AV13: Finished Film and Assessment

We screened our films at student organised event called AV13 [Audio/Visual 2013], where everyone on the course had to get involved in where they could to help run the night.
I was one of the presenters on the night, with two other students, whereby we introduced the films and were in charge of making sure the crowd knew what was happening at each stage. Although it was scripted we kept everything really light, after some advisement from Chris. It was an..... interesting and fun role and it was nice to have an event like this that showcased our work, and seeing everyone really get into it by clapping and dressing up etc.

This is our final film that was screened at the event:

The Making Of Ridley from SHU Film & Media Production on Vimeo.
[https://vimeo.com/82270334]

Reception of the film:

The film was well received and I got a few comments about it afterwards from my pees, everything else went fine. The only thing I would say as a negative of the film, is that seeing it on the big screen the bits towards the end where Dean is slowly separating himself from the character Ridley, which is portrayed over three shots (left, right, centre) it looks as though we shot it wrong because he has/doesn't have a blazer one when really it was planned and is supposed to portray the two sides of him, the one internal video blogger and the external craziness.

The Art & Science of Screenwriting with Susannah Part 5

This session was a mixture between Susannah finishing up on the fundamentals in the Narrative Matrix and Ron talking about the use of Sound in film.

We first looked at My Childhood by Bill Douglas
From this we considered what the scene was doing, in terms of its cinematic point. How it was necessary to understand what your dialogue is doing and interrogate it if it's not doing what it should be/is not as effective.

Dog Day Afternoon Directed by Sidney Lumet (The Julia Scene)
There is a certain texture, rhythm and musicality. Each character has their own distinctive voice, and it's hard to try and capture that as everyone starts writing how they speak which then means that every character sounds the same. When in reality that isn't true and would make for a very one dimensional film.

I liked this scene as we skipped between seeing how the conversation was going from both people perspectives and how the.... sort of wave of dialogue progressed as she found out about the situation, when he finally blows up at her and how he eventually put down the phone. It was all very smooth and felt musical, especially with the speed of how she was speaking. Ironically enough dialogue can also be about not saying anything, and we saw that when the man in prison, tried to jump into the conversation and the silence allowed his anger to build and bubble until her blew up then eventually gave up.

Dialogue ties in heavily with other points of the narrative matrix;
It helps with understanding the mood of a character and why they are a certain way.
Its essential in plot progression, as normally it's when a character finds something out that pushes the narrative forward.
Emotional tone: How the characters are saying what they are and what that could possibly signify about the situation and their feeling.
Dialogue is a good way of increasing/decreasing tension, with something as small as a witty one liner to one harsh word.

We next looked at this clip from Children of Men Directed by Alfonso Cuarón [0:44-End]

 An effective technique in dialogue, is when the scene is blocked and we see a characters facial reaction to hearing other characters talk about them. I really liked the idea of this as I think it's an interesting way to explore two sides to a story. For example, the unseen character who is being talked about; if they were to stay quite and listen, and act as if the moment never happens then there must be a some sort of truth to what they are saying. However if they were to burst in and interrupt and make it clear they heard every word then either they have something to hide of the person portraying them is being heavily inaccurate.
As well as all of this there is normally a clear or at time underlying theme in these situations, in this case the scene acts not only as a backstory but as a understanding of Faith vs Chance, which could be foreshadowing a major event.

Sue gave us a few writing exercises to do that would help enhance and consider how we write dialogue
-Write the opposite in terms of literal and tonal i.e: Saying something happily/sadly.
-Have the characters describe on another.
-Have a character rant and other be very quite and selective with their words, and then reverse this to see how it would change things when the roles have been reversed.
-Have a character describe a narrative event, kind of like in the Children of Men Clip above but more plainly in this scene we watched from Hunger Directed by Steve McQueen


Storytelling in an accountability way which allows the audience to step away from the visual element of story telling and step back into the imaginationary part, letting them do the work. I really liked the idea of this, and if not a monologue like shown in Hunger, then something like the visual storytelling of faith vs chance in Children of Men.
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The session was more interwoven between sound and dialogue but I have spilt it up here so everything could be grouped together.

