I.C.U - A2 Short Film January 2010

This is our completed short film, I.C.U, and overall, I am pleased with our final result. I felt this whole production was a good experience and enabled me to develop my film making knowledge and skills. Through every stage of pre-production, production, and post-production I learned something new and I also learned skills which could be adapted elsewhere, for example using Photoshop to create film posters. As well as our actual film, I think we created an effective series of ancillary tasks. In particular I feel our film posters and magazine review were successful in working together to support our film, as well as being able to promote our film individually. For an in depth evaluation of my I.C.U production please read the latter drafts of my labels, Evaluation 1, Evaluation 2, Evaluation 3 and Evaluation 4. Each different question allowed me to evaluate the different areas of my production, and I think my evaluation clearly shows my thought processes and decision making behind the film.

Daisy - AS Opening Sequence June 2009

"A Picture's Worth A Thousand Words"

Eventhough Camera was not going to be my priority during our filming, I still endured a masterclass to develop my techological knowledge! These are the notes we recieved and discussed with out teacher:

Digital Video (DV)
There are many great things about today's technogloy. Digital video recording have big viewfinders, which are just the tip of the iceberg. An advantage of DV is that modern camcorders have become small and portable (Batteries are small and lightweight, tapes have moved from full-size to compact). Filmmakers no longer have to lug a big videotaping contraption to each location, with modern DV cameras we can simply set up our equipment within minutes still maintaingin a high level of filming.

Dimensions Of Camera
Depth of field (DOF) is the portion of a scene that appears sharp in the image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on either side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions.

For some images, such as landscapes, a large DOF may be appropriate, while for others such as portraits, a small DOF may be more effective. In cinematography, a large DOF is often called deep focus, and a small DOF is often called shallow focus.

The focus pull (rack focus) is a creative camera technique in which you change focus during a shot. Usually this means adjusting the focus from one subject to another, it requires making adjustments such as changing filter or adding shutter.
Pulling focus on the whole picture can be done at any time simply by turning the focus ring until focus is completely lost. This can be used as an opening/closing shot or as a transition between shots. It can also be used for various effects, such as a point of view shot from someone who is drunk or groggy.

The shot below begins focused on the plant in the foreground, then adjusts focus until the girl is sharp.
In the age of digital editing, focus-pulling for effect is more commonly achieved in post-production. This adheres to the general guideline that it's safer to record pictures "dry" (without effects) and add effects later.

Hand Held Camera involves the camera operator removing the camera from the tripod and steadying the camera or your shoulder or other surface. This is a very technical skill to master however, if done well it will capture the viewer's imagination and take them on a cinematic journey.

It’s important to practice using the camera hand held before going out on location and shooting, to develop a comfortable position. Always remain fluid and relaxed, otherwise this will reflact in the shots you record.

Composition

When done right, the composition will not draw attention to itself. Instead, it will instill a sense of normalcy and stability. On the other hand, a poorly composed shot will have the opposite effect. It will distract the audience, or worse, make a scene entirely unwatchable.

Fill the frame….sometimes your mind tends to exaggerate what you see through the viewfinder of your camera. You often perceive things a bit bigger than they actually are and you also tend not to notice 'slight' distractions. What you end up with is shots with huge areas of wasted space around the edge and people with things growing out of their heads.

Make sure your subject fills the frame. The best way to do this is to move a bit closer. Before you record have a quick look round the edge of the frame and behind your subject. Make sure that you don't have acres of space full of nothing interesting and check for 'stuff' intruding into your masterpiece.


The Rule of Thirds is a basic rule of composition. This guideline gives you ideas on where to place your subject within the frame. Though your tendency may be to position your subject dead center on the screen, the rule of thirds will give you a more compelling picture. The rule of thirds suggests that the main subject in your shot should fall on one of the points where these imaginary lines intersect. The resulting image will be much stronger than if you simply place your subject in the crosshairs.

Video: Rule of Thirds http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPeOBPxV8iE

For example; when framing a person, that person's eyes are your main focal point. Whether using a wide shot or a close up, compose the shot so that the person's eyes fall on one of the uppermost imaginary intersections. The intersection you choose depends on which direction the person is looking. Frame someone looking screen left on the right third of the screen. This places the subject slightly off center and builds in another element of composition called "look room."

Looking Room, Lead Room and Headroom is the space that you leave in front of someone's face on the screen. This space gives the person room to breathe, as well as gives the impression that the person is looking at or talking to someone just off screen. If you don't leave enough look room, your subject will appear to be boxed-in and confined. Be aware that the amount of look room necessary is dependent upon the angle of the subject to the camera. A person looking directly toward the camera will require less look room than someone shot in full profile.

