of our trailer and decided it would be more enticing for the audience and more interesting to have a male actor as well in it.
We then developed our ideas and wanted to ensure we kept all the same features of the genre and affects that we'd researched and thought of having an abusive relationship concept, this would make the audience empathise with her. Furthermore this would enable us to use the same locations and mise en scene but have another character.
After looking further into this type of concept we found that it was the obvious choice to do so we have decided to use the concept of mental illness and how it can effect someone's life.
In our research we used multiple media sources, some of which included apps which can be seen below. The popular online photo sharing apps helped us gain an image of how we wanted to present our character and also a sense of muse-en-scene. For example Music, Costume, props and Location. Using this different range of media it has allowed us to understand the importance of social media and how it impacts the marketing and promotion of a concept. It allowed us to get feedback and also understand how we should promote our trailer and ideas.
Seeing this music video inspired us to possibly feature captions in the same style of the music video which included statistics and facts about the couples relationship. We discussed about potentially featuring caption similar using facts of the girls life on the streets. This idea is unique and goes against the general conventions of a film trailer.
Examples:
'87,658 minutes of homelessness'
'863 judgmental stares'
'359 cigarettes'
'60 nights sleeping rough'
'60 cold nights'
'36 hungry days''
'12 bad come downs'
'416 tears shed'
'£35.17 earned begging'
'2 attempts to help' '1 suicidal thought'
For our film trailer we have decided to emote certain feelings throughout as we feel that this will capture the essence of a social realism film. We will do this by sound, camera angles, miss-en-scene and editing.
The setting that we have chosen is various locations around the London area. From prior research, we have looked into different settings of London and what type of shots have been used to show the atmosphere. The areas that we have decided to feature are:
council estate
cafe
church
underground/train stations
high streets
park
tunnel
Sound:
From our previous blog post we decided to use non-diegetic sound as we feel a soundtrack will allow us to capture the feeling of the character without her having to speak. However, we will write a script in which we will have the actress speaking in some places throughout the trailer. The aspect that we need to be careful about is making sure that the film trailer does not look like a music video. Some ideas include:
Throughout the trailer, we will use a variety of camera shots that will capture the actress's emotion. To do this we will use close-ups, medium shots, low and high angle shots and establishing shots. We feel the establishing shots will capture the setting and also the atmosphere around her. At the beginning, we have chosen to include London as the setting because it is heavily associated with social realism.
Mise-en-Scene:
We have researched into the types of costumes that we think would fit the character of our actress, and our reasons behind these costumes are stated in previous posts. Also, the use of props are very important in our film trailer, as it symbolises our character in a way that grabs the audiences attention.
Editing:
When editing our footage, we want to promote deeper thought into an every day occurrence of homelessness. It will give an insight into what they have to go through everyday and how they have to deal with it. The tempo of the trailer will build up towards the end, using fast cuts. We will introduce fade in and fade outs in between shots at the beginning to show a contrast. We will be able to show binary opposition because of how we are going to costume her and the life she leads compared to the general public in London.From the trailers we have looked at, this is used regularly to encourage an audience to watch a film.
We will be using alcohol bottles in some scenes of the trailer but as our actor is under the age limit (17) we will be using empty bottles or ensure there is only water in them.
The side effects of drinking alcohol could make the actor unaware of her surroundings and could result in her losing consciousness.
Smoking
Our actor will be smoking in some scenes, we have spoken to her and she has agreed to do this as she already smokes in her everyday life.
Drugs
In the scenes that we are using 'drugs' we will need to test out materials that look like these drugs as we will obviously not be using the real things unless they are pills such as 'paracetamol'.
Location
We will need to make sure we bring someone dad with us when we go to these places to make sure we are safe and that there is someone who can watch out for us while we are filming.
The name for our trailer has been chosen by our target audience as we felt that this would allow them to feel part of the making for our trailer.
They name they have chosen is 'MANDY'. We all like this name as we are able to use it as the name for our character. The name is eye catching and is simple. 'Mandy' is also a type of drug which relates to our idea. Following on from the blog post below, we have just briefly thought of a few fonts that could work for the name and how we would want it to look when the character writes it.