We mostly spoken about sound and thought about it in consideration to how it effects your piece as a whole. The thing that stood out to me the most was when Ron said: Sound starts from the script and ends with the credits. Granted we all take sound for granted and think of it more as an after thought. Therefore when we have the script I am going to plot a separate one for sound, because I so far know that I want an orchestraic and theatre felt element to it. We also considered how sound is used to help us see the images the way we want the audience to. To me this meant thinking what each section made me feel and how I would portray that by use of sound, sort of like association between sounds and feelings.

One clip that we did look at for a way to consider how sound is used as an effective way of storytelling was Them by David Moreau and Xavier Palud. 
The scene we watched involved a mother and daughter driving down a deserted road at night when something jumps in front of the car making the mother crash into a tree and the car break down. The mother goes to fix it and our view from inside the car with her daughter is obstructed by the bonnet. The mother disappears and the daughter searches around the car calling her name to try and locate her. Eventually the response she gets is someone mockingly mimicking her, and so she runs in fear back to the car where she tries to call the police. Scared and alone with something out to get her.

This scene made me realise how important it is for sound association for the audience. It puts you off guard way when you are hearing something you cannot place. In this case it was a weird clicking sound. As well as this nature played a big role as the sound of the crickets etc seemed so surrounding and distracting that it was hard to focus on the overall silence beyond that. The repetition of the daughter calling to her mother, gave you the hope of expectancy in an eventual reply and again highlighted how alone the character was.
Finally in the car as she calls for help and the sound of the police station on hold is an uplifting happy go lucky beat which is an opposing sound to the thiller-esque situation. This then allowed sudden sounds to then produce a scared reaction in the audience making them jump.

The second main point to the sections we had on sound was to see it as a way to bring physicality to the screen.

Last Phase of Post Production

The picture cut was finalised on Wednesday, and even though we had bled into the sound design time I had no fear that we would still get everything done in time. Editor and I sat together and went through every clip that was in the sequence and I carefully debated each one in terms of meaning and character/story development and through this rigorous process we finally had a final cut in place. This process worked really well as it meant that there was a reason behind every cut and once we had finished there was no question about it being done.

We immediately handed the finished copy to the sound designer to get started on ASAP, I left him too it and came to check on his progress on Friday whereby I listened to what he had done and made sure everything synced up. As previously mentioned there was nothing really extravagant to add to the soundtrack of this piece as it would take away from the basic simplicity of the piece, but the sound designer still managed to come up with a few soundscapes that worked well for building the tension of the film throughout. I commented on placements for new sounds and how I wanted the sound adjusted and then left him to it again. We communicated again over the weekend with my checking his progress and making suggestive adjustment here and there before eventually signing off on the sound design and the project itself. It was necessary to get everything agreed on by Sunday because even though our deadline wasn't until Friday we needed it to be finished in preparation for the AV13 event on Wednesday.

Marketing Our Film

I started by doing a little bit of research to know what specific elements needed to be in a movie poster I simply searched "Movie Poster Conventions" to get a general outline, an example of some of the stuff I found.

 

I then went more specific and focused on movie posters based on the psychological thriller genre, looking at some of the films that I described as being similar to the film that we wanted to make. eg Black Swan, The Secret Window. These posters and many other had the characters face as a primary image either looking right at the camera or just off to the side at the off-screen space. I didn't think this conventional method would work well and so wanted to try a different approach. 

In the end I came up with two movie posters. One of which followed the more conventional Main Characters Face method, and the other I chose to do because I thought the image worked well as a subtle implication of the films underlining theme. Despite the similarity of the layouts that I found, I played around with different positions and chose what I thought worked better for the poster.

The conventional poster was inspired by Trance (2013)  [D: Danny Boyle]

Mine had slightly less of the picasso element but I really liked the technique of the Trance film poster and thought it would be fun to try and attempt to duplicate it. I thought the coloured sections denoted the characters fragmented state of mind and having the raw emotion of the character on the poster made you pay attention and want to understand his fury.

The second poster I personally preferred as I thought it was a much more simple and stylistic approach, especially in conjunction to the way the film itself is simple. The interlocking hands I though denoted the character trying to keep the two sides of himself together. 

