Welcome to the blog of Rasam Productions and Full Throttle Distributions Sam Pollock (The Director) charting the evolution of the opening to the new feature film "Wrenched" jointly produced with Rob Shaw (The Producer)and Asa Newmarch (The Cinematographer). You'll be able to see the final cut on my YouTube channel as well as various short videos and vodcasts/podcasts right here on this blog! Enjoy and please feel free to comment/add suggestions!
Our aim is to make our film a rating of 15 (BBFC Rating). The reasoning for this is because of the actors ages, sexual references, strong language and bloody violence. However we don't see the man getting stabbed therefore it is not as violent as an 18 rating film. The girl is wearing revealing clothes which backs up the reasoning behind the 15 rating. We expect the majority of the audience to be male, because of the sexual themes in it but also the ammount of gore.
We know that there is an audience available for this genre because we have seen the success of films such as Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) which had a budget of $320,000 and made $47,000,000 in the US. Another example is Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) which had a bigger budget at $15,000,000 and made a staggering $103,000,000 in the US and made £8,000,000 in the UK. Finally Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) which had a budget of $1,800,000 and made $11,000,000 in the US. Using these three as examples we know from all of the box office figurest that our film fits into this genre and has a similar audience to these teenagers from around 15-25, both male and female.The age range of our secondary target audience would be alot broader. This is because teenagers below the age of 15 will still be able to see the film if it went out on DVD because they could just get someone to buy it for them. Also people over the age of 24 will be able to watch it because older people also like to watch a good slasher film but when the get over a certain age they will start to watch psychological thrillers.
Here is a video of our target audience giving us some feedback on how to make our film better
To summarise, I feel that the audience for our media product would be from around the age of 13-40 which is a very wide range but the ones who I beleive are most interested in slaher films.
Here is our latest rough cut and I decided to use the annotations tool on YouTube to help me explain some key areas in which helped to attract/address our audience:
As this is only our latest Rough Cut it does not have any sound on it. Having sound will greatly improve our media product but it will also help attract/address our audience. This is because it will create tension in our film and the long notes will effect the audiences heartbeat which will inturn add suspense and fear which also helps with the preferred reading. It is a common convention in the horror genre that a film has its own soundtrack that people can refer too. For example here is the Halloween soundtrack:
Here is our final cut "Wrenched" with our soundtrack now added to it:
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this process?
Heres is a video of me talking about all the technologies I have used during the coursework process:
Here is a quick summary of all the technologies I have used and why they were so useful:
1. Blogger: Right from the very start of the coursework process we have been blogging on every stage we have been through. Its not just a guide telling everyone what stages we are on because we can also see other peoples blogs. This is great because our media teacher set up alot of other blogs that was full of information guiding us to create the best work we could possibly do. Click here to see a good example of this. We could also look at other media students blogs to se which stage they are on, how they have done things differently to us. We could
actually watch their film or generally look at their posts
and give them feedback
2. YouTube: We used YouTube to upload all of our footage and used the annotations tool to explain some points. This was extremely helpful because YouTube is used by millions of people and if we could get just a few people to see it then it would be extremely useful. Also IGS has a YouTube channel and all of our rough cuts were put on there and other schools that we are closely linked could see our films. Click here to see the IGS YouTube channel
3. Facebook: We mainly used Facebook for audience feedback. We all have hundreds of friends on Facebook and most of them are in our media class or the other media class. Also the vast majority of the people on Facebook were in our core target audience so it was even better to get their opinion and not just ours. I beleive that the feedback we got off everyone
has helped make our film alot better. Click here for an example
of audience feedback from Facebook.
4. IMDB: We used IMDB for looking up films we could deconstruct whilst also looking at the films director, year of release, budget, UK and US Box Office. This gave us a great indication which horror films were succesful and which ones weren't. This helped us alot as we could deconstruct the best films from within our genre and use the best techniques which made them all so good.
5. Scribd: This is very useful for things such as stroyboards, production schedule, treatment and casting and creativity just to name a few. Scribd was especially useful when we had to write or draw things using pen and pencil on peices of paper but it aslo needed to be put on our blogs. Once we had finished what we need to do on paper we used the Scanner to scan it in and then we were able to uplaod whatever we wanted to Scribd. It was also helpful when we had created things on a Word document and we had to put it onto a blog post.All we had to do was upload it to Scribd and then embed it into a post. Click here to see example of use using Scribd to upload our Treatment
6. Cameras: We used the school cameras alot during the coursework process for many different reasons. Obviously we mainly used the cameras for our filming our coursework but we also used it for behind the scenes. As you can see below we have a video of Asa (our cinematographer) using a camera and tripod. Other ways we used the cameras include filming our company idents that went before our actual opening and some audience feedback from our media class which are also our core target audience which was very useful.
7. Macs: We used most of our time on the Macs using for several different reasons. We used it for blogging, IMDB research, editing, making company idents, making a soundtrack just to name a few. This was a huge new experience for me as I have always used a normal PC or a laptop so it took a while to get used to but when I did it was great to use and it had alot of benefits.
