Project Diary 3

This Diary is a further update to our previous one, going over our plans for carrying out the production of our trailer. 

Action Plan

Ross and I decided that to efficiently complete our task, we must create an audit and an action plan for the remaining tasks leading up to and including the filming and editing of the production. Below is the plan, detailing the steps we have to complete and the priority of each task. 

Click to visit the Action Plan

Poll

As a quick update regarding the poll we ran on this blog a little while ago, I would just like to justify our decision after that small piece of audience research. 

The result of the poll was that:

Four wished us to make a Psychological Thriller

One wished us to make a Horror Thriller

One wished us to make an Action Thriller

None wished us to make a Detective Thriller

At first glance it may seem that we have gone against Audience research by choosing the form of Thriller that was not chosen by any, though our final idea actually encompasses the best of all that were chosen including our own choice of Detective. Though predominantly Detective, the inclusion of an unexplained twist as a Dead man is ID'd as the killer introduces the Psychological elements. Horror is conveyed as the overarching story is of Death and Mystery; aspects that hold connotations of Horror. Action isn't involved as much, though as it is a Police vs. Criminal style film, it will include scenes of Action.

Locations

Once we knew what the beginning of our film entailed, we decided that the best opening would be to have the killer at a distance under a lit lamp post to back light them. To hunt locations, we traveled to a local Village called Little Oakley to find a suitable setting, as we knew there were lamp posts like the ones we needed. Below are the pictures we took:

We decided that the first two images were the better looking ones as they depict exactly what we were thinking and are, themselves, distant from anything else enforcing the desolate and lonely ideology. Below is a mock frame I created using the image to convey my ideas for the opening shot of the trailer:

The figure below the lamp post is the murderer and the two approaching
lights are the headlamps of the soon to be hijacked car.

Actors

For our film trailer, we require a number of Actors to fulfill roles, some bigger roles than others. As my Dad used to participate in Amateur Theatrics, we chose him to play the main roles. It also helps that one of our Parents is the Actor we need most as he will be the most available. The other role we needed to fill was a Historian who will be speaking the majority of the Trailer. We chose to ask a History teacher at our school to fill the role as he is exactly what we envisaged when designing his scenes. He happily obliged which was a great leap forward for our Pre-Production. Below is a link to a tick list of all of the actors we need that will be updated:

Click to visit the Ticklist

Production - Storyboard Draft

After our Preliminary task, it became time to design a Storyboard for our end Production. As previously stated, we decided to go against the majority demographic and aim our film at a niche audience with an adaptation. This is because our previous films for GCSE etc. were not detailed enough and that we could create a much better trailer for an adaptation or, as we have now chosen, a factually based story. 

The story of the A6 Murders, which we have chosen to base our film on, begins on the 22nd August 1961 where Michael Gregsten and his Mistress Valerie Storie were hijacked on the A6 and ordered to drive for the entire night before Gregsten was shot and mudered, and Storie was raped then shot. The next morning, Gregsten was found dead with Storie seriously injured next to him. James Hanratty was suspected right up until he was hanged for the crime, though no resounding evidence was ever found. It was only in 2002 that DNA testing proved his guilt, though some believe he was framed just to conclude the case which is the main point we are basing our story on; the copy cat muderer at the end of the trailer will be revealed to be James Hanratty - impossible as he was hanged fifty years ago, making a poignant point about DNA and how it can be tampered with. 

We plan to play on this DNA point and, respectively, name the film 'DEADMAN'. This is a play on words as 'DEADMAN' clearly conveys the DNA result though it also reflects the original setting which was 'Deadman's Hill'.

The original idea storyboard is below:

After the initial storyboard were put down on paper, we drafted the full storyboard indicating main scenes:

Project Diary 2

This Diary is a continuation of the previous, detailing what we need to source and think about for the Production.

Project Diary 1

This is our first Project Diary detailing the outline of our idea for the trailer we will be creating.

Further Information about the A6 Murders (Quoted from the James Hanratty Wikipedia Article)

The facts

At about 06:45 on 23 August 1961, the body of Michael J. Gregsten (b. 28 December 1924) was discovered in a lay-by on the A6 at Deadman's Hill, near the Bedfordshire village of Clophill; he had been shot twice in the head with a .38 revolver at point blank range. Lying next to him semi-conscious was his mistress Valerie Storie (b. 24 November 1938). She had been raped and then shot, four times in the left shoulder and once in the neck, leaving her paralysed below the shoulders.

