Storyboard for my Initial Idea

Below I have put up my story board for my initial horror film idea to go alongside my treatment and script.

Update on Horror Pre-Production

We have been now been put into our production groups, my group consists of Millie Corser, Alex Willshaw, Laura Little and myself. We have titled our production company 'Little Productions' under the influence of Laura's surname, with our slogan being 'Little Productions....Large Ideas...'

Our group has been split up into our roles, Mille the Director, Alex the Assistant Director, Laura the Creative Artist and I am the Producer.

Also, we have decided to go with Millie's idea after much discussion, however, we changed the title and as a group and chose 'The Occult', which we all agreed on and feel that it will work well.

'The Others' and 'WishMaster' were two main influences to Millie's idea. Below I have put up the links for the trailers of these two films to help give a sense of understanding and a visual perspective of what we had in mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu494-Dr5po

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJgl3uoxXc0

We have not really used these films as influences with our idea more with the ideas of camera shots and angles, aiding us to make a production as professional as possible.

Also we looked at past Hurtwood students horror films, and 'Drip' really stuck out, we hope to use some of the effects and filming ideas withing our own production.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwwHrCld4C4&feature=related

My Pitch Power Point Presentation

Above is my pitch which I presented to the class. This gives a general outline of the ideas and the style in which I would have wanted my film to look and be like. This is brief but it helps my class understand where I am coming from with my idea.

Also by allowing everyone to pitch it makes everyones ideas a lot more clearer and therefore helps to decide on a final decision for your group, and also make its easier to take different aspects of peoples ideas to make your production as good as possible.

Script for original Film Treatment

ORCHESTRAL SOUNDTRACK played throughout the opening sequence. This is a montage effect, images from throughout the film, no sound from each scene just the ORCHESTRAL SOUNDTRACK playing over the top. Credits, Names and Film title will be running over this, they will fade in and out of the images.

EXT. COUNTRY ROAD – EVENING
Trees blowing, leaves falling to the ground. The silence and eerie feeling to the road as it has no cars on it.
CUT TO:

EXT. OF CAR - EVENING
Car is clearly shown, at night time parked outside of a house. The car is a four door family car.
CUT TO:

EXT. OF COUPLES HOUSE - EVENING
The couples house, typical semi detached house
CUT TO:

INT. KITCHEN/HALLWAY – EVENING
Couple arguing very stereotypical looking – both around early thirties and fairly attractive.
CUT TO:

INT. OF CAR – EVENING
The couple looking away from each other in the car
CUT TO:

EXT. COUNTRY ROAD – EVENING
Pale woman (Emily)walking along country road in a wedding dress, only see the back of the woman, she is walking away from the camera
CUT TO:

INT. OF CAR – EVENING
Emily sitting on back seat of car in wedding dress looking down.
CUT TO:

EXT. OF DIFFERENT CAR – EVENING
Car crashing into the trees, speeding extremely fast going straight into them and flipping over.
CUT TO:

EXT. OF CAR – EVENING
Emily getting out of car, can only see Emily, the couple are out of sight, it’s of the back door of car opening.
CUT TO:

EXT. OF LANE/EWHURST PLACE – EVENING
Darkness, and in the distance old brick castle like house, with very few lights on (maybe only candles).
CUT TO:

EXT. GRAVESTONE – DAY
Gravestone at a grave yard, with a black jacket just on top. Autumnal leaves falling to the ground around the gravestone.
CUT TO:

ORCHESTRAL SOUNDTRACK STOPS SUDDENLY.
EXT. COUNTRYLANE - EVENING
Countryside, on an autumnal evening. The ‘Crossroads’, two narrow country lanes meeting to form a cross symbol. Sky is very grey and misty.
Camera tracking from a close up of the roads to a long shot.
SHEER SILENCE
PAUSES
THEN THE SOUND OF A CAR DRIVING along the road. Car drives away from the shot into the distance, the car gets smaller and smaller.
CUT TO:

EXT. CAR - EVENING
Four door car parked outside a semi-detached house. In the background can see inside the house a couple arguing, you can only see their figures as they are behind a curtain/blind. The main focus is on the car but the couple are quite clearly visible in the background.
Camera tracks towards the couple and it becomes clear they are shouting and arguing with each other
Can only see from behind the window, the man walks away from the woman and then the light is switched off.

My Film Idea - Treatment

Film Treatment

Act One:

Country Side. During autumn. Present day. Opens with the ‘crossroads’ or narrow country lane going off main road. It is early evening, the mist is ever increasing. Grey sky, blurred vision.

Exterior of car. Normal four door car. At night time. Car is sitting outside a house, on a main road, very few other cars parked. The house behind is a detached house, fairly small.

Interior of house. Fairly modern. Middle aged couple both quite attractive. They are arguing. Husband has come in from work late and they are going away for the weekend to a little ‘Inn’ in the countryside for their anniversary. Both shouting at each other. Husband is packing his bag. The wife is trying to hurry up her husband.