8. IMovie: This was another new experience for me but we gradually got used to using it before we started our final coursework peice. For example we filmed a microdrama, a mise-en-scene task, swede film and our prelim task so I knew how to use it when we started filming for the coursework opening. I have learnt alot from using IMovie for example I have learnt how to use transitions, how to put titles onto a clip, how to use the crop tool, how to use the add sound affects etc. I feel very confident using this software know so it has been great learning a new skill. This picture shows how we imported our company idents, soundtrack and other recorded sounds into our production. This is another vital peice of technology that i have learnt along with everything else. I did realise that the file does have to be in the correct file format before you can import it. Even though we didn't use this way to import all footage we filmed it was vital we imported everything we had shot onto the IMac so we could edit it and make our product as good as it could possibly be
9. LiveType: I personally was the one who took reponsibility for the company idents. Again this was a new peice of software but i found it quite easy to use. We thought of the two ideas as a group but then I tried to replicate them as best as I could. I learnt how to add effects to the text and how to add a background video to name a few. Just like our rough cuts we got audience feedback on these idents on Facebook. Click here to see some audience feedback on our first company ident. I learnt LiveType is alot like IMovie. All you have to do is add sound affects to the canvas and you can edit the timing by using the timeline. The media browser alows you to view the font before selecting it so you know if you like it. The wideframe preview allows you to do the same thing but with all the effects on the canvas whilst it is all playing so you can also edit the timing of fonts coming on to the screen etc. Once we had finished the idents we just saved them and imported them into IMovie
10. Garageband: Although I believe we left it abit late to experiment enough with this software i thought we did a great job. This was also another application that I have learnt how to use and with the help of a tutorial from our teacher or group managed to make a soundtrack that fitted in with every aspect of the opening. It was the icing on the cake doing the soundtrack because it made our 2 minute coursework opening complete. Garageband was abit tricky to work as some of the effects were hard to get to work together. The hardest part of making the soundtrack though is making sure that everything is in time and making the most of the peaks in tension. Also when we had finished everything it was easy to transfer it onto IMovie as we just saved it and imported it
Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task (The Continuity Editing Task), What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In The Progression From It To Full Product?
The first thing I found when we started on our coursework task is that it was an extremely big step up from the pre-lim task. There are several reasons for this but the main one I believe is that for our pre-lim task we were put into groups and we filmed the whole peice once and in an hour. However I have found that it has taken a considerably long time to manufacture a quality peice of work for our coursework. This has resulted in several re-shoots with many different stroylines and alot of different actors. This became a real problem as it was very hard to find good actors because most people are quite shy and dont like to be filmed. Also with the pre-lim task it was a matter of uploading the footage and puting together a peice of work that had match on action, shot reverse shot and the 180 rule. In our coursework once we had uploaded all of our footage we found that some camera angles/ shots didn't quite work so we had to re-shoot. The problem with re-shooting is that the actors have to wear the same clothes and the lighting has to be the same.
Here is my pre-lim task:
Apart from finding the coursework task a big step up from the pre-lim task I also learnt alot from my first media product. Looking back know I can see how much have learnt along the way. One of the main problems with my pre-lim task is that we didnt use a tripod and we just got someone in our group to hold the camera. This was a bad mistake as most of the shots are very shaky when they shouldnt be. As I have learnt from my coursework task if they are any shaky shot in our final product then we will get marked down instantly. Another improvement from our pre-lim which links into shaky shots is that from our pre-lim to our latest rough cut there is a vast increase in shot varaition which is a major factor that the exam board are looking for. For example there is a shot when Harry says that he is much better than me so we should of taken a low angle shot to show him as bigger and more controlling.
Another problem with my pre-lim task is that the acting was not really serious as we were amateurs at this point and it was our first performane infront of the camera. We didnt take it as seriously as our coursewrok task so we were trying to make it quite funny. This was mainly because the genres are very different in the two films as the pre-lim we filmed was obviously not a horror like our cousrework opening.
Another progression I have found from the pre-lim task is that when we filmed it we only took us one hour to do it in and then we put it all together and that was it. However in the courswork task I have discovered how vital audience feedback is towards our final piece, without it our production would have been just our opinion and no-one elses. From the help of people in our media class and people in the other media class we have developed their ideas and made our film much better from it. It helps us understand not just what we want in our film but what our target audience wants and this had helped us greatly.
This is an example of us recieving audience feedback on 'Facebook':
Here is an example of us receiving audience feedback from our media class:
One of our group tasks was to create the soundtrack for our film opening. However we did not use a soundtrack in our pre-lim task this made the task for us to make a whole new soundtrack and extremely hard and challenging one. We had to do quite alot of research and we did this by looking at 20 film openings and we found a few codes and conventions from them. We tried to base our soundtrack on this and we hope that when it is complete it will fit in well with our final product.
There were quite a few minor errors with my pre-lim task and it has helped me to make sure every little detail perfect in my final film opening. These extra points from my Pre-lim include:
We needed to edit in the purposely broken 180 degree rule to show how it does not work.
We could of had a set genre rather than just an everyday theme.
We needed appropriate props and setting.
In the background we can see Sam so we should of made sure there was no one behind what we were shooting.
We needed to have narrative enigma. We could of kept Charlie's identity hidden e.g. shot of feet coming through the door rather than his face.
There are a lot of jump cuts so we should of taken more shots.
To show the viewers anchorage of where we were we should of taken a master shot of the room and its surroundings.
This is our latest rough cut of our production and as you can see it is a massive improvement from my Pre-lim task:
