Ben Le Tocq (Media AS)

On Thursday 26th November, Chloe, Harry and I filmed our opening sequence in town. We had Kirsty, Kit and Louis as our actors and overall I feel that the day of filming went smoothly. Reflecting on our filming day, I feel that when we starting we didn’t quite understanding what was expected. After recording a few scenes following our story board, the rest of our opening sequence flowed well and made logical sense throughout our afternoon of filming. We ensured that we filmed each scene more than once from many angles while using a range of camera techniques.

Highlights of the day:

• The point of view shots we captured on our homeless actor turned out to be some of the best shots we filmed on the day.
• The prepared was thoroughly thought through creating a smoothness of final scenes which is one of the main part to our opening sequence.
• Types of lighting we used adds effect to some key scenes in our opening sequence. These helped highlight facial expressions when they were the focal point.
• I feel that we were able to get so many different shots out of only a few locations, keeping the plot simply but using a variety of shots and ideas proved to work well.
• The three of us all understood what needed to be done and followed the same ideas, allowing us to be productive and enjoy the day without feeling under pressure.

Low points of the day:

• Some of our shots did not turn out to be as successful as we originally thought. We had planned to show the homeless man stabbing a picture of his boss showing the end of his life, however the picture wasn’t very clear which weakened this point of our story.
• Acting in the opening scenes wasn’t as good as planned because in some shots the actors looked into the camera which we didn’t want.
• Last minute change to a few scenes on the day meaning we had to improvise and therefore didn’t have as much time during the filming day.

Targets for future filming:

• Be fully prepared before filming day, having all the props we need and if unsure about a prop just bring it because it may be a mistake
• Ensure our actors know what to do and how we want them to do it. Here we could of briefed them before filming meaning everyone knew what to do.
• Share our timing plans with our actors so we get enough correct footage
• Thorough filming, we could of done with filming many different angles in some shots to allow the scene to flow smoothly. Having many shots would of allowed us to have some choice when editing.

 

Here is my Facebook Profile which is designed on a member of our target audience. It allowed us to familiarise ourselves with what they look for and how they spend their time. We did this prior to filming so we could include the suspense for example, which is what our audience research showed people enjoyed especially people from our target audience. From the research, it helped to understand what was expected and whether or not our thriller would be appealing.

Below is my Facebook Profile I made after completing the audience research:

This risk assessment is compulsory as it highlights the dangers around us and allows us to be safe during our filming day. By completing this we can prepare for the day knowing what shots are safe, which shots aren’t and what to be aware of around the areas we used to film our thriller. It allows us to improve the overall productivity of the day.

A production meeting agenda is a very important part of our thriller as it allows the whole team to come together and make sure we get down exactly what we need to produce our thriller, and have thought about the structure of the day. It means we can see who is doing what roles during the day. A production meeting agenda contains key information such as dates, locations and shots.

To show what we discussed, we created a production meeting. It is a good reference to refer back so we can see if we are keeping to the plan, and it gets us organised so we can film within the time restraints. By having this done before filming we didn’t need to waste time figuring out who was going to film what and therefore we were able to maximise our filming time.

Below you will find our production meeting agenda when you click on the image.

This is the shot list we have made as part of the planning process. It was useful as we could see what shots we had used and it made sure that there was a variety of shots to eliminate repetition. Making the shot list meant we could have it during our filming day and we were able to follow our basic outline. We stuck with the original idea of our thriller, but the shot list allowed us to see that there were certain problems with it, such as a jump cut which we later realised would not work as it is considered a mistake in film making.

This is the storyboard we used to finalise our ideas for our thriller. The storyboard contains notes about camera movement, types of shots, length of the shot and some sound. We will use this on filming day and possibly add parts which we think fit better. Creating a storyboard benefitted us as we could visualise if it made sense and create a detailed plan for each scene.

 

This is our extended step outline and gives an overview of our thriller. From this we gain a clearer idea of what the structure will be and to ensure we have an organised plan. Following on from this we can make sure our mise-en-scene, camera angles, editing, performance and sound we have planned will work. We were able to combine all our ideas from moodboards into one area which made it clearer to see how our opening sequence would go.

Our final idea is about a man who was made redundant by his boss and consequently became homeless as a result. Our thriller opening follows Louis’ (the homeless man’s) journey from accepting his new life as an unemployed homeless man to taking revenge upon his boss.

For this task we had to create a mood board with our ideas for our opening sequence of the thriller. This task allowed us to visualise what the ideas would look like and we soon realised which ideas would work and which ones wouldn’t. By visually being able to see the ideas we were able to make sure there was a mixture of micro and macro features as well as ideas for the antagonist and protagonist, this also meant we had to think of original and conventional ideas to fulfill the task. The main purpose for this task was to pitch our ideas to the rest of our group and to begin to imagine what our opening sequence to our thriller would look like. Below we have all three of our mood boards, in order we have Harry, Chloe, then myself

   

 

 

Here we analysed the Roland Barthes theory. This included the codes:

• Enigma
• Action
• Symbolic
• Cultural

This helped to realise just how important narrative is in a piece of media. It is important that I encode my thriller with a range of signs and symbols that the audience will decode and therefore be frightened, excited and feel part of the film.

Please click on the image below to view the document we created considering the above theories.