Media Evaluation, question seven.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt from the progression of it to the full product?

Question answered here: http://prezi.com/v_jwipszoeeu/evaluation-question-seven/

Finished Main Task.

Our two minute opening to a teen horror.

Non-Diegetic and Diegetic sound ideas.

In our opening two minuets we need two different tracks to be played at certain points. One of these will be played in the very opening scenes above a montage of woodland shots, this piece of music has to be slightly scary, creepy and atmospherical. The second is played as though it is coming through the radio in the car, this music will have to sound modern, popular and like something teenagers would listen to, however copyright is a problem here.

Non-Diegetic sound ideas.

Diegetic sound ideas.

Film Sypnopsis.

Overall film synopsis:
Three teenagers take a road trip to Brighton for a weekend away, however on the way their car breaks down and they are forced to spend the night in an unknown wooded area. Here they receive text messages from one of the characters phone, that he lost whilst in the wood, but when they try to call for help they do not have signal. As the film progresses each character goes missing with the implication being that they are being murdered by the writer of the text messages. The film ends with just one character left.

Specifically the opening two minuets:
The film starts with shots of a wooded area, this adds mystery and creates a creepy atmosphere for the beginning of the film. Next we are introduced to the three protagonists in the film, Lizzy, Nina and Harry, as they are driving along an isolated road, all three are in high spirits as they are on their way to Brighton. However Harry soon makes Nina pull over into the woods as he needs the toilet. When he returns, after scaring the girls, they discover that the car will not start. Harry then realises that he has dropped his phone at some point. Whilst the characters start panicking about their predicament Lizzy and Nina then receive a text message from Harry's phone, impossible as he's lost it somewhere and they are in the middle of nowhere.

Main Task: Filming.

Last week we finished all our filming for the opening two minuets of our film. Unfortunately we had some difficulty in getting all our actors to the location of filming at the same time and so decided to only use three characters instead of four, which is what we had originally planned. However I do not feel that this hindered us or the mise-en-scene of the film in anyway. In fact, using only three actors meant that we could focus more on these and get some interesting shots of them without the shots appearing to crowded.
 When we filmed the weather was consistent and we managed to get some great shots using the sunny weather to our advantage as it creates a contrast between what is happening in the scenes, it is a sort of reverse pathetic fallacy.
 We also made some changes from our storyboard and took some shots differently, all of this will be explained more fully in our evaluation.

We are now currently editing our film and it looks like our filming is fine although we may have to rerecord one character saying a line as the clarity isn't a good as we would like.

Main task: Film production companies.

As our film is an independent film with a low budget we did not think that it would be produced by big, cinema based film production companies, this ruled out ones such as Twisted Pictures, which although focus on our genre film normally work with established directors and screenwriters. So therefore I did some research into the BBC and Channel 4, both of which produce these types of films.
BBC Films- BBC films seem to do a lot of work with independent films and 'new talent' and, being the the BBC, they focus on mainly British films so whilst they appear good in these ways I do not think they would necessarily show our film. This is due to the fact that it is aimed at teenagers and is quite a 'slasher'. Generally BBC Films show and produce films that are targeted at a different audience and are also normally quite a different genre, with drama seeming to be their focus.

Film 4- Film 4 makes lots of films for both television and cinema. Whilst they have produced some quite big budget films which can be seen on their website, such as The Inbetweeners Movie, they also help to develop more independent films. They also have a wide range of genres that they produce, from comedy to horror. As well as helping to produce these films they also show them on their television channel and others that they own, such as E4. Consequently I feel that Film 4 would be the company to produce and show our film.

Main task - Filming.

We filmed some test shots for the wood scenes in our main task on the 6th February and these will hopefully be up on youtube soon. It was good to practise with the camera as it helped us to see what looked professional when we played it back on the mac and what we needed to do to improve on our shots.

Then, on the 13th and 14th of February we started to film our actual main task. On the 13th we had arranged to meet at our intended place of filming, however due to personal reasons one of our actors had to cancel last minute, whilst this was disappointing we decided to continue with our filming nevertheless. Another obstacle that we ran into was that our location was not the best place to film the shots we needed as we had not accounted for the traffic at the time of filming, but as we had researched many other locations we could quickly move to a more suitable one and begin our filming. In this day we managed to capture a lot of needed footage of our actors, including vital scenes from our storyboard. In spite of this we also agreed that we would need to arrange to meet again to film some more shots due to the fact that we did not quite manage to complete all of our footage. 

On the 14th our group went back to the woods where we had filmed our test shots and reshot some that were not quite up to standard, I feel that our shots this time around were a lot better as we had a clear idea of what we wanted and knew now ways in which to film this correctly. As well as filming shots from our storyboard we also ended up shooting some scenery that we happened to encounter as it just had really interesting mise-en-scene that we thought would create a perfect atmosphere for our opening two minutes.