Evaluation

Sr media evaluation final.

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final cut

developed story board

Here is our developed story boards for our final opening that we developed from our initial ideas, we have made a few changes from the previous ideas in some scenes but overall it is the same story line.

The overall idea is both simular and different to our previous idea as they both carry out the idea of kidnapping but through a different story. When we come to shoot everything we want the beginning of the sequence to be full of suspence by doing this we want the shots to look very dark and grainy to create a sense of mystery. The way the female character acts will aid the sense that we want to create even further, we want her to look away from the camera and move away from it as quickly as possible to create a sense of mystery.

developed ideas

We discussed our ideas further and decided that as a group we all decided that we wanted to use our second idea for our new opening.

Second idea: A teenaged girl gets into the wrong group at school and goes to a secret party on a field with her friend un aware of the danger that lies ahead. Later that night an un invited stranger makes his way to the group's party and ends both the party and lives. Most of the group managed to escape the mad man including the protagonist, but her best friend had been taken.

However we have also developed this idea further, in the opening we would only see the female protagonist getting back home from the night before and is upset from what had happened. Later on in the sequence she breaks down and we get flash backs of what happened that night, and the next morning where police officers show up to the scene. She later on mentions her friend missing and that she needed to do somthing about it, through this sequence we want the audience to feel a sense of suspense of what exactly happened that night and what is to come.

Initial ideas

Here are some ideas for our new thriller opening that we discussed.

We wanted to create an idea simular to our previous idea but a lot more easier to understand, we are going to keep the idea of being kidnapped by a mad man for our new idea but a different story line.

First idea: A teenaged girl goes to a field party alone with the wrong crowd, that night whilst the group were having fun a madman shows up and kidnaps almost everyone in the group and takes them away, thankfully the girl escaped and all through the night till morning she runs to her bestfriends home for help as she knew that this mad man wouldnt sleep until he caught the rest of the group.

Second idea: A teenaged girl gets into the wrong group at school and goes to a secret party on a field with her friend un aware of the danger that lies ahead. Later that night an un invited stranger makes his way to the group's party and ends both the party and lives. Most of the group managed to escape the mad man including the protagonist, but her best friend had been taken.

A change in plan..

After having our final animatic reviewed our teacher then told us that what we was trying to do was to complicated, too many locations in such a short space of time and that we needed to make it more simple for our audience to understand. So as a group we decided to re-think the story line and how we could improve it. We still wanted to keep the same idea about people being kidnapped by a mad man but perhaps change the characters. To get some inspiration we watched a few openings, one that we really thought was effective was 'Seven' by M.Night.Shyamalan. We liked how simple yet effective the opening was, you just see a man lieing in bed with a clock ticking away creating a lot of suspence and mystery to the opening.

First shoot

Yesterday we did our first shooting and a few things went according to plan, the locations were great and sucessfully managed to get together. Unfortunatley the camera had run low on battery and wasting good filming time charging up the battery. The night drew in quickly and it was too dark to film with only two scenes shot we had to call it a day.

Fortunatley we learnt a lot from this experience, organisation and time managment is very important when filming. I feel that we need to dedicate a whole day to film in order to achieve successful results.

Final Animatic

After taking all of the feed back on board we began improving our animatic. We started recording more diegetic sound such as character dialog where the worried mother says "I just want my kid back". We also wanted our opening to include a lot more so we added more scenes and extended the dinner table scene where we see the angry father loose his temper leaving the family in utter shock. A new clip where we see a missing person poster of the kidnapped child, which are all added to the final animatic. We added more of a variety of editing such as fades and jump cuts. 

Animatic

After completing our finished storyboard we then needed to turn it into an animatic ( a rough cut of what our opening). To achieve this we firstly took photos of each frame and put them onto photoshop to change them to a suitable size by cropping them down, then edited them slightly. We added spotlights in different scenes and also played around with the levels to create a more dramatic effect. We then put all the images on Premiere pro to create a video, we added different diegetic sounds such as footsteps and also included non diegetic music. We edited the video to create a real fast paced thriller opening by using various cuts and fades to slow the pace down creating suspense.      

(First draft video of animatic here) 

Here is our first draft of our animatic, after completing it was then reviewed by our teacher who then gave us different ways of improving the animatic. 

Effective choice of music/ although it will be copyright so we need permission 

Good use of angles/diegetic/distance/ good editing but need more variety   

Some good diegetic sound, need to include a lot more

Sort out final actors, locations, shooting schedule

Overall, needs a lot more development, especially during the flash back scene.

Locations

(images here)

Props

(image here) 

Character design: family

( images here) 

Character designs: boy

(images here) 

Character Designs: mother

Here are some sketches of one of the main characters. ideally this is what we want the mother character to look like, sketching up our character designs will make it easier to chose the actors.

Story board

Here is the final story board which we each created and developed from our initial ideas, as you can see we have made a few changes. In the beginning of the extract we wanted a centralised long shot of a front door with a red piece of paper coming through the letter box and slowly falling to the floor. The reason we want the paper to be red is that it represents horror and danger which sums what is in the movie.

Next we are introduced to our first character a young boy, again we centralised him to show his importance. We wanted to include the boy being kidnapped to really grab the audiences attention and to also support the idea of danger.

Next we see the mother of the boy crying in a police interview wimpering "I just want my kid back". Then a cut is shown and a different location to a dark field, in focus is a white trainer and in the background we see the poilce searching the field holding bright torches.
We again have used representation with the white trainer which suggests the boys innocence.