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.