They finally leave the house ready to go away for the weekend. Still both arguing as they are running a lot later than expected. Their journey begins. The mist begins to settle, becomes quite hard for the husband to clearly see the road.

Act two:

The couple are in the car. Still arguing about being late, as it is getting later on in the evening and they still have a fairly long journey to go before they arrive. Soon after the couple stop talking as they are both angry with each other.

A young woman in a wedding dress faintly appears in the mist. Its quite late, dark and cold. Young woman wearing nothing else but a wedding dress, she is shivering. The wife suggests they should stop and ask to see if she is alright. Husband is continually refusing, ‘You have been complaining the whole journey that we are running late and now you want to delay us even more for some freak’. The wife persists; she feels that they need to help this young girl. Eventually the husband gives in. They wind down the window, the woman speaks to her, asking ‘How are you? Are you lost? Do you need any help?’ The young woman does not speak. Just nods her head.

The wife insists that she gets in the car and that they will take her to wherever she needs, she clearly explains who they are and that it is their anniversary. In the end, the young girl says politely her name is ‘Emily’, and that her family own a small ‘Inn’ not too far away. The wife is adamant they will drop her off, the girl is freezing cold shivering and she makes her husband give her his jacket much to his disgust.

Throughout the journey she says very little, answering questions with very minimal response when asked. Emily keeps having flashbacks. Flashback one: A couple driving towards Emily also in the same wedding dress, she was offered help but were extremely rude in the car, calling her names etc. Husband has a heart attack which leads to them driving and crashing into a ditch, killing them all. Flashback two: A drunken couple driving late at night past the ‘crossroads’ they notice Emily again in the same wedding dress and begin to start howling abuse, driving close up to her side and just scream ‘Freak! Wierdo!’, they speed off after that. Within a few seconds they have sped out of control and crashed into the trees, the car has flipped over and the couple are both dead. Emily goes back to making polite conversation with the couple.

Act three:

Emily insists that they drop her off at the bottom of this small country lane, she explains that her parents ‘Inn’ is just up there and that she is fine to walk. The couple eventually allow her to walk the rest as they want her to be safe as it is now very late. Emily would not take no for an answer and she was eventually lost out of sight in the mist.

The couple continue their journey, as they check their map they realise they are not too far away so they go on with their journey. They finally arrive at the ‘Inn’, a middle aged man behind the desk, ‘We have been expecting you! It’s fairly late, is everything alright?’ The husband explains that they had to stop on their journey as they saw a young woman in a wedding dress wondering the streets. There is sheer silence after he speaks. The couple both look extremely puzzled at each other. The man behind the desk enlightens the couple that that was his daughter. She had died six years ago, at the very ‘crossroad’ on the day of her wedding. A couple were arguing as they were lost, they were looking at a map and drove straight into her causing her a painful death. The couple are in shock, they have nothing to say they are speechless.

Cuts to a graveyard. The gravestone of Emily Willow. An autumnal afternoon, leaves falling to the ground. The graveyard is empty. On the gravestone is the very jacket worn by the husband of the couple.

Introduction to Editing and Final Cut Pro

A few weeks into the term we were taught how to edit and use the ‘Final Cut Pro’ software on an Apple Mac computer.

Below is some brief notes on what and how I learnt to use the software:

• Setting up a scratch disk – this is very important, it is where the computer takes notes on what you are doing. To do this you:
  Go to ‘Final Cut Pro’
  System Settings
  This then opens a new window
  Click ‘Set’
  Click on ‘Firewire Drive’ and find your folder
  Click on ‘Scratch once’
  Click on ‘Choose’ – You will need to do all the abovewhenever the computer asks you to reset scratch disks.
  Now make a folder – File/New/Bin – we named the bin with our groups name
  The repeat – File/New/Bin – we then named this one ‘Log’
  We then dragged the ‘Log’ into ‘our groups name’- The small triangle symbols expand things into drop down menus.
• 
  The ‘Rushes’ amounts to all of the completely unedited footage that you have recorded – it is called ‘Rushes’ because in films the canisters are ‘rushed off’ to be developed by a ‘runner’.
• 
  ‘Blue triangles’ on playback head select the area that you are working with.
• 
  You can spool through backwards and forwards with the slider or move the cursor arrows forward and back frame by frame.
• 
  The ‘spacebar’ stops and starts the footage
• 
  Logging – you need to put the takes you want to use in your log bin, you do this by:
  In and Out points – Press ‘I’ key for ‘in’ and press ‘O’ key for ‘out’
  Press ‘Modify’ and choose ‘Sub-clip’
  Then name your clip–e.g. Close up of man sitting
  Drag clip into log bin – NEVER DELETE ANYTHING FROM THE RUSHES
  Click File/New/Sequence – title it
  Drag into log bin – then minimise the rushes
  Double click on the title
  You must always cut on the action
  Double click on log and drag to timeline.
• Extra Information:
  ‘B’ key for blade to chop or use the double edged arrows
  ‘A’ to change back to arrow
  Linked Selection – if turned off, it moves the picture separate to the audio, you can click this on or off
  Snapping – Jumps and connects to other piece’s – if you turn it off it stops snapping
  
  

'The Trees' Poster

We were given the title 'The Trees', and we were told to make a film poster and a tag line based on this title, using only the image we took.