Moving objects such a cars require a similar buffer called "lead room." Allow extra space in front of a moving car so that the viewer can see that it has someplace to go. Without this visual padding, the car's forward progress will seem impeded.
Headroom is another element you should consider when framing your subject. Headroom is the amount of space between the top of someone's head and the top of the frame. If you leave too much space, the person will appear as if sinking in quicksand. If you don't leave enough room, the person will seem in danger of bumping thier head. By positioning the suject's eyes on the top third imaginary line, you will be building in the proper amount of headroom. When considering head- room, be sure the shot is loose enough so that you see part of the subject's neck or the top of the shoulders. However, don't be as concerned with cutting off the top of someone's head, as long this serves a purpose. Viewers do not perceive this as abnormal as long as you frame the actor's eyes where they should be.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In all stages of the pre production, production, and post production of our media product it was necessary we accumulated constant audience feedback. As in any field of the media world, audience is king! Therefore we could keep on improving and developing each of our ideas in order to make our product as successful as it could be. The first audience feedback we received was from our first pitch idea. In order to gain feedback we pitched our first idea for our short film to the rest of our class. From this we learned and realised many different things. We learned that it wasn't clear how our story linked to our original inspiration colour "red". However, after we explained this to audience telling them how the themes within the film, such as love, anger, passion and revenge were associated with the colour red, as well as our key plot twist of "fire", this problem was soon resolved. From this pitch, we also learned from our feedback we needed to show the development of our characters in more depth, especially Alfie's character. We also needed to show his motivation in order to seek revenge. Therefore we decided to contrast Alfie and Johnny's characters. Johnny would be a flirtatious character always showing Marie attention, which would drive Alfie's own insecurities wild and cause him to be an extremely possessive boyfriend to Marie, always being very protective over her. The attention Johnny pays to Marie, would also be the motivation for Alfie to seek his revenge. We did this so that the audience would then understand why Alfie is so jealous of Johnny’s character, and why he acts in the manner he does. Another thing we learned from the feedback of our first scene was that the content of the flashback was unclear to people. We needed to be clearer in the pitch of what the audience would see in these scenes, and whether this is when Alfie would catch Johnny and Marie together. We decided it would be best to show the majority of the flashback scenes with just Johnny and Marie acting flirtatiously towards each other, and on the final shot of the scene show Alfie finally seeing them together, and this is were the flashback would end. By doing this we felt the audience would have a clearer understanding of Johnny and Marie’s relationship and how it had developed over a period of time. Therefore it would be more understandable to the audience for Alfie to be suspicious and jealous towards Johnny’s character. A key piece of feedback we had from our pitch was that would it be possible for us, taking our casting constraints into consideration, to be able to show Johnny and Marie's physical affection between our casts. The reason why we decided to show this physical unity between Johnny and Marie, was to open the film with a strong plot point, so the audience is aware that these actions are the cause for Alfie’s revenge. Taking this into mind we decided it would be possible, we would just have to be very selective about who we decided to cast, and ensure they were mature about the situation and were comfortable with acting in this way, as without the physical affection between the two character the scene would be lacking realism. A key point brought up in our audience feedback from our first pitch was the first scene involving a blackout. The audience was curious whether or not the action still taking place was able to be seen or not. As the scene would be filmed after school there will still be some natural daylight, so the blinds can be opened. If there is not enough light to see the action then we will add to the scene that the lights only trips out for a minute or two and then comes back on. A final piece of feedback we received from our first pitch was that there wasn't enough dialogue between Johnny and Marie in the first scene to show the scene progressing. We agreed we didn’t have enough dialogue in the opening scene to show the style of Johnny and Marie’s relationship. Therefore dialogue we added in this scene could be for Marie to tell Johnny about Alfie’s psycho ways and how it affects her. This would enable the audience to sympathise with Marie’s character so she isn’t just perceived as a cheating girlfriend. However, we will not get to in depth with the dialogue as we don’t want to use too much dialogue and keep the story simple. Taking all this feedback into consideration I was able to re-write the pitch solving all the misunderstandings and developing the advice! By using this feedback we were able to make our media product more appealing to our audience. The next stage of our pre-production which required feedback was our script. This script was drafted four times before it was finalised! The first feedback we received is that there was too much dialogue and not enough visual, so we decided to cut this down and try to add more action into the story. We thought it was more necessary to use the camera to show the characters narrative development, so therefore we cut the dialogue down. We had the same problem of too much dialogue also in Scene 4. Therefore we decided we needed to research more films in order to get some inspiration of how to move the narrative along with out dialogue. It wasn't till our 3rd draft that was finally decided we had the right amount of dialogue, as we had to keep changing and re-arranging significant parts in order for the story to make sense. The next bit of crucial feedback we received from later drafts of our script was to remove the voice over. Our audience feedback showed it wasn't necessary to have this in the scene and we could do this more effectively by just showing Alfie's character holding a newspaper with a specific headline. Therefore this would also create more suspense.