The text was chosen because its the standard scriptwriting format and the date is the night of our AV13 screening night. The tagline was hard to conceive as I came up with a few that was either incredibly tacky or too long winded. I eventually decided on this one as it was the most simple and to the point which I think worked well.

I showed the two posters to a range of people to get a general consensus of which they thought was best and why as I know that my view was more than bias.
Making the poster was a simple enough process and not being the slightest bit proficient on Photoshop I chose to put it together on a much simpler software before exporting it as a high quality image to be printed and put up on show for the AV13 night.

The whole AV13 night made me think about how I would market my film if it were being shown in a film festival.
The first thought was something that had been mentioned in one of my sessions over the semester and that was: Who do you want to see your film/Who is your film for? What is your film? I went about answering that question and from there
For this short in particular I would aim to get it shown at Student focused film festivals such as
Exposures Film Festival (which sadly in taking a gap year) and Cinematique! whose ethos is to show student films in a comfortable environment without the worries of entry fees and major competition. It's a way to build up confidence and courage in student filmmakers and their films. It's hosted in June/July in London. In terms of who I want to see my film, I want it to be like minded individuals who I could then form a team with to collaborate whilst doing entry level jobs in the industry. This because the "What" of my film is simply a student film.

I felt that a brochure has too much space for marketing a short 5-7 film, and normally when you go to a festival there will be a programme with information about every film, and so it's about standing apart from that. Instead of a brochure I fashioned a leaflet/flyer that would market the film. I thought this would be more effective to an audience as it's less daunting and easy to hand out. Even if it was stuffed in a bag, you eventually take a brief look at it, as I as well as many others have surely done. And for all those that do discard it there are even more that will take it into account and remember it.

The leaflet still contained all of the necessary brochure information such as: Film synopsis, longer outline, production still and cast and crew details,

The above is a screengrab of my finished product. The one on the left is the front of the leaflet and the one on the right is the back. Being doubled sided meant that I could include all the information in a spacious and easy to read manor. It includes all the elements of a brochure with a few added elements such as contact information and searchable social media.

All this marketing research and making was important as once we leave and are still trying to build a reputable name for ourselves we need to understand how to do all of this in order to reach people.

My Directors Notebook

After speaking to my tutor we thought it would be better to show pictures of what is in my directors notebook for a few reasons. The first is that it is very thin, as we only had one day of production, and secondly as I would also be using it document my process as a director for the semester two major project, which we had already started doing.

I chose to use an A5 sized book because it's easy to carry around and whip out, I did originally want something A6 but after having a look I deemed it too small.

So the first page in my notebook was a breakdown of what every role needed to bring with them on our production day. I personally love lists as it's a lot easier for me to keep track of everything that's happening both individually and as a whole when I spoke to each crew member before the shoot. 

These pages were from our day of production, and though it started off very organised it ended up being a little haphazard, which is fine for me as I of course understand my own though process but as a body of work it would need a bit of annotation to make head or tail of it.
1. At the top under the heading: 1:30/1:45 refers to the time we would start filming, as that is when our actor was due to arrive
2. Breakdown of shots, in what order we intended to film, based on producer/cinematographer thoughts, especially because of the varying lighting changes if we had filmed chronologically. This way was decidedly more time efficient.
3. The crossed out numbers were me breaking down the shots that aligned with the morning and the evening, as well as noting how many additional close ups we had to do before we changed the lighting to move on to the evening shots. I noted which ones we purposely skipped/altered for when time was fast spent. This would be useful for the editor when it came to putting everything together. This continues at the top of the second page.
4. Jotted at the top 5:30-6:30 is the time that we had to be finished for as the actor needed to leave.
5. The reference to neighbours/house-mates was something that I asked the actor to add to the script as at the time of filming we could hear conversation and movement from the people above us, and it went on for quite some time. This then meant that if it proceeded we could make an excuse for it early on in the story.
6. The list of costumes I had to jot down because, we had no art director and secondly because towards the end I had planned on interlacing certain outfits to show the delusional state of the characters mind.
7.There were a number of things we had to adapt to because of the location change and scene 7 shot 22 was in reference to that. I wrote it down not only for our benefit but for the editor.

I didn't get to meet with the editor as often as I liked for various reasons on their part but when we did meet I kept a list of the suggestions I had made and changes that needed to be implemented so that I could confirm that they had been made when we were to meet up again.


This is all that was in my notebook. As stated when I researched into the content of a directors notebook everyone works very differently. As well as this I had the shot list and marked up script with me on the day and often made notes, or ticked things off on their as well.  For me personally a directors notebook is where you can keep track of certain thoughts during the shooting process that either help you keep organised or creatively expand on what you can have.

The Art & Science of Screenwriting with Susannah Part 4

In this session we focused on audio visual style of Opening Sequences we started off by looking at the following openings;

Gummo [Harmoney Korrine]: Set up the character and let us know some of his personality as well as his cultural background and how that could go on to influence the rest of the film. The music as well was very well chosen, in its jovial, the music reminded me of stereotypical hill-billies which worked well as a backdrop for the character set up. There was also something very sinister about the type of text they decided to use in the opening.




Paris Texas [Wim Wenders]: Was picturesque and intriguing through the unfolding scenes as it plagued the audience with questions about this silent character in the desert.

The Full Monty [Peter Cattaneo]: The opening to this film was used almost as a background story in order to show the stark contrast to then and now. The opening few scenes set up some of the themes that the film would be addressing such as Gender stereotypes and unemployment as well as setting up key characters and how they interact with one and other.

Se7evn [David Fincher]: The opening built up the anticipation, so that even if you didn't know anything about the film you already had a sense of foreboding about what was to come next, and once you have watched the film you realise that the opening has a lot of clues to the plot.


The Hunger [Tony Scott]: The very beginning was done like a music video, and the use of monkies and lab equipment was a form of foreshadowing to the plot of the film

Lost Highway [David Lynch]: Very simple whereby the titles whizzed towards us like an oncoming car and were the undeniable yellow or road paint.

Europa [Lars Von Treier]: The hypnotic voice over and the shot of a close up train track soothed your mind and was used a tool to deposit the audience into the film-scape.



These openings were a range of experimental and mainstream, each had a different technique to their styling, it was either to directly tell something to the audience or suggest/foreshadow the events of the film, or even to put the audience in the right frame of mind for the films genre. These clips allowed me to consider what I would do for the major project opening sequence. I had to be clear about what I wanted to show and understand what kind of viewing I would be giving the audience, and that it was okay to step out of a linear/related audio/visual tone and theme for the set up.

We then did an exercise to think of what opening sequence we would use for our major project. Some people already had something they had planned to do in mind, I just made mine up:

I wanted to have a shot of an oscillating music box placed on a stereotypical stage actresses' make up station. The music box would either be a Carousel  or a circus tent with the curtains opened up. As this music maker spun one way the titles would spin the other way. In terms of audio I wanted to either have the expected delicate music box sound or the circus theme or heavy metal (Inspired by the opening of Michael Haneke's Funny Games). Which ever sound I had would end with a woman's long and piercing scream (This is how the major project starts according to the first draft of the script). At this the music box would stop turning and so would the titles. An additional thought of showing this sequence with an overlayed mirror effect occurred to me, kind of like how clogs interlock and move in varying directions. This effect would symbolise the characters two minds/states. There's a strange beauty about the idea and imagery that I had that I really liked and it feels like a short story within a story which I guess in a way os what an opening sequence can be.

Lastly we looked at graphic matching and how it can be used to foreshadow and mirror we looked at some clips from Fish Tank [Andrea Arnold] Walkabout and Don't Look Now [Nick Roeg] and finally The Graduate [Mike Nichols] the montage/graphic matching scene followed the seduction one that we looked at in the last session.
My favourite was the Don't Look Now  [Nick Roeg] I thought that the graphic matches were very smooth and even caused a sense of unedgeness just watching it which was interesting.

Major Project Development

Today me and the producer (who is also the scriptwriter) met up today as he had recently written the first draft which I'd had a few days to look over. I talked about a ups, downs and possible developments of the script which he made a note of to consider when he did the second draft. As well as this, now that we had a framework we discussed how many actors and locations we would need and a where we could get them.