The
idea behind using the diary as one of our main props is to incorporate the
captions within the diary entries. We thought that doing this it would allow us
to explore the different types of filming we could do in order to make the
words come out of the page.
We also think that at the beginning of our trailer
we are going to have the main character reciting a diary entry to set the mood
as a voiceover. We also thought that the character could sign off the diary
entry with her name and that can be used at the end of the film trailer as the
final shot.
Here is the production logo animation for our trailer that will appear at the beginning. From the previous blog post about the idea of using trees we came up with this design and felt it was appropriate for the genre we are using.
The leaves and the name of the production company falling represents our name and the idea of many ideas that could be thought of. We chose to have fallen falling from the tree as its something different and iconic to our company. We chose the plain black and white colours as this fits in with the genre of our film and also it is a blank canvas allowing us to create anything we wanted. We think that the black and white is simplistic and it doesn't take away from the design of the leaves falling.
Logo
We experimented with the different colours we could use for the logo name. Below you can see the different colours we tried out and the final idea. We will use this logo on our blog, website and poster to represent us. The black around the corner looks grungy and dirty and thats the look we are going for.
For our target audience research, we decided to ask a number of different people that we considered to be our target audience a couple of questions. They consisted of describing a mood board and also what name they would prefer the film to be called. This broadened our research of the film title as we already had a poll on our blogger homepage with a voting system. Below is the video that we created with the target research in.
As a class, we created short films to represent a particular theory. Our group created a short film for Levi Strauss, it is the first film within this movie.
We have been researching logo ideas, and we want to involve the idea of something falling, due to our name being 'Fallen Productions'. We have therefore come up with a mood board of different images and ideas which we could incorporate into a logo. We are also thinking of making an animation for the beginning of our film trailer to appear as the production animation. Below is the mood board of our ideas:
Following these ideas we have created a production animation which you can view here
For our film trailer, we have been researching how to promote and attract an audience into watching the film. Below is an example of a method of promotion.
Carrie:
This film wanted to market their remake of the film, and therefore decided to do a coffee shop prank, which was related to the film. The prank consisted of a 'possessed' women who has 'telekinetic powers'. Below is the video which was filmed throughout the duration of the prank.
We created a voting poll to see what other people thought was the best name for our film trailer. This can be seen in a previous post. The voting poll for the title name has now closed and the results are below:
The results show that 'Mandy' was voted for the most. 'Fast Lane' and 'Haze' were joint 2nd with 4 votes and 'Pep Love' last with only two votes. From these results, it tells us what our target audience would want our film to be called, which we will debate and see whether it agrees with our story.
As well as the poll, we will be looking to ask some more people and interview them to see what they think would be the best name for our film trailer and why. This will deepen our target audience research, and will ensure to fulfil the needs of those who are most likely to watch our film trailer.
We decided to take photos of places in London as this is one of the locations we were considering for our trailer.
Our favourite image is the underground station sign as some people may link this to where beggers or buskers go to try and get money and they can also use it as a place for shelter, secondly the sign is brightly lit but high up this could be implying that there is hope or happiness but its just far away or needs to be found.
Secondly we liked the picture of the begger as you can see the floor is really dirty and wet and he's all alone sitting at the side showing he has possibly no friends or no one to turn to.
Looking at other social realism films, we have decided that it would be appropriate for our trailer to be rated 15. We feel that the use of drugs, alcohol, and smoking would be more applicable for the age if 15 and over. Below we have included some examples of social realism films, and their ratings. This helped us to distinguish the differences in the films, and why they were classified their rating.
Contains strong language and moderate sex references
From the examples, there is a lot of variation between different social realism films and how they are rated. It appears that the use of drug use and strong violence gives the films a higher classification (usually 15 or 18), and that moderate scenes of sex references have a lower rating.
From the research, we feel that the rating of our film trailer, 15, would be appropriate, as there will be the appearance of drug and sex use and possibly moderate violence.