Following the script, we created a "World of the film" board so we could really understand the themes of our film and the mood we wanted to be projected. Therefore we gathered different images of what we thought related to our film and presented it to the class. We didn't get very successful feedback from this task as it seemed we were projected the wrong idea for our film throughout this board. However, after listening to the feedback, I myself found I had a better understanding of what the audience wanted from this film, and the emotions the film involved. We used celebrity images, who have been through situations the same as our characters to portray this, however the audience felt this made the mood board appear like it was in a gossip magazine. We didn't need to focus on the actual story but more on the symbols, themes and emotions of the film. However, we were told some images reflected our film such as the shadowed models face which shows a fixed intense expression, which looks quite evil. We felt this would be an appropriate facial expression Alfie would pull when he see’s Marie and Johnny together. The bottle of vodka in the image is a part of Alfie’s past as his father was an alcoholic, and possibly one of the reason’s why Alfie is so possessive over Marie, and we realised we needed to focus more on these type of aspects in our world of film board. Therefore we re made the mood board and found our second attempt was much more successful as reflecting the image we wanted it to portray.
The next step of pre-production which required our feedback was storyboarding. Again we went through several drafts of storyboarding until it was finalised and the key point which was constantly repeated through our feedback was that we did not have enough cutaway shots. Our audience thought even though our story was strong we was telling it to easily with the shots we were going to use. Even though we did finalise our storyboard, we didn't always follow this in our actual production process and on location I often found an opportunity and/or had an idea for another style or type of shot. We added many cut a way shots, and also back up shots from a variety of angles. When we was shooting scene 5 I came up with the idea to shot Alfie thinking from a variety of different angles and distances. Also in the flashback scene, the shots which we filmed in the library we decided to shoot on the actual days filming, as we had some spare time and the library was free.
After our storyboard was finalised, this was our last stage of pre-production which required feedback. We moved on to organizing our photo story board, casting, rehearsals, and then our shooting schedules and call sheets. After our actual production filming took place it was straight to the editing process! Even though feedback has been crucial at all points throughout this unit of work it became especially vital in this post-production stage. It was essential that we received feedback for each scene we put together, so we could perfect each scene before moving onto the next. After digitising our rushes and putting together a rough assemble edit it was time to edit scene one. From our feedback for scene one we firstly learned that no one really liked Marie's screaming reaction to the black out. Therefore we removed this shot as it didn't seem realistic to the audience.
We also learned it was more effective to use less shots of Marie and Johnny flirting and more cut away shots so the attention is really focusing on Alfie, as the audience said they wasn't focusing of Alfie's character which was our original intentions. We also learned that if we cut the shot when Johnny leaves Marie to go and check the door, earlier the change of angle flows better, so we adapted this change. A few of our film's reviewers thought that the shot of Alfie locking the door really dragged on, so we cut this shorter. We also had some feedback on the sound of the scene and we learned the music we use at the beginning of the scene should fade out quietly when dialogue between characters starts and be audible in the background, however it should not stop completely which is what we decided.
We also needed to add in the sound effect of an explosion after the flame is sparked, to create an effect and make the action more significant. In Scene 2, our audience fairly decided we needed to re-shoot as the continuity wasn't perfect. Some people felt the scene was rather slow paced compared to the fast, despite this being what we wanted and needed to create the mood for the scene, therefore we never took this into account. One person particularly didn't like the wind effects in this scene so we blended this with another background track. More a less all of our feed backers agreed that the ambulance sirens should be longer, so we adapted this as this was something we was intending to do anyway. According to our feedback Scene 3 was our most impressive and liked by everyone. The flashback scene had cross-fade effects which added realism and the Black & White images represent the passing of time and the past well. From our feedback of Scene 4 we learned we had already displayed the same message of the scene in the flashbacks. This scene was also poorly shot, as the continuity was bad, the camera operator was visible in the windows reflection and we didn't shoot as much footage as we should have. Therefore we decided to scrap this scene and jus interpret the good shots we had into the flashback scene. The only feedback we received in scene 5 was regarding its ending as many people felt the ending wasn't strong enough. Therefore we decided to not have Alfie's character walking away towards the camera but instead use a fade to black to end the scene, ready for the titles to appear.
After the editing process was finished the next feedback we received was that of our ancillary tasks. The first task we started on was our film poster. As a class we all discussed and incorporated ideas we thought would suit each others films. From this we learned that our poster was imagined with Alfie in the foreground with an evil expression and possibly Marie and Johnny in the background. We needed our poster to have really dark, dull colours and posses an air of mystery. Using the feedback we got, we compiled our first poster. The majority of people liked the format we produced and thought the images worked strongly. However we needed to make the writing more legible and the colour of our tagline needed to be changed to be clearer!
The next task was our Magazine Review and I thought our film would best suit a magazine such as Total Film. However once I made a review with this style of magazine in mind my feedback required my to completely change the style. Even though people thought the magazine review fitted a magazine such as "Empire" our actual film wouldn't really focus on this magazine. We also needed to add the review of other films and not focus on our own film only. Therefore I changed the entire format and style of the review to suit a magazine such as Independent Critics. I first produced the magazine review on Microsoft Publisher, but this didn’t look very professional. However, on the second draft I used Adobe Photoshop to create the review and I felt it looked much more realistic. Once I received feedback the audience felt this suited our film more appropriately however, more texts needed to be added as the reviews wasn't long enough, and therefore I had to shrink the size of the images in order to make these changes.

