Lily, in our group, redrafted the pitch on the website Emaze and the results are immediate. The layout matches the newspaper theme and the title 'Print Out'. The added boxes containing details of production schedule, make-up, and casting, makes the pitch look neatly refined in certain areas. Finally, the smooth transitions between each slide allows the pitch to flow effortlessly throughout rather than the jaded sudden appearances of slides in 'Microsoft Powerpoint'.
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For my music choices, I decided to create a video and talk about my music choices using 3 examples and playing the music over my explanations.
Compared to my first episode of 'Sunday Corner', the video quality was only 360p compared to 720p. In addition, because I edited the video in one take, there were many times when I 'umm' and 'err' a lot, which does not look professional. Finally, the sound mixing between the music tracks were not great because my voice is sometimes drowned by the music playing in the background. However, after trying this method for two videos, it's proven to be a useful tool in allowing myself to bring my thoughts in a clear and concise manner and I plan to create more of these videos in the near future. Our group member Lily drew up a sketch for a storyboard. Although our group agreed that the artistry was not amazing, it was still useful for us to see a first draft of some of the shots that we will film for our opening sequence. However, this storyboard would not be useful as a final draft because of the unfinished drawings and it is hard to differentiate shot types. Lily then created an animated storyboard, and the boards had more clarity because of the added colours and the 3D animations.
In addition to writing a screenplay, we also decided to draw up a shooting script as there will be no dialogue. This will be very helpful for filming because it helps us to visualise how the shots will take place and the order in which they should be done. Although the likelihood of some shots changing in the final edit are likely, it is still important to have a foundation before adding layers.
This is the second draft of the script for our opening sequence. The changes that were made include:
My HouseFor the beginning of the opening sequence, we will be shooting at my house. The reason why we chose this was because the aesthetics from the inside and outside of the house match our character's background as a middle class man with reasonable income. Also, the lighting in the house is great for filming because the ceiling lightbulbs fill the entirety of the first floor landing. Exterior locations For the shots where our young juror is walking down a road, we decided to use the road that I live in because it matches with our main character's lifestyle and background. In addition the road is a conventional locations for the beginning of mystery thrillers, especially David Fincher's films.
For the shots at the café and sideroad, we decided to use a café in our local area. One great incentive about the location is that the café is right next to an alleyway that can be used for the final scene. However, one problem about this location is that we may need to ask permission to film here because we will be shooting on private property. This could turn into a major problem if we get refused because we would then have to find another place to film, thereby wasting valuable production time.
For coming with ideas for our film, we decided to record of podcast of our group (Myself, Reece Savva, and Lily O'Reilly) discussing ideas and concepts about our film. It was an interesting experience because it shows how much of an idea you can create in a short space of time.
Timestamps 00:00-00:55, introduction of speakers and what the podcast is about. 00:56-03:35, discussion about inspirations, talking about the idea of focusing on character building and character journey, rather than the overall mystery. 03:36-06:05, talk based on answers from questionnaire, brief discussion about red herrings, more talk about inspirations and aspirations for film. 06:06-07:19, some talk regarding target audience and what we should focus on to please our target audience. 07:20-09:44, start to talk about our ideas for start of film, discussion about flash backs or flash forwards and mention of Netflix series 'Marvel's Jessica Jones' as inspiration for style of flashback. 09:45-14:15, lots of talk about main character, who his he, what's his background, how do we introduce him. 14:16-17:15, talk of location and different shot types, slight plot development. 17:16-21:30, a lot of discussion about structure and plot of opening scene, including shot types, reasons for decisions. 21:31-23:33, roundup of ideas and outro. Evaluation As I listened back to the podcast, I found that our communication skills were lacking because we spoke over each other, and someone's ideas couldn't be heard because another person was interrupting, which made listening at times cringe-worthy, and painful as I know that I can rectify those small mistakes. In addition, we sometimes went off topic and referenced too many TV shows and films that we liked, even though we were linking the references back to the idea. However, despite these shortcomings, I still thought that our ideas came across clearly and the format we chose was unique when it came to brainstorming because it was not about drawing a fancy a mind-map, but rather articulating ideas on the spot.
This is the first script draft for the opening sequence to our film. I used courier font to capture the typography of an actual script. I also did not mention the titles appearing on-screen because in actual film scripts, they don't input them because titles are done in pre-production. There are some spelling and grammar issues in the last scene, but I will try to overdo that mistake in my second draft.
This was the read-through for the first script draft.
Timestamps 00:00-06:41, read-through of the script with discussions about reasons for certain decisions and some proposed amendments. 06:41-11:22, discussion about certain plot changes to script, and placing of titles but why not putting titles in script
The first question we asked was for the respondent's gender. This is to differentiate whether both genders will choose different answers, rather than the same. Luckily enough, we got 10 responses equally from both genders so extracting data would be easy. In safe measure, we added in transgenders as the rise in young transgenders is still a hot topic in our society.
Question 2 was about the respondent's age. As we asked some of our friends, the '15 to 17' range would likely be the highest. We also asked our parents so '51 to 60' came out second, which is refreshing to see.
Question 3 and 4 were focused on marketing so we have a better understanding in how to market our opening sequence. Surprisingly, advertisements are still the strong media, according to the survey, so our group may need to think of posters for marketing our film. However, the rise of social media can be shown with this category coming second, correlating with the dominant age range of '15 to 17', so maybe creating an Instagram and Snapchat account could allow us to connect to the younger generation. Lastly, although the other three categories were the lowest, it still helps to know that these types of medias are marketing films.
