Evaluation Question One

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The screen shot below is from the opening titles of the film 'Se7en'. This was our initial inspiration for the titles of our film. As you can see we have taken the black background and white writing effect from the titles of 'Se7en' and developed it further in our own opening.

We went on www.dafont.com and decided to use a similar font to the one used in these titles. We didn't want them to be too alike however as we wanted ours to be more simplistic and original.

We have also developed the idea of the book in the film 'se7en'. I had chosen to include this into our film as it adds a personal approach to Charlotte's heartache and also shows her obsession with her former boyfriend.

Instead of showing Charlotte actually writing in our diary, we just filmed the photographs, cuttings and memories that she had previously included. We took the idea of using cuttings and photo's from this clip.

We felt that many conventions of a typical thriller were that men were more often than not the villains and women were the victims. We challenged this convention of Thriller films by swapping these stereotypical characters around, with Charlotte being the villain and Ross being the victim.
We felt that this was an unexpected twist on the plot, and went against the average Thriller film. I did find however that there were existing films with female villains.

In the film 'Hard Candy' the female is the villain. We wanted to take this idea and develop it further by also including the idea of revenge from the plot. Charlotte finally gets revenge on her ex-boyfriend just like the female character does on the man in 'Hard Candy'.

Our media film challenges the usual plots, characters and effects of a typical Thriller film for teenage viewers. We have tried to create a darker concept, without much of the teenage drama and stereotypes that usually apply to a young adult. Although our film is based on love and revenge, we purposefully do not make the viewing soppy or overly emotional, when showing the lovers. We used the black and white effect to create a darker, shadowy mystery to the setting of our film and also to it's characters. We used this idea from the film Sin City, which is a recent film, with the black and white effect adding a more atmospheric touch rather than making it look old fashioned, which is what we wanted to convey in our own film.

Our film is purposefully jolty and grainy, and we felt that it went perfectly with the music. We challenged the typical high quality viewing of most modern Thrillers. We also decided against using speech in the opening as we felt that the soundtrack was enough to convey the atmosphere, and the story did not need to be explained within the first two minutes.

Amy Reeve

Our progress so far...

Ever since Charlotte and I finished producing and editing our film, we seem to have become a bit lax with posting on our blog. This week we are focusing on planning what we will be doing for our evaluation in time for the easter holidays. Hopefully after easter Charlotte and I will have either finished our evaluation or will have made good inroads into it.

We are hoping to return to where we filmed our thriller film and talk about what we were trying to achieve with the different ideas and effects that we put into it.

Am Reeve

Evaluating

Charlotte and I are at the stage now where we are going to begin our evaluation and hopefully we will be able to create the right atmosphere for it to go hand in hand with the style of our film. We shall be filming our evaluation and so we would like to create idea that we are doing an interview of the cast and the makers of 'Liason'. We shall hopefully answer some important questions and manage to explain the process of filming.

Amy Reeve

What's left to do...

Charlotte and I are now happy with our thriller opening. We feel that we have fully edited our footage and we are pleased with our choice of music and effects that we have used. All we have left to do is to blog what we have done in full detail, we are also planning on posting extra information to give an insight into the progress we made throughout the project and any issues we came across. We need to do an evaluation, which Charlotte and I are planning to film in the style of a; 'Behind the scenes interview'. We shall take it in turns to question one another on our characters and then we shall both talk about the process of filming. I am hoping to upload our film onto youtube so it will be on our blog before half term. We are also asking for advice on whether we need to change anything in our film, or if people who have viewed it have any suggestions as to what might make it better.

Filming progress

Reeve came over mine last Sunday to film the rest of our project. First of all I filmed the bedroom scene with Amy and Ross in bed asleep. I got a few different shots of them that we've used in our film, including one mid shot of Amy alone that is used at the end after you see Ross hanging from the tree. Amy then filmed me walking through the forest, using a range of different shots, most of them long shots and filmed from behind me. When we came to Ross hanging from the tree, I was originally going to kill him using a gun, however we decided this would be too hard to film, as we wanted to actually film the bullet being shot from the gun. Instead, he is hung with a noose round his neck (though you don't actually see this) from a tree. I filmed a mid shot of his legs dangling, and at this time the sun was just setting so the light creates a slight silhouette and looks perfect. We then went back to mine and continued to film: I went outside and filmed a few shots of Amy and Ross in the window, kissing. I have mesh curtains which created a silhouette of the two lovers with the light behind them. The low angle shot of the window is a little jolty, to deliberately show that it's also a point of view shot, to create the impression that my character is watching Amy and Ross. We deleted some of the footage that we originally filmed of me outside the window looking up at Amy because it looked quite unproffessional, plus the only way to capture a clear image of me was in the day light, but when my character is spying on Amy and Ross it's dark as you can see their silhouettes. We decided to not include the text message and the phone, and Amy waking up and finding that Ross has disappeared, mainly because our film now goes on for a total 2 minutes including all the editing. Instead the film ends with Amy asleep in bed, but alone instead of with Ross, leaving room for interpretation of what will happen in the rest of the film once she wakes up and realises Ross has gone, and how severe her reaction is. We decided that we are going to use Devendra Banhart's Insect Eyes for music throughout our film as we have received a positive response to it from various people who have viewed our film. We edited in the opening credits using the Men in Black Font. We used dips to black during the first part of the film as the shot changes from page to page of the notebook. We also used gradient wipes as each page changes. The name of our film 'Liason' appears at the end of the film, after the shot of Amy asleep. A dip to black emphasises the white writing. the font we used is called Phorssa which we installed from the website dafont and fits well with our film as it is like cut out letters from a newspaper.

Charlotte Bone

Plans and Ideas

Charlotte and I plan to continue filming this Sunday. We are hoping to film the rest of the shots, so that on the Monday that we return to school we are able to edit the film as a whole. By doing this we will be able to decipher what we need to change and film again and what works really well and may get us a better overall grade. We have not yet decided whether we plan to keep the same soundtrack throughout the opening two minutes or whether we should use two songs. I personally feel that the first song that we have used is enough, however I think we should try another, so we know for sure that it is the best thing to do. Our chosen artist at the moment is Devendra Banhart however we may use Damien Rice as well or as an alternative.

Amy Reeve

Editing

I decided that whilst editing the opening shots of my film, the end shot that zooms in on the words; "every heart is ticklish to love" went far too quickly, meaning that the viewer may not be able to read the words in time. I overcame this by cutting the scene where I thought the time should start to slow down. I then right clicked on the shot and scrolled down to find the option that allowed me to slow down the amount of seconds it would take to zoom in on the phrase. When we replayed the footage through, the last shot was in slow motion, allowing the viewer to realise the importance of the words.

Amy Reeve