Storyboard - Draft 2

After recieving feedback from out first storyboard draft we learned our main problem was that we needed more cut a way shots. We learned that this was especially the case with Alfie's character in Scene 1. More shots of Alfie pouring petrol would be neccessary and then switching inbetween shots of Marie And Johnny getting closer to the action.
Therefore only two more storyboard sheets needed to be added before we had our final draft. In my opinion however, I thought Scene 3 & 4 needed to have more shots, as these were flashbacks. The intention was to show the flashback represented a time period of the past, to show the relationship between the characters had existed for a while. However, this was dependant on the different settings available to us within our constraints!

Storyboard

In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In order to create a successful short film we decided to use, develop and challenge different forms and conventions from the "thriller" genre. The general target audience for our media product is older teenagers (15+) and therefore we used typical conventions of the thriller genre for inspiration into our media product.
Our original idea stemmed from the stimulus we was given: the colour red. From this colour we decided the themes our film could entwine which involved: anger, passion, love, revenge, murder, betrayal, and fire. We felt the majority of these themes matched the ingredients of the thriller genre. We decided to focus on revenge and betrayal as our main themes, ignited by the passion between two characters. Therefore our film uses the convention of stereotypical themes for the thriller genre. Films such as "Don't say a word", where a psychiatrist's wants revenge for his kidnapped daughter, use similar themes of betrayal, anger and jealousy and also like our film use a stereotypical isolated character. However, our film does develop the conventions of a stereotypical thriller film, as it entwines the themes of romance and passion. This is similar to the themes portrayed in the film “Obsessed” staring Beyonce, as this film also develops the typical themes of thriller.
Like in many thriller films our short film has the stereotypical "psycho" character which is reflected in our character Alfie. This character is a typical convention of thriller films as this typical “psycho” character is used in films such as “Scream”, “Waz” and even the character Sam in Kidult/Adulthood. His character is paralleled in typical thriller characters, whereas our character of Johnny develops stereotypical characters of a thriller genre as he is not aggressive and eager to get revenge, yet he makes an important role in the film as he is motivation for Alfie's revenge. This is similar to Marie's character as even though it is not typical for her style of character to be the lead in a thriller film, this convention can be challenged against the usual "damsel in distress" and she can control the trouble she has caused.
In our film, the setting in my opinion uses the conventions of a stereotypical thriller genre.
The setting of our short film consists of long isolated corridors and the small classroom which create a typical environment yet these conventions are developed as we had to make this work in a school setting, working with our constraints. One key convention our setting challenged in our film was that way it was set in broad daylight. It is common in thriller films for the main plot action to take place during the night, such as “Prom Night” and “The Dark Knight”.
A way in which we used camera in our media product strongly reflected to me a clear use of typical thriller convention. The extreme close up of Alfie's eye in scene 2 shows the intense emotion, which is similar to "Psycho" when there is close up of Marion's eye after she has been stabbed. Both shots hold focus for a few seconds to add to the realism of the emotion. It is hard to match a typical shot type to a specific genre of film as camera is used to be creative rather than always reflect the genre. However, the slow paced panning and tilting shots in scenes 2 and 5 are typical of a thriller genre as they are used to create suspense. This similar style of shot was also used in one of my group members AS opening sequence, and this was also a thriller genre.
We also used the convention of fast, snappy editing for our flashbacks to show the characters mind over playing the past in their mind, which we felt was typical of thriller protagonists, as they usually are reminded of their motivation for their flaw before they commit it, for example, this happens in the film "La Haine" and also in “Don‘t Say A Word”. Our scene 3 flashbacks are also similar to Matt Damon’s “Bourne Ultimatum”, which again shows quick flashing shots. We incorporated this style of editing and developed the convention as we added the black and white effect which we felt added realism. This way we felt it was easier to identify scene 3 as past events. The sound we chose for our film built tension in the way that was typical of a thriller genre. The first track played in our film was very slow paced with the hunt of a soft drum being beat in the background. It is a very gripping track which gets the audience enticed and filled with mystery which is the usual motif of thriller film openings. Overall, I think our film both, used, developed and challenged typical thriller conventions, and think the films of the genre were able to give us the inspiration we needed to make our media product a success.