Production Update: Filming

Thursday 26th September we filmed shots at Dan's house which is a typical suburban house. We filmed shots of Holly from various different angles so that we could pick and choose which suited our trailer most. We used props such as vodka bottles, scattered tobacco, credit cards, loose change and white sugar crushed up to form lines on the table in order for it to look like class A drugs. We smudged Holly's make-up to make it look as if she doesn't take much pride in her appearance.

We also filmed shots of Holly coming into contact with Dan (the angry uncle whom gives the impression to the audience he is abusing her sexually, physically and mentally) and when she opens the door she is greeted with vulgar language which indicates the sort of environment she lives in.

Locations

   This shot is from Dobbs Weir river where we will film some shots of the angry man who is trying to find Valerie. We used this location because it reflects our genre of social realism because of the electricity towers, warehouses etc... It shows the audience our film is set in the suburbs of London where urban meets rural.

We also chose to film some shots next to the river because of the atmosphere around rivers and on a dark and dingy day we want to give the audience a sense of foreboding. We will use pathetic fallacy to gain the atmosphere in our shots.

Characters

Dan is an important character in our production as we want to have a scary/disturbing side to our production and therefore we decided to create a character which has an alcohol addiction and is supposedly violent. We have used make-up to give Dan a bruised eye socket which hopefully leads the audiences imagination into thinking that this man is capable of anything.






Holly is the actor in our production. She plays the main character, Valerie. We chose Holly because of her distinguishing features such as her red hair, freckly skin and also because her ability to perform well and professionally without wasting time. Holly is also a talented dancer and we hope to incorporate her dancing skills into our production.

Billy plays the role of Tyler, Valerie's soul mate. We want Tyler's personality to come across as loving, gentle and understanding of Valerie's situation. In our production we want to have shots of Tyler with Valerie and dialogue of deep emotion. 

Analysis of Social Realist Trailers

Fish Tank

 I have taken inspiration from the film ‘Fish Tank’ which was directed and written by Andrea Arnold, released on 11 September 2009 and produced by BBC Films and the UK Film Council. The reason in which our trailer will be similar to Fish Tank’s is because the genre is the same, Social Realist, and because of this we will have similar props e.g. cups of tea and the string bag), hair and make-up, costume, dull lighting, actor’s performance and settings(for example in Fish Tank they filmed in Barking, London). As you can see in the print screen above the setting is exactly what we aim for in our film trailer ‘Valerie’.

There are other aspects of Fish Tank that inspires our film trailer, for example, the nominations and awards they have won we would have those sorts of nominations on our film trailer because the audience know what sort of categories they like and we want to attract the same audience as Fish Tank (e.g indie).

Also, the Fish Tank Trailer has a pattern of fast flowing shots of different aspects of ‘Mia’ the main characters life. How our trailer will be different to Fish Tank’s trailer is that gradually over the shots you see Valerie’s life improving slightly since she’s met a nice young man but will also leave on a cliff hanger, a common convention of film trailers, to create suspense.











I also took inspiration from Series Two of Skins created by  Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain and run on 11 February 2008. I chose Skins because of the settings and characters. The settings in skins go from one extreme with shots of a council house estate to very expensive posh houses which creates a picture of the reality of UK's society.

The characters in Skins are around the same age as Valerie and so we took note of some of the shots skins have of how the characters look and are dressed and we will be shooting similar shots.

The last media text that I took inspiration from was London to Brighton because of the camera angles they captured of the characters

Costuming

For our main character, Valerie, we have decided that in the shots before she meets Tyler she will be dressed in simple, unflattering clothing in order to represent that she is from a lower class family that lives on a low income and have very little disposable income to buy brand new fashionable clothing.

Inspiration taken from FishTank and Skins.

However, throughout the trailer Valerie starts to look more presentable since she's meet Tyler and therefore her costuming will become more appropriate and fashionable.

Tyler's costuming will be more common however trendy wearing such things as jeans, plain tops and trainers. This will be to represent that he is from a well supported family background.

Extra's such as the boys hanging around in social housing estates will wear tracksuit bottoms and hoodies, to conform to the social stereotypes of 'chavs'. We want to include these extra characters because it will give the audience a sense of what foul play Valerie has to deal with in her day to day life compared with Tyler.

Production Schedules

To help Daniel and I keep on track of what filming and editing needs to be done we have created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel which has the four months in which we are allocated to do our production and we have colour coordinated carefully to best plan our time. This will help us meet deadlines which are crucial for big movie makers in order to keep the budget down.
The dates in Green are filming days, blue are editing days, yellow is emergency re-shooting time and the red dates are the first cut and final cut deadlines.

Our production schedule

Storyboard and Animatic

Here is our storyboard, we created a storyboard for our film trailer to give us some idea about what sort of shots we are going to have and also to help us prepare for the actual filming.

We also created an Animatic to give us more of an idea about timing. This is all preparation to make sure we get all measures right first time as in reality film makers don't get a second chance because of mistakes and mistakes mean a tighter budget that might affect the quality of the film.

Production Planning

Me and Dan's film trailer idea for the storyline was about a vulnerable young girl called Valerie in her teen years whom is a victim of domestic, drug and alcohol abuse. We wanted fast flowing shots of the 'darker' moments in her life and gradually as she falls in love the shots become of Valerie starting to change until she realises what impact she has on the man who has helped her to recuperate her life. We finish the shots on a dramatic cliff hanger where the audience don't know whether Valerie and her lover will end up together.

We decided to present our ideas in a presentation to show to our class so that they can give us constructive criticism and, if we have missed any, they can spot any limitations we might have.

Feedback from our presentation:

The class pointed out to us that we had two genre's going on. Rom com or Social Realist. We decided on social realist because of the main character's challenged background. They also pointed out how we going to pull off the drug addiction, violence etc... We responded that we didn't want to include any actual violence in our scenes as it would be very tricky to pull off the actor's performance however to represent violence we will use other methods such as make-up and hair to suggest Valerie has a black eye. Classmates also suggested that we should have some rainy shots and use scripting instead of a voice over.

Wiley 'Heatwave' Music Video

This is our version of Wiley's 'Heatwave'. We lost a few shots through uploading them however we eventually made the music video look better through the editing and repeating some shots.

Knebworth House

As preparation for the second year of Media Studies we had to take a trip to Knebworth House to film a summertime music video. My team included Me, Dan, Ellie and Mollie and we chose to create a music video to 'Heatwave' by Wiley as it's a summertime song. Our main aims were to practise lip syncing shots and some shots with dance choreography.

 Most shots we were very happy given we only had an hour to shoot at the Knebworth House and then a second hour at the park where it rained the whole duration of the time we were there. Which highlighted for us the risks of filming a summertime music video in England and also taught of the harsh deadlines we might come across in our final production. 

Famous films such as The Kings Speech, St Trinians 2, Nanny McPhee, Batman the Movie, even TV programmes such as Eastenders and Midsomer Murders have filmed at Knebworth House.