The evening after the murder, the car Gregsten and Storie had been in at the time, a grey four-door 1956 Morris Minor registration 847 BHN, was found abandoned behind Redbridge tube station in Essex. The car had been jointly owned by Gregsten's mother and aunt, and lent to the couple who, according to Storie, were 'planning a car rally'.

Gregsten was a scientist at the Road Research Laboratory at Slough. Storie was an assistant at the same laboratory and had been having an affair with Gregsten, although this did not become public knowledge until much later. Gregsten lived with his wife Janet and two children at Abbots Langley, whither he had returned in December 1960 after living with Storie for an unspecified period.

DNA evidence and appeal in 2002

The case for Hanratty's innocence was pursued by his family as well as by some of the opponents of capital punishment in the United Kingdom, who maintained that Hanratty was innocent and sought to draw attention to evidence that would cast doubt on the validity of his conviction. However, following an appeal by his family, modern testing of DNA from his exhumed corpse and members of his family convinced Court of Appeal judges in 2002 that his guilt was proved "beyond doubt". Paul Foot and some other campaigners continued to believe in Hanratty's innocence and argued that the DNA evidence could have been contaminated, noting that the small DNA samples from items of clothing, kept in a police laboratory for over 40 years "in conditions that do not satisfy modern evidential standards", had had to be subjected to very new amplification techniques in order to yield any genetic profile. However, no DNA other than Hanratty's was found on the evidence tested, contrary to what would have been expected had the evidence indeed been contaminated. 

Learning Editing

As practice for our actual production, my partner and I have decided to create sequences much like mini-Prelims before our Project diaries, trying our hand at filming higher quality videos. This is due to the fact that the more practice we get, the more we will learn the editing software that we will have to use. The software package we have chosen is Final Cut Pro X; this is due to the fact that it has now been made much easier to use than it's predecessors yet still every bit as powerful. Final Cut is new to us, though we believe, through these mini-Prelim's, we can learnt to use it to the best of our ability.

Intro Video

To complement our logo, we created an intro to use both for production diary videos and the final film. It consists of our newly created logo, an image of the night sky and a piece of Royalty free music found at Incompetech. We also included generated clouds from Sony Vegas.

Elements

Logo

Night Sky image

How the Clouds were generated

Firstly, we added a Media Generator of Soft Clouds to work as a base

Then we edited the background colour to be 100% Alpha for the transparency

Lastly, we edited the Frequency and Offset accordingly to keyframe an
animated sky.

Logo Design

My partner and I decided that we needed a Production company name and identity to enforce the realism of our end product. We resulted in choosing 'Woods Today films' as our production company name as a lot of amateur film companies name themselves after their first production which was our GCSE film last year; 'If you go down to the woods today...' After choosing a name, we set out to designing the logo:

Original sketch

The original sketch, when we set out to designing on the computer, quickly became:

We decided the Owl was a good addition as it holds connotations of both Thriller and Woodland which relates to the name. Owls also represent Wisdom which gives our identity a more powerful presence. The logo is made out of a number of elements which are depicted below. The image also includes a number of different coloured designs:

Preliminary Film - LATE

As practice for our actual production, my partner and I set out to create a preliminary film so that we could get used to using Final Cut Pro which neither of us is familiar with. Previously, however, we have worked together on similar projects to what our actual film will entail for our G.C.S.E production. The Prelim did put us into the mind-set of filming again which is useful for choosing camera angles and shots for our actual production.

Below is the rough storyboard that we followed loosely to obtain the shots we required for the final cut:

I also designed a simple Poster as a complement to the Preliminary film:

A film Poster I made for the Preliminary Film

 Below is the Prelim:

Before creating the film we designed a storyboard to loosely base the Preliminary task on. Some shots vary and have been omitted from the final cut. Bloopers were added at the end of the task for comedic effect and to give a glimpse at the production process. Below are our storyboards:
Evaluation

I do believe our Preliminary task ended up very well considering the little time we had to complete the task and limited sets, actors etc. I am particularly proud of the way we edited and filmed the cuts between shots smoothly so the film seems fluent and continuous. Our On action shot as Ross reaches for the Media Suite door is a great example of this. I do, however, feel we could have improved the film in some ways. There were a few shots, namely the shot featured from within an office, that we wished to shoot, but due to time restrictions, we deemed it not important enough to have to obtain the appropriate permission for one shot. We also, changed the ending quite considerably without editing the storyboard; we must keep in mind that in a bigger production, edits and redrafts must be made to maintain continuity and order in production.

Early Research

My partner and I have now began researching Thriller trailers and films deeper, as we are soon to reach the point where we must pitch our ideas for original trailer ideas. To begin research, we decided the best plan was to devise a survey on what people enjoy about Thrillers - their trailers in particular - and what they wish to find in said trailers. These results will help to steer us in the correct directions, beginning with which films to draw inspiration from. Next to most results we have commented on our findings to demonstrate our planning though processes. The most popular movies from our survey were The Bourne Series, The newer James Bond Series and Shutter Island. Psycho was chosen only once, but it is one of my favourite Thrillers so I chose to analyse it's trailer regardless to see if there were any points I could use in our own trailer.

In my analyses I have put asterisk's next to the elements I have identified that I believe will be most useful to us and ones we will try to include in our trailer to produce the same effects.

The Bourne Identity

-Diegetic building sound FX-Female dependancy - subverts stereotypes
-Stereotypical Action Film voice over - opinion is that it is too 'naff' and 'cliche'
-Tacky credits - too veered towards Action than Thriller
-Soundbriding - demonstrating speech with other clips*
-Fast cutting leading to ending - keep pace up and audience interested*
-Clow motion mixed with fast motion - creates confusion
-Synchronised to music*

*Ideas that stand out initially

The Bourne Ultimatum

-Bourne is vulnerable as is being chases - his success in holding them off connotes his intelligence in imminent power

-Fast editing - builds pace and tension - gives a sense of the films speed*

-Voice over of the narrative sets out storyline clearly

-Fight scene conforms to male aggression and violence stereotype - highlights Male power - anti-feminism

-Sound builds tension and pace with drums - keep audience alert*

-Mainly close-up shots to include audience and express emotion through facial expressions

-No women in trailer - anti-feminism and suggestion of extreme danger

*Ideas that stand out initially

Shutter Island

-Synchronised to music*

-Jumpy scenes

-Sound bridging leading to shocking information*

-Calm music builds to climactic crescendo*

-Mysterious, untelling dialogue

-Unexplained settings*

-Surrealism - Flash back and dream sequences

-Gore - disturbing injuries etc.

*Ideas that stand out initially

Psycho

-VERY UNCONVENTIONAL!

-Consists of Hitchcock giving tour of Bates Motel as if the setting was real

-Explains events and key points abiguously so as not to give away detail*

-Too much of a risk and unoriginal to copy

-Clever that only scene from movie is iconic shower scene - enforces significance.*

*Ideas that stand out initially

Skyfall

-Women are in power - M and female agent - unstereotypical
-Protagonist is vulnerable - shot - subverts stereotype of male power*
-M is shown to be vulnerable and has weakness' as Boss disciplines her - flipping of power*
-Bond 'raises from dead' - Godlike - anti-feminism
-Explosion of considered safe building MI6 - thriller concept of removing safe zones
-Crescendo music for massive events - music synchronisation*
-Change in dynamics and dissonent, polyphone textured music*
-Rapid editing and cuts - creates tension and pace

*Ideas that stand out initially

Orginal Storyline or Adaptation?

In addition to finding trailers to draw inspiration from, we wanted to use our survey to decide on what type of film to make - one with an original story line, or one that is an adaptation of a book. Our results were interesting as a larger percentage wanted an original story line, though the smaller percentage that wanted an adaptation seemed to fit into a niche. Those that chose an adaptation were typically males between the ages of 25 and 40. It was then up to us to decide together whether we would follow the quantitative research and choose the form of story that most chose, or aim our film at a niche market. Following a tutorial with our teacher, we decided on an adaptation as it became evident that past adaptations succeeded due to two reasons; fans of the original book would watch out of interest and curiosity and also other audiences, possible younger, less read viewers, would watch due to a love of the genre or a want to learn the story, despite the fact that they are adaptations. By considering the niche adaptation fans, we are not only aiming our film at them, but including a mass market and making our film available to the most people.