Group Meeting

During our media lessons this week, we have had the chance to discuss the filming schedule, our plan of the storyboard, and more information on filming in general. We have sorted out the filming dates, which from now on is going to be on Thursdays from half twelve on wards, and Saturday mornings, and these will all be during January when our scheduled filming dates are. We have discussed the story board in more detail, we have changed some things in the narrative to make it more effective and we have made some things more detailed, and some things more simple, such as using two dolls rather than three, and changing some of the shots and edits we are going to do whilst filing and editing. We have arranged what shots we plan to do, how we are going to do it, and how each scene is going to be cut, and some of them involve jump cuts, cross cuts and more. We have also arranged the different filming styles we are going to use, such as applying some filters when editing and things like that. We have discussed special effects in further detail, for example how we are going to dress the dolls, how we are going to get fake blood and things like that. We have planned lots more for the opening in general and are feeling very productive with media work. We discuss the plans and change things slightly each week as we advance more towards the filming side of things.

Mood board of iconography

Following is the mood board made of our genre- the iconography of psychological horror.

Filming Schedule

Me and Hannah have discussed when we will be filming, after having looked at the call sheet and checking with people how often they are happy with filming and if they are all free on the same day. We have found we are all free to film on Thursdays from half twelve on wards because me and Hannah have free periods and everyone else has time off college. This is convenient because we are all free at the same time and it gives us three to four hours of filming before it gets dark outside. We will also try to fit in some filming on Saturdays, because none of us work all day on that day and it makes sense as we can all get to the filming scene. This schedule will last over three or four weeks of January, until we have all the scenes and we are happy with how they have all come out. We have to keep in mind the weather might not be the best, which is why we have reserved so many days for filming. Other things to keep in mind is people slipping over and things like that, but we have included a risk assessment on our blogs, and that contains all the health and safety information we need. We are all satisfied with this filming schedule and are set to film starting when we get back to school after the holidays.

Call Sheet

Following is the call sheet. This involves information of who we are using to do acting, what dates they can do and then when we have made this we can plan when we are going to make the filming schedule.

Hayley: Hayley is free on Thursday afternoons and Saturdays and Sundays. She is going to be our main actress, the victim, and we plan to use her every time we meet up with the actors and we will need her every time we film.

Ellen: Ellen is also free on Thursday afternoons and Saturdays. We are going to be using her to act as one of the dolls, so when we film there may be a couple of occasions when we don’t need her and Freya there and only need Hayley, which is where filming on Sundays will come in handy.

Freya: Freya is free on Tuesdays, Thursdays and weekends. She is also going to be the other doll, the same role as Ellen, so we will need her for the same amount of time.

I and Hannah are both free on Thursday afternoons in our double free periods at school and on Saturday mornings, where neither of us has worked. When we go to film, the place is convenient for everyone to get to so that won’t be an issue for anyone.

Issue flming

One of our actors had a broken arm so therefore wouldn't be free to film until January which means that we have had to postpone our filming over christmas. This means we have had to reschedule with all of our actors and rearranged to film during the last couple of weeks during january, which means hopefully it will be slightly lighter during the evenings as well to film.

special effects

for the special effects, we are going to use fake blood on our main characters. This will involve making the fake blood from a YouTube tutorial and we will practice it before we actually use it for the final thing. The clip embedded in this post involves the process of how we will make the special effect, and how effective it will be. We have met up outside of school to practice making this, and it seems to have looked good so we will use it for the actual film.

Target Audience Research

This clip features someone from our focus group of our target audience. We filmed them talking about what they would expect to see in the opening, what they would enjoy watching, and more questions along that line. We will do this for a few people, so we get a sense of what people like in general in our target audience. This will give us a more of a general idea of what to put on our storyboard and what we are going to put in it, and there could be slight changes after this.

For our film opening, we needed to ask people what their opinions were and these people had to be fans of the genre of opening we were making. We asked them various questions about what they thought of the narrative, what they expected of our opening from the sub-genre of psychological horror, and questions on whether they would go to watch this at the cinema and if they thought anything would be improved upon. We uploaded this video to YouTube having filmed it on our phones. Following is the video uploaded.

Location, health and safety

The place we will film (New-bottle Woods) has some health and safety hazards. These could include:

Hazard:                                                       How to get over it:                                     Rating of hazard:

Falling over some tree branches            Tell all of the actors they need to                            7/10

or tripping over tree roots.                      take care when running in the 

                                                               woods and keep a health and 

                                                               safety kit with us at all times.

Being stung by something such             make sure all actors and filmers                             4/10

as a bee or stinging nettle, could            inform the person in charge that

involve an allergic reaction and             they have any allergies and keep 

be dangerous                                          an epipen on them at all times. 

Members of the public walking             Inform all members of public about                        2/10

past through the filming process            what is going on and if they have any

and having concerns                              concerns to refer to our teacher or school

Animals coming into contact with          Make sure all members of the team                        2/10

people involved, or damaging the          are alert at all times/

filming equipment.

things being stolen from members          Keep all of our property with us all                       4/10

of the public, because it is a public         the time and make sure we keep a 

place and we might not be in control      watchful eye on our equipment 

of everything all the time.                        around other people

Wet floor on the ground from the            Make sure the members of the team                     5/10

night before                                             are aware of the damp conditions 

                                                                and walk carefully

Using sticks as props- could                   keep a fist aid kit with us at all times                     3/10

 potentially harm someone if used           and make sure all of the actors are

incorrectly                                               aware they shouldn't touch the other

                                                                actors with the sticks 

filming in the house: risks could              keep risk to a minimum by being                        3/10

include falling down stairs,                     very careful where actors walk

or tripping over things indoors.

Communication

In order to communicate between the group, we will make a facebook messaging group and talk about everything on there. On this, we will plan for when we meet for filming and to have meetings in general. We will also plan the blog posts we will have the same, how we will get our actors and how we will plan their outfits and the mise en scene such as props and places we are filming, etc. We will plan to meet on a weekly basis, normally at school for an hour when we have the same free period, and we can sit and plan everything for our film opening.

Location: Permission

We plan to film in the woods in Croughton, which needs permission as the land is privately owned. We got into contact with the land owner and had no response, so decided to change the location we were going to film. This place we plan to film now is New-bottle woods. This is a public woods so we won't need permission from any landowner. This means we will be able to film as soon as we want to, and we will make the plans for that in the near future. Following are images of the place we plan to film. the branches of the trees on the floor work well as the mise en scene because we will use it as one of the props.

Classification- Pre-Production Planning

Our film may contain slightly offensive dialect, and it will certainly involve lots of intimidating scenes and maybe a bit of blood stained clothing, so we will need to take this into consideration for when we classify the film. Here is the ratings for 15 films from the british classifications site:

What might I see in a 15 rated film or video?

Any of the following:

•   strong violence
•  frequent strong language (e.g. 'f***').
•   portrayals of sexual activity
•   strong verbal references to sex
•   sexual nudity
•   brief scenes of sexual violence or verbal references to sexual violence
•   discriminatory language or behaviour
•   drug taking

The light language we will use makes the film we are making rated a 15, then we won't have to worry about anything else because we aren't using nudity or anything related to that. The only things we need to worry about is the language that we are using, and maybe slightly grotesque use of blood but nothing too bad. This website showed us that our film opening will be listed as a 15.