It was a very brief meeting but it felt good to have things moving already in motion for the semester two major project.

Now that the script for the major project has been outlines, I can explore where I want to go stylistically over the Christmas break. So far there was only one film that immediately jumped out at me at me that we could perhaps use as a base point, Fight Club. There of course other elements to consider such as what audio visual stylistic approach I want to take and how I want to dress the set and the actors. But as said I have a while now to debate an answer to these points. I will also be speaking to my cinematographer about what came to mind when he read the script so that we can come up with a good few films between us to critically analyse together. 

Other Creative Ideas

Something that I have always wanted to do is explore the use of dance in my film as both a visually stunning element as well as a way to explain the story in a completely oblivious way.
Although I am into Drama filmmaking over Documentary, I always want to try and add an experimental element in my films as I feel it gives me another dimension to play around with.

Films such as Anna Karenina D: Joe Wright and Black Swan D: Darren Aronofsky I think best construct elements of my personal view of filmmaking





I believe working on the film Ridley is a good starting point as elements of delusion is in play which allows me to explore a more experimental take on the film. We are also shooting a number of scenes in a theatre space which is fantastic because I love the idea of theatrics in films and the  stereotypical notions behind them.

Although I am not writing the script I think I can still have some influence on what is in it and it gives me some experience on what it would be like in the industry as a director as it's not always that the director is the writer, especially in TV.

Audio Visual 2013

At the end of the semester our finished films would be assessed during a group organised event called, we all joined and filled up roles of our preference. I chose to be one of the MCs on the night that would be responsible introducing the films and bringing people in from the bar/waiting area after intermissions.

I wasn't able to make the first two meetings, but I made sure that I asked someone to put my name down for the MC team and caught up on what was discussed by reading the minutes that were written up and posted on the facebook group that was set up to help us organise the event.

I also met up with Joe one of the other MC's to discuss what the plan was for the night in terms of introducing and gathering in people, and we decided that the nest thing was to keep it simple and divide our roles based around the three intermissions. e.g; First one person would introduce the first lot of films while another person was making sure people who needed to be in attendance were around and the final person would help oversee everything that way we got a balance of doing it all.

I managed to make it to the third meeting where we talked a bit more about what was left to do and what we needed to have done by specific dates such as posters, final cuts for the editors etc. Also Joe mentioned that the night was supposed to be scripted so me Joe and Katie discusses a time we could meet to script the night.

Professional Practice Research

Having Known what I've wanted to be for a few years now I have been slowly accumulating a range of websites and books on a range of subjects from finding entry level jobs and graduate schemes to making your own films. The professional practice study module has helped me to now slow down and formulate all that I have previously gathered and articulate them into a structured process. 

I'm normally the sort of person that knowns what's about to happen next in a film and is rarely ever shocked by a twist or the ending and so that being said the directors on my list of favourites are there because they have surprised me in a film or done something I thought was visually stunning. As beautiful framing is one my guilty pleasures. To name but a few;

Joe Wright: Pride and Prejudice which is one of my favourite books, but from this film it was the way in which he chose his shots. It was a mixture of careful consideration and spontaneity which I learnt from the directors commentary of the film. From there on I watched more of his films and became interested in his directing style and approach.

Martin Scorsese: The Departed is the film that made me really interested in his films and exploring how to shock the audience and have simultaneous storylines in one plot.

Alfonso Cuaron: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban had such a distinctive tone and colouring that set it apart from the other films in the series. Although Cuaron's approach to the adaptation was pretty on the nose other elements such as the soundtrack and camera movements and colour pallets and even acting almost made it seem like it was a work of it's own. Being a reader and a film student the thought of adapting novels is never far from my mind so Cuarons technique enabled me to see ways in which you can claim ownership as a visual art whilst still keeping close to the text.

My goal is to be a writer/director and I know there's a long way to go before I get there and so through all the above mention approaches looking at who I admire and why, what is out there when I have finished and what I want to do I can find the most suitable approach for me to get there.