Surprisingly, I expected to see Cinema come first but with a slight margin against challengers like 'Online Streaming' and 'Video on Demand' with normal movie-going experience: this didn't happen. According to our survey, '80% would still pay money to watch a film in the 'Cinema' but with rivals like 'Netflix' creating original films with top Hollywood stars ('Bright' starring Will Smith is out in December on the streaming platform), 'Online Streaming' managed to gain 20% of the overall vote. From this data, our group could uploading the film on YouTube as it would attract the online streaming audience as an alternative for putting the film in a cinema, which is unlikely to happen.
Question 5 decided whether our opening sequence should have a clear or an unclear narrative. Again, like question 3, there is another surprise where both narratives got 50% of the vote and this may have to do with movies like 'Inception', 'Memento', and 'Se7en' that appeal to a mainstream audience but have unclear narratives. However, using this data would be tricky as input for planning our opening sequence because you can't have a clear and an unclear narrative in the same opening: they are opposites of each other.
Question 6 was about the respondent's preferences to a chosen era for a mystery film. As the mystery genre encumbers many eras like the 1800s with 'Sherlock Holmes', the pre-1950s with Agatha Christie's Poirot and Marple, and the 00s to the 10s with 'True Detective', 'Se7en', and 'Zodiac', audiences may not want a 00s film and instead prefer an 80s flashback movie.
Luckily for our budget, 60% chose 21st century eras, which helps to establish our mise-en-scene as we can use day-to-day props rather than trying to establish a pre-90s era with the likelihood of continuity errors being high and eating up our budget. However, the survey shows that no one chose pre-80s, which shows a change in the medium because before, many people would like to have an old-fashioned mystery thriller; now, an audience would prefer a modernistic thriller like 'Nightcrawler' or 'It Follows'.
Question 7 was showing whether or not audiences would like to have a character break the 4th wall at the beginning of a mystery film. Usually comedy films would break the 4th wall as the method works well for funny intertextual gags, and self-mimicking in this genre, but we wanted to see whether respondents would think that this theatrical convention would work well in the mystery genre. As we created the survey, I thought that this question would be a throwaway because mystery genre films would never work with a goofy detective nudging the viewer at certain intervals; it wasn't. Thanks to a movie like 'Deadpool' and TV shows like 'House of Cards' and ' A Series of Unfortunate Events', audiences would like to have a detective break the 4th wall in some way or another according to 40% taking part in our survey. However, the majority of 60% thinks that breaking the 4th wall should happen but I think our group should still take into account of that 40% minority.
Question 8 was an opinion based answer as we wanted to get responses from the participants on certain opening sequences to mystery films that we analysed in depth. Lily chose 'Gone Girl', Reece chose 'The Imitation game', and I chose 'Memento'. I was surprised to see that 'The Imitation Game' got the majority with 50% as it has a grandeur direction and an unconventional style with orchestral music, and slow tracking and pan shots with the cinematography. But it may have to do with the engaging voiceover by Benedict Cumberbatch as he introduces us to a story that needs paying attention (some slight 4th wall breaking). Memento came second with 30%, which is an opening sequence that introduces us to the two narrative strands in an exciting fashion and the polaroid photo concept was well received in the responses that we got.
Finally, Gone Girl came last with 20% and this may have to do with the opening not available on YouTube and so I had to embed a link into the question, so the respondents may not have been bothered to look at the sequence.
Question 9 was considering the type of story that people like to see in a mystery film. As predicted, 'Whodunnit' got a majority of 40%. This might have to do with this sub-genre being the safest option and one that most audiences would recognise. The rest gained 20% each, which was encouraging to see because it shows that our respondents enjoy a range of sub-genres in mystery. Personally, I prefer the 'inverted' sub-genre because I like seeing filmmakers making thrilling stories full of twist and turns, even though the major twist was revealed at the beginning. Finally, in the 'Other' category, the two responses were 'crime' and 'romantic' but these are genres and not sub-genres; its still interesting to see people's interpretation of sub-genres and genres cross-over into each other.
Our final question was an open one, and it was asking the respondents of their ideal mystery film. The reason why I chose an open question for last was because I wanted to find out their interpretations of a mystery film, so I can input ideas of our opening sequence from our survey's responses. Apart from one person skipping, this may had been due to time constraints on their part, everyone gave us their ideal mystery film ranging from classic Sherlock Holmes and Alfred Hitchcock movies, to Western thrillers like 'The River Wild' starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. No response was the same, which is great for our group because it gives us more ideas to have a look at, but sometimes having a word like 'murder' as one response is hard to work with because 'murder' could be anything.
Evaluation
Overall, I thought that the survey we constructed was effective in finding our target audience because our predicted target audience was 18-35 in males but now we can see that mystery appeals to a wide age spectrum between 16 to 50, so it is useful to know that different styles attract different ages. Also, by using 'closed' questions, it gave the survey a tight focus so that respondents don't get bogged down with every question.
The feedback we were given by some family members was that people wanted to choose more than one option on some of the questions, but I felt that if I gave this freedom to our respondents, the results won't be as clear as we got them because people would choose a bit of everything and not a definitive answer. |
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May 2017
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