Below is my poster, I did not feel I did very well on this task, as I found that some of my pictures used and taken were not as useful as I thought they would have been. I very much like my background of the sky and trees, however, the font used does not really fit in with my genre.

Elephant Film Poster

After watching and studying the film 'Elephant' and doing a number of pieces of work on the film including:

• A script for 'what happens next' - what we want to happen


• A storyboard to show 'what happens next' - created by the use of the script


• A film poster.

Below is the poster I created on Photoshop for the film 'Elephant' using pictures I had taken myself and edited to create what I wanted my poster to look like:

My first Poster on Photoshop

After learning the basics of Photoshop, we were told by our teachers to create a film poster, using three original film posters: 'The Exorcist', 'Anatomy of Murder' and 'Terminator 3' and a film of our choice from the list of film posters we were provided with. We had to use parts of these posters and compile our own movie poster using them.

Below is a copy of the poster I created:

Foundation Production - Research 1

The Grudge

From filmmaker Sam Raimi (Spider-Man®, Army of Darkness) and acclaimed Japanese director Takashi Shimizu comes a terrifying tale of horror in the tradition of The Ring and 28 Days Later. Sarah Michelle Gellar (TV’s “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”) stars as an American nurse who has come to work in Tokyo. Following a series of horrifying and mysterious deaths, she encounters the vengeful supernatural spirit that possesses its victims, claims their souls, then passes its curse to another person in a spreading chain of horror. Now, she must find a way to break this supernatural spell or become the next ‘victim of an ancient evil that never dies, but forever lives to kill.

Jaws

The Ring

Hide and Seek

Photoshop - Lesson 1

I have already used Photoshop previously, when I did GCSE Media. However, I found it quite difficult remembering all the tools required.

Below is the Photoshop toolbar which helped me with creating a good piece of work:

I found it quite difficult to use the 'Lasso Selection Tool', as I found it extremely difficult to cut round certain objects, trying to make the object look as good as it could be was hard to do. As sometimes the image or object would not have look as clean cut as it should have done if the cutting out was not done correctly.

The tool I used most frequently was the 'Eraser' as I often had to erase certain pieces of the image or certain areas. To help me see what I wanted to erase more clearly I would use the 'Zoom' tool, choosing one of the percentages to help me. Also, 'The Hand' tool, was useful, abling me to move my images around easily, layer by layer.

I didnt use 'The Healing Brush', 'The Cookie Clutter' and 'The Stamp', as I dont really know or understand how they are used and how they will make my work more effective.

The Guardian - Review

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/guardian/

In 2006, The Guardian was released at the cinema starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kucher. Together, they pair up in a horrific rescue mission in the Navy Coastguard elite rescue unit. Costner, the most successful coastguard, who experienced a catastrophic accident during the rescue. As he was so traumatised by the experience, he becones a trainee to the coast guards.

Jake (Kucher) is the high school champion swimmer, comes along and their personalities clash. As, Costners passion and his attitudes towards coastguarding push them to the limits, allowing only the strongest to survive. The harshness of naval academy life is celebrated without being glamorized.

I thought this film was incredible and definately worth seeing! Although, I did not watch this in the cinema but it still made a huge impace on me and is an amazing film!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZy-wcQIsRU

Initial Film Sequence

Above is my Preliminary Task.

For this task we were put into groups of three people, one being the camera man:Kate, one the director: me and Continuity: Alex.
We were giving a script which we had to follow aswell as the correct camera angles we had to use, at the end of the filming we were allowed about 10 minutes to do as we feel to personalise our task, adding parts to the script making it properly begin and end for example.
Once completing the filming we edited our footage in 'Final Cut Pro' each sharing out the editing to make it fair and get an idea on how to use the software.
I was very pleased with our final product, and feel it flows perfectly. Now by doing this task on 'Final Cut Pro' I feel a lot more confident using the software, and hopefully next time I use it I will have more of an understanding.

Using Digital Camera's

On the 15th September, we had our first practical lesson in which we learnt how to use a digital still camera.
Below is an image of the screen of the camera:

Introduction to Media

Why I chose Media?

I studied Media at GCSE and really enjoyed it - so I wanted to continue it at A Level and hopefully make a career out of it!
During my GCSE Media course I created part of a magazine for my practical production and really liked putting it all together on Photoshop, and one day I hope to work in the Media industry. I have not decided which part in the industry exactly I wish to work in as I am still not aware of the filming side of it yet. But I think I want to be in the magazine industry on the editing side of it.
However I am very much looking forward to creating a Pop video next year :)

CD COVERS