Animatic

Director's Commentary

Our film distribution

Our logo was inspired by mostly Working Title and also 20th Century Fox. We wanted the design to be clear which is why we incorporated the writing. However we also wanted a symbol so our company was very easily recognizable. This logo was put at the very beggining of our film so the audience would know who produced the movie.

20th Century Fox usually produces high budget movies with a lot of special effects. I dont think this would be the correction production company for us as our movie is quite low budget. I think working title would be a good production company for our movie as they usually produce low budget movies with little special effects such as "Long Time Dead".

How Does my media product represent particular social groups?

Representation

This screenshot is from the film "The Strangers". This sections displays the differences.

• Both the charecters are quite young
• They are sown to be completely alone and seculded
• They are both in danger
• In both situation there are strangers in the house whom you cannot see their faces
• They are both the protagonists witht he majority of screen time
• They are both having a regular day before the strange events start to happen

This is a screenshot from our film. This section will display differences.           

• Our charecter is younger
• Our charecter is male
• In "The Strangers" you see the mysterious people's entire body                                                           

Technology we used to contruct our film

We used a flip camera. I filmed the entire movie so I found using this camera very easy to use. It was very basic but with enough settings to make our film effective. The camera was very small whihc was useful for the POV shots. The quality from the camera was below average which was dissapointing. The display was very small which limited the image we got before we put it into the computer.

To make the shots steadier we used a tripod. This was small and compact so it was easy to move it from shot to shot. It also held the camera steady.



An Apple Macintosh computer. This computer was quick and efficent. The layout was simple whihc allowed us to make the editing a lot faster.



 iMovie was the program we used to edit the film. This software was perfect it is easy to learn and to use. I also was able to add many different effects.

Garage Band sofware was again very easy to learn and to use. I found it simple to add many different instruments, changing the pitch of the music and controlling the volume whihc allowed me to add tension to the movie.



Feedback From the Target Audience

We showed our film to a number of people in our target audience to see if they like it. The feedback we got from them was mainly positive. We were told the effects added to the story and the greyscale made the atmosphere more creepy which was the effect we wanted.

We recieved some criticism as well such as the scenes were too long and we should have had short scenes to add tension. This was useful as we shortened some scene to try and create more tension.

Welcome Home- Final edit

Storyboard Drafts

These are the storyboards we used to plan our film. Using the storyboards was a method of helping us map out our film idea and coming up with new camera shots and techniques to incorporate to help us improve it.

1st Storyboard



2nd Storyboard



Music- Discussion and Analysis

The music we ceated for our film turned out really well. I think the music greatly contributes to the film's atmosphere and is appropriate for the sceenes that we matched the two pieces with. We used the software Garage Band on a macintosh which, after the training session we used quite well. We managed to get a variation of instruments that complimented one another. When we wanted to create tension we started off with a low volume and slowly had it get louder and louder. This same method is used in a lot of horror movies. This was coupled with high pitch instruments to make the scene more dramatic.
The soundtrack worked well overall however I think it could have been improved by using high pitch and short sudden notes, similar to the famous Psycho soundtrack.

Narrative/ Story development

Protagonist

• We wanted a teenager so it would be relative close to the target audience's age. Thsi would make it easier for the audience to relate to him.
• We had him in everyday clothes to help portray an average teenager. He also had a modern but very egenral haircut so it seemed normal in every way.
• We set it in a modern household to help indicate the time period that the movie was set in.

The Stranger

• His face was not shown at the beggining of the movie to keep an element of mystery about him which helps influence a sense of fear in the audience
• He was dressed in dark jeans and a leather jacket. We wanted to avoid a chessy portrayal of a sterotypical of a murder such as long dark coat. However he was also wearing leather clothes as we wanted to foreshadow his intentions. Him being dressed like this means he is not shown as supernatural as that was not the kind of film we wanted.
• He walks carefully down the stairs which shows he does not want to be heard on his approach.

Logline for the film idea/concept

• We always wanted our film to be a thriller/horror as it is the genre of film we both like
• We looked at movies such as The Strangers and Paranormal activity to conclude that we wanted a stranger that we didnt show a lcear picture off till near the end of the movie
• We looked at The Strangers to decide we wanted someone to be alone in a hosue to express vulnerbitity
• We decided to look at some thing that would scare a typical teenager who was home alone which is how we decuced the strange falling of the books and the abnormal powercut idea.
• We thought about having a dog in the film but which was inspired by I am Legend  but we thought this could be a distraction from the main story and having an untrained dog could cause many problems.
• We thought about having a strange looking neighbour who came and talked to our main charecter about the powercut so made the audience falsely accuse im of being the intruder but we wanted him to appear totally alone.
• We to display our main charecter as a completely average teenager so the audience may get the idea that this could happen to any of them. This is why we had him to mundain tasks such as texting, cooking and watching TV.
• We thought the flash back contributed to the film as it would immediately grab the audeince's attention and kee them asking questions throughout the film.
• We wanted to keep the intruder's identity a secret until the end so the audience did't know who it was.  This is why we flashed forward before he came down the stairs far enough to see his face.

Photos from the film

All of these photots are screen shots from our final edit of our film

This photo is from the start of our film showing Ross walking home

This photo is Ross at home when he heard something strange

This is from the last scene in our film from a cross cut when Ross is walking to school at the start of his day

Tasks Undertaken to develop my Skills

To develop my skills and understanding of film making I have done several activties.

Breakfast Club
In class we remade the opening scene from Breakfast Club. This taught me how to create a plan and think out the film properly before hand. It also gave my some time with the editing software "iMovie" so when it came to make our own I was more experianced.

