Production: Ident

After researching different film openings, we decided the best option for us to make our opening as professional as possible is to create our own ident from scratch. To do this we used PowerPoint and iMovie.

To do this we used the image, text and colour options in PowerPoint to create an image/logo we liked. In the end we came up with this:

We used a black background to symbolise danger, death and loss of identity. We used red imagery and text to symbolise danger, blood and death. These two colours make the audience immediately aware of the genre of the film. We kept the imagery simple.
We then added this image into iMovie. We selected an option that animates the image slightly. Initially it starts off just an image of the house and eventually zooms out the reveal the whole logo. We thought this slight animation made it look much more professional. To add the sound effect we downloaded a sound clip from a copyright free website and took a section to fit the Ident. The slow hum of the sound, dramatises the ident preparing the audience for the start of the film.

Ident Research

From my initial research, I learnt that filmmakers used replaced well known ordinary idents with much darker colours. This is done to reflect the genre of the film, letting the audience know what to expect from the film before it even starts playing. Some popular colours used in these idents are black, blue and red as these colours have connotations of danger, death, sadness and loss. I will consider this research when designing my own ident, especially the use of colour. Here are some examples of idents used in successful thriller films:

Pre-Production - Rough Cut 1 Audience Test:

We created a focus group from people who represented our target audience (15-25). We showed them the rough edit of our first draft and asked them questions about what they thought we did well and what we needed to improve upon. The focus group consisted of 4 females, although we would have liked a mixed gender group, these were the only people available to us at the time. The people in our focus group were:

• Emily Marsh 16
• Molly Braggins 16
• Jessica Underwood 17
• Anna McAllister-Little 17

Here were the results:

Are there any parts of the footage you think we could improve on?

• Some of the shots of the bench scene are very bumpy. Make them smoother to improve the look of the shot. 
• Scene at the bus stop, a lot of it is out of focus, your opening may be better if you cut the shot or cut down the timing of it. 
• The shot of them walking down the street is too long. 

What sort of the music do you think we should add?

• Something innocent but eery
• Something that subtly builds suspense, but you don't want it to be too dramatic. 
• slow music that slowly builds up to create tension.

Does the opening set a good tone for the rest of the film? Can you get a feel for the narrative of the film just from the opening?

• Yes, it sets an eery tone and leaves you wondering what the full story is.
• I thought it was a good first draft, I think the music would really bring the opening together for the rest of the narrative. 
• I liked the constant contrast between past and present in this opening. It makes me very intrigued for the rest of the film. 

Do you have any extra feedback?

• I think it needs to be made more clear what happens at the end to the girls friend because its quite confusing. We aren't sure if she was real or not.
• I think there needs to be a bigger impact with the ending. 

This feedback from our focus group helped us get a good range of ideas on how to improve our opening to create the final edit. We also got some good feedback for which music would work well with our production. 

Production: Rough Draft 1

Film

This is the first edit of our final media film. We edited all the clips together to create an outline of what our final film will look like. In this edit we haven't added music yet or any credits. By making this first edit without key components such as music allows us to take feedback from our audience on the storyline alone and make it the best it could be, as music creates a large impact and could mask some improvements we could make.

The Reaction:

We asked two members of our class to watch our first edit and tell us their thoughts, this was Molly Braggins and Jessica Underwood. We thought they would be helpful people to ask as they are in our target audience in terms of age as they are both between 16-17 years old. They are also media students themselves so we thought they would offer helpful advice from an education perspective. After we showed them the clip we asked them some questions for us to get some constructive advice.  

What We Did Well:

From our feedback we gathered that we told the story well through the use of filters and makeup and editing to show the deterioration of her mental health. Another piece of positive feedback we received was that ambient sound added was good and fit into the scene well. The example they used was the bird song added during the beginning of the opening, our feedback stated that it added a calming tone to the scenes 

Editing: Dividing the Work

As myself and Georgie each owned the software we needed to edit our film on our own laptops we decided that it would most efficient to divide up the flashback scenes equality between the two of us to edit. Each flashback scene will be edited in a separate iMovie project and then once edited they will be exported and put into one final project that will be our final film. By doing this is allows us to spend more time editing as we don't need each other to be there whilst we edit. It also allows us to contribute equally to the editing process and allows us to include our own creative ideas. However to avoid wasting time we will show each other our finished flashback before we export it so we don't have to go back and make changes. This will be a quicker method meaning we can spend more time on editing our film as whole.

Filming Day Two

Our second day of filming took place on Monday January 11th. For this day, we focused on filming the flashbacks for opening, making the most of our time to film as many as possible.
We started the day by using the first hour to prepare both the girl's makeup for the flashbacks. For the first part of the day we were filming happy flashbacks, therefore we did both our actors makeup in the simplistic, natural look we planned beforehand. We then filmed the happy flashbacks, for example, the photo and book reading flashback, as well as some flashbacks outside on the street.
We then went back inside for the second part of the day and adjusted our main actors makeup from the natural makeup to the darker, more sinister, vacant makeup. We then filmed scenes such as the mirror scene and the crying scene. By the end of the day we had filmed all the flashbacks we needed.

Our next step is to put our clips together and create a first rough edit and get feedback from our target audience. During editing, we will also see if there is anything we have missed and will need to do on another day of filming if needed, this could also give us an opportunity to re-shoot anything thats not the quality we expected.

Call Sheet Two: