Diagetic and Non-Diagetic Sound

In our film opening all of our shots will include diegetic sound, this is where the sound comes from the people in the film or is implied to be present by the action of the film, for example, brushing of leaves against each other and the sound of a character breathing. Dan in our group is responsible for making these sounds noticeable and believable in our film opening and in order to do this he has a microphone on every set we film and holds it out of the shot but close enough to pick up the important sounds such as conversation between the victim and her friend she bumps into on the pathway. However, some sounds are easier and better quality to record by doing them separately and not on scene. Dan did this with the breathing and music coming out of the earphones on the river set. Non-Diegetic sound on the other hand is represented as coming from the a source outside story space and this will be included in our film opening when we film the first killers victim in her house when the mysterious man is creeping around the house. Dan has found some interesting copyright-free sounds on the internet which we are going to use for the house scene and we hope this we build up tension for the audience.

 

Finance

BBC'S LOGO

In reality I would get the money to help finance my film from BBC studios. This is because BBC is a trusted and reliable company which funds many other films and TV programmes in the UK. A lot of people watch the BBC channels and therefore our film would be broadcasted to many homes and seen by a large number of people which would hopefully make our film very talked about so that people who do not what the BBC channels would try and watch it.

Our Film Distribution Company

Twisted Pictures Logo

For our film to be successful we need to have a successful film distributer behind us. I decided to choose 'Twisted Pictures'. My main reason for picking this film distribution company is because they already back a lot of horror/crime/mystery films such as The Saw Series, Dead Silence, The Tortured, Texas Chainsaw 3D and many others. Twisted Pictures is an American independent production company. The company was founded in 2004 by Evolution Entertainment's Mark Burg, Oren Koules and Gregg Hoffman. This makes them a trustworthy and reliable source to distribute our film and will hopefully make it successful.

Production Company Clip

As part of a film you need to have a professional and consistent production company behind it. We decided to name our production company 'BCDM PRODUCTIONS' this is because the letters stand for the first letters of all our names and we thought this would be an unique and original name. We used an app for the iPhone to generate the clip above in which we purchased so we have full copyright for the clip. We wanted our production company to be responsible for making films of the scary/horror/mystery genre and therefore we decided that a lamppost with a flickering light in the dark would be ideal for our production company and therefore the production company would be seen as consistent in what films they create.

Filming The River Shots

Above on the left we have me playing the victim and Mollie(top right) filming the shots and Cristi(top left) making sure the shots and outfits work together. The middle picture is of Dan playing the 'mysterious man' in his black apron. To the right we have Cristi holding props and generally helping out around the set.

As part of our opening scene is set along the river just after the title of the film is revealed we decided we needed to film these shots first before the weather gets nearer to winter and worse. On the morning of Thursday 29th November 2012 we filmed a series of shots of the 'mysterious man's' next victim. We included shots such as handheld shots of the mysterious man running after his next victim, long shots and medium shots of the girl running, point of view shots from the mysterious man’s point of view so the audience are scared for the innocent girl who is being stalked as one of the psycho's many victims. Cristi arranged all the costumes including mine which was the jogging outfit for the girl, Dan's outfit which was a black apron which was wrapped around his head so that his identity was kept secret and also her own which was a casual outfit. We were very pleased with the shots we captured and they work very well however we were aware that there was unwanted backlighting in some of our shots which was out of control and this may be something I would improve on if we were to film the shots again maybe choosing a different time of day but it does work well in showing the audience the time of day that it is as we want them to know it’s the morning and that the killer is fresh from killing the girl the night before and his now onto his next victim. Cristi provided props such as the water bottle, headphones and iPhone that I was holding whilst running and also the bag that she was holding. Overall the filming took us 2 hours and we made sure we used the extra time we gave ourselves to go through and film some shots again to get the best quality we could.

Production Planning

During today’s lesson (Tuesday 27th November 2012) we sat down and discussed when we are going to film our shots and reminded each other of our roles so that we were able to film our shots smoothly. We decided that as our first deadline of the final cut is soon approaching that we should aim to film as soon as possible. We used SMART goals to help us plan out our filming schedule meaning we need to be considerate of the time we have, make sure our filming goals were achievable so we don’t overload our schedule and have bad quality shots and also be realistic about when its best to film our shots as one of our settings is at my group members house (Mollie) and therefore we need to plan to film our shots when least people are in the house as possible so we are not interrupted and have unwanted background noise.

StoryBoard

This is the storyboard for our film opening. Mollie and Dan mainly worked together to produce the storyboard as they are the more artistic members of the group and they managed to produce clear and understandable images for what will be happening in our film opening. The storyboard was crucial to the planning of the production because we were more able to manage out time and stay on task for what we were meant to do.

Inspiration

 

As a group we took inspiration from a well-known film 'Scream'. As most of our film is about a mysterious man stalking girls and creeping around their daily lives we watched a few scenes from this film so we picked up variety of shots that work well and are more effective in creating tension, suspension and an atmosphere for a horror movie and we hope to use them for our film opening to make our film as effective. We also noticed from the film that there is little dialogue which also creates tension so we have applied this to our film opening and kept dialogue to a bare minimum.

The Title of Our Film Opening

As a group we decided that we want our film to be about the revenge of a man on other girls who know details of what happened to his daughter that was brutally murdered therefore we wanted the title to resemble the idea of revenge and this is where we got the idea of the name 'Reprisal'. Reprisal is quite a mysterious name and not many people know what it means which makes it more intriguing and we hope this makes people want to know more about it. Mollie who is in our group found a generator on the internet which allows you change the format of the title for our opening sequence into a bloody mess as you can see above. This gives the audience a vague idea of our film opening without giving too much away and it will also remind you of the genre of the film which is horror/mysterious. We will be introducing the film title after approximately 53 seconds of the film opening with a flashing black background to give the title more effect.

Our Opening Scene

 

For our opening scene we will be focusing on a scene where a young girl is murdered. She will be babysitting for her parents how have gone out to the pub and she watches a news report on another young girl who has been murdered in the local area on TV. Naturally Storm is scared and phones her parents to check when they will be home, her parents reassure her and say that they will be home soon so Storm decides to start running a bath. Storm goes over to the baby and will say she won’t be long she's just checking on her bath. She then goes upstairs where she goes into the bathroom and as she is walking into the bathroom you catch a glimpse of the serial killer dressed in all black walk from one room to another watching Storm which builds tension and fear. She then goes into the toilet and then it cuts to a scene of her parents walking home and match on action as they walk through the door into the house. The parent’s shouts for Storm and when they hear no answer they look round the house and they see that she has been drowned purposefully and is hanging half in the bath and half body on the floor.

The scene then cuts to another news report of Storm who has been murdered however in another household where a girl is preparing to go out for a run, there are shots of her running and then as she runs over the river the camera is in the eyes of the killer who is watching her and the girl is oblivious and runs on and then the opening ends where she stops for a rest on a park bench and starts talking to people who say she shouldn’t be on her own and asks her if she knows what has happened in the local area.

Our opening will include key skills such as match on action as the parents walk into the house, non-diegetic sound and diegetic sound throughout the opening and many more.

Word Treatment for a New Film

One idea I have for my film opening is basically a story around a mysterious person who is a serial killer dressed all in black throughout the film and he targets girls in the local town to kill. The reason he goes after girls is unexplained until the end of the film where you find out that someone killed his daughter and ever since he has wanted revenge on any innocent girl as he is a psychopath. The genre of the film is horror/mystery and there are various news reports throughout the film accounting the different times the killer strikes.

The film focuses on one victim of the killer and throughout the film you see sightings of the killer following the girl for unknown reasons. There will be plenty of anti-climax and fear for the young girl.Also the film will resemble reality and be more like a documentary following the eyes of the serial killer. We used the film ‘Scream’ for inspiration as there is a similar storyline however this film will be more realistic.