Preliminary Exercise
Planning out and filming the preliminary was an exercise where we had to film some continutity sequences and have a two-way dialougue. This gave me some time with the camera with helped me understand hwo to use it properly and made me feel much more confident.

Music
We had a few lessons using garage bands and how we could create our own songs with the many different sounds. We leant how the put the sounds with each other to make a decent soundtrack. We also learned many different effects we could put into our music to make sure it influenced our audience in a desired way.

Making the Storyboard
Thie helped me gain a better understanding of what our film would be. It allowed us to realise what would and what wouldn't work so when we came to our filming we had a plan to follow which made the entire filming process a lot smoother and easier.

Shooting Schedule

DATE	TIME	LOCATION	CAST	Synopsis
20/11/2010	10am	Marlborough – My House	Ross Campbell	Walking to the house and opening the door scene
22/11/2010	5pm	Marlborough –  My House	Ross Campbell	Inside the house. Powercut, microwave  and book scenes.
23/11/2010	5pm	Marlborough -  My House	Ross Campbell and Eddie Hobbs	Inside the house. Powercut and stairs scenes
24/22/2010	10am	Marlborough - School	Ross Campbell	Ross going to school

Research of Similar Media Texts

I watched some horror/thriller films before we began the process to get an idea of how I wanted our movie to be. This also gave me a greater understanding of how editing techniques can be used to manipulate the feelings of the audience.

Final Destination
From reasearching some youtube footage of this film I gained a deeper understanding of how to display the action scenes in a horror movie. Some fast shot-reverse-shots build tension for the viewer and make it a more intense viewing experiance.

Paranormal Activity
We used a technique from this movie and many other horror movies like it by not showing the culprit until the very end of our film. This helps to build suspense and makes the film more frighting because of the fear of the unknown. It makes the audience try and imagine who or what maight becausing these actions and makes them use their imagination trying to figure it out.
From this film and some like it such as Blair Witch Project we used a hand held camera for some of the shots whihc give the audience an idea that someone is watching yet does not want to be seen.

Seven
 The disturbing mise-enscene of Seven helped to bring fear to the audience during their viewong and that is something we wanted to incorporate into our film. We also use their lighting effects of a dark setting which was very successful in Seven

Target Audience

"Welcome Home" has a taget audience for anyone who like horror/ thriller movies. The range of ages who would see our film would be from about fifteen to forty-five.
Our target audience would probably be the same as films such as Paranormal Activity, The Strangers, Blair Witch Project and Scream.

The group of people who would most likely see our film would be teenagers, still in education who could realte to the main charecter. They would enjoy films that were intended to scare the audience while at the same time give them an adreniline rush.

Preliminary Task



Before we began the filming of our actual film we did a small project so we could gain a deeper understanding of different techniques and rules of filming. From this I learned a lot more about aspects of editing and camera techniques. This allowed me to get more comfortable with editing which also allowed me to make diiferent scenes flow together and to make quick edits. I also learned a lot more about different camera techniques such as the 180 degree rule, POV shots and reaction shots. Below are some pictures of these rules.

180 degree rule from Preliminary



POV shot from film opening



Reaction shot from our film opening

The 180 degree rule is in place so that the shots makes sense to the audience as it does not appear as if the charecter(s) have suddenly changed position

The POV shot allows us to create the idea that somebody is watching. This was very useful in our film as it allowed us to create tension.

The reaction shot lets the audience know how the protaginist feels at the moment.





Changes decided to make in film.

• We got rid of our original idea of a film due to it being far too complex for the resouces we had at our disposal. We wanted to have him in an apartment building and a lot of strange things happening such as chairs being lain on the fllor when he was in the other room creating a satanic symbol. However we could not of possibly got an aerial shot of the scene so we decided to srcap it.
• We also had the idea of the unknown intruder of being somewhat supernatural such as a ghost or a demon. After a short period of planning and discussion we decided against this as we did not have the skills to create something like that in our movie and it would be ebtter to have a human intruder than a dissapointing or fake looking demon.
• We scraped a scene where our charecter came into the house and texted for a while. The original purpose was to display this was his own home and that he felt comfortable in the setting. However, we decided this was already accomplished by having him know where the keys were to the front door and how at ease he was when making food and watching the television.
• During the editing we added a time at the beggining of two scenes to illistrate that we had done cross cutting and the first scene was actually at the end of the film.
• We had a black out inbetween some scenes as we wanted to portray that some time had passed inbetween each scene. It would have been dull if we had shown every activity that contributed very little to the story.

The changes we made to the film were, in my opnion, positive. It made the entire story more realtable and believable to an audience which made ours more frightening.

Risk Assesment

Before me and Ross began filming we had to think of all the things that may go wrong during the filming and how we could resolve these problems. We came up with the following points:

• We wanted a natural light to be in the scenes as it seemed more realistic as our charecter had just come home from school. However we needed it to be dark so it was clear that there had been a power failure. We resolved this by drawing the curtains whihc allowed the room to be pitch dark when the lights went off.
• We were unsure of how much of the scene we should have before our charecter enetered his home. We filmed a minute of him walking home and then when we had finished we cut some of it out of our film was in the time limit.

Cating Shot

This was the one and only charecter in our
film. Ross Campbell played an average teenager
when there was an intruder in his home.

Location Shots

We used this position to shoot a POV shot
near the start of the film.
Next shot we used here was when the charecter
goes to pick up books that mysteriously fell.
Also used in the last shot of the movie when we
see a mysterious charecter walking downstairs.


Next shot in the sequence when our charecter
investigates a noise heard on the stairs.


Our charecter was sitting here when there
was a mysterious power cut.