IDENT IDEA

An ident is a bit like a commercial, but not. It is basically a production company in our example, but you can get TV channels etc, identifying themselves on a small like video just before the film starts, and we're going to create one using Livetype, a software that we'll use in the lessons, or Flash to make our own animations. The ident can also have an audio track over the top of it that we can make ourselves, we will then use these idents at the start of our short films so that the audience can recognise who made it.

What Idents should include:
.Company Titles

.Audio/sound
.Animation
.Company Logo

This is an example from Warner Brothers Pictures production company:

In this example it's easy to identify the logo which is what we will try to do when creating our idents, but also they use a soundtrack with the ident which is unique to Warner Brothers.

The name that i've come up with for my production company is ' Paper Plane Productions' and i've chosen this because it's easy to remember and get stuck into the audience's head , and also everyone is familiar with a paper plane so hopefully they'll become just as familiar with ' Paper Plane Productions'. I tend on having a Paper Plane for the logo with the name ' Paper Plane Productions ' on it , and then build on this for my ident by adding animation, sound , etc.

THE FINAL GIRL CONCEPT

 

Laurie Strode

The final girl is a thriller and horror film tradition that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, and sometimes the one left to tell the story. The term was created by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hellraiser, Alien and Scream.

History:

According to Clover, the final girl is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, also she sometimes has a unisex name.Occasionally the Final Girl will have a shared history with the killer. The final girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

Buffy, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

One of the basic premises of Clover’s theory is that audience identification is unstable particularly in the case of the slasher film. During the final girl’s confrontation with the killer, Clover argues, she becomes masculinised through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer. Also Clover points out that the villain of slasher films is often a male whose masculinity, and sexuality more generally, are in crisis. Examples would include Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Clover points to this gender fluidity as demonstrating the impact of feminism in popular culture.

Examples of final girls

Williams gives several examples of final girls from the Friday the 13th franchise: Alice from Friday the 13th, and the heroines from Part II and Part III. (He observes that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter does not have a final girl.) He notes that they do not conclude the films wholly victorious, however. The heroines from Parts 2 and 3 are catatonic at the ends of the respective films, and Alice survives the monster in the first film only to fall victim to "him" in the second. The final girl in Part 2 is carried away on a stretcher, calling out for her boyfriend (which Williams argues again undermines the notion of final girls always being victorious). Moreover, Ginny's adoption of the monster's own strategy, in Part II, brings into question whether the final girl image is in fact a wholly positive one.
 
  How Laurie Strode defines the final girl archetype: . Carrying books.

Final girl Laurie Strode with books and scream queen.

. Later on she say 'I've forgotten my chemistry textbook' and her friends laugh at her and tell her how they forget their book all the time. .Her clothing is very unglamourous, not very sexy. . Also the hair colour dark brown. .She doesn't have a boyfriend, which is usually the case that she un sexually active, whereas the scream queens do have boyfriends and are sexually active. .Responsible character, unlike the other scream queens.   How Sydney Prescott defines the final girl in Scream(Wes Craven , 1987): .Denotation of her night dress is quite childish, and when we first see her she's doing her homework. .She has the conventional hair , dark brown. .Mise-en-scene used for her bedroom with it being neat and tidy. .Boyfriend talks to her about the lack of sexual activity , she's still a virgin. .'I wouldn't dream of breaking your underwear rule' Billie Loomis talking to Sydney Prescott.

FESTIVAL MASTERCLASSES

we went on a media trip to the ASFF short film festival in York on Friday the 9th of November.We went to two master classes, a talk from Danny Cohen the successful cinematographer, and a talk from the head of production at Warp films Barry Ryan.

Danny Cohen Master Class:

This master class was set up like a relaxed conversation between Danny Cohen and Mariayah Kaderbhai where she'd ask him interview styled questions. He started by talking about how he got into the industry and how initially he did a social science degree and then became a photographic technician which gradually led into him being the cinematographer he is today.

Throughout the master class Danny was asked on how he made numerous scenes and these scene would be shown to us and then he'd explain how he put them together, for example one of these was a scene from This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) and he explained how it was difficult to find an area where everything was like how it should be set out in 1983 so he had to make make changes to the area, like changing the satellites on the houses, and the cars all had to be from the 1980's time period and he told us how some cars were used more than once in the scene as they were on a low budget and couldn't afford any more, he also gave useful tips to the camera angles he used during this film and why he used them.

He also gave more general tips not just about cinematography but he talked a lot about location and how directors like Shane Meadows got a lot of ideas and inspiration on location meaning that you have to react a lot to what you see when on location.  Also he mentioned about how natural light was great to work with and he always worked around natural light and he gave examples of how he was filming in winter where the days were shorter as it got darker sooner so he had to film quickly.

Warp Films Master Class:

Barry Ryan talked about the latest in film productions and a lot about Warp films and its achievements as this year it is celebrating its 10th year. He talked a lot about how to get ahead in the business and all about budgets and how much you truly make off box office intakes once all your financers and people who put money into the project have been paid.

He talked about what the future of film making was going to be in his opinion and how most of it will be over Internet rather than cinema releases, etc. For example he reckoned youtube will be a future hit for film makers.

He went into a lot of detail about how warp films have advertised and presented cover art for their films and how you need to get the attention of your target audience by showing them what they want.

MICRODRAMA: FINISHED FILM + REFLECTION

LADS ON TOUR MICRODRAMA.

I think for a first attempt at a slasher genre microdrama we did well to say we had no knowledge of how to make slasher microdramas. However, we've learnt from this and have taken what we did well and what we could have done to improve into consideration for our next task.





Establishing shot, no narrative enigma.



For example in our opening scene we revealed the characters straight away instead of using the idea of narrative enigma where we could have revealed the characters later on in the microdrama, but we did however use an extreme long shot to establish the setting of the place which is used in most films so in this sense our opening scene was done well.



Panning shot.

 Also when the characters were revealed for the second time we could of used a variety of shots with one of them being a high angled shot to show the vulnerability of these character and how powerless they are to their fate that's ahead of them, but it's used well as a panning shot as we used a tripod to track the characters to keep them in the centre of the frame.



 



Over the shoulder shot.



Although this over the shoulder shot is good as it adds to the variety of shots, we could have thought about what should have been playing on the TV , for example using intertextual references like in Halloween the 1950s flick The Thing plays on the TV while Laurie Strode babysits - another 'thing' lurks outside.



High angled shot.



This high angled shot is good as it adds to the variety and gives the sense that someones in the building and also shows how vulnerable the characters are.

Also to make this scene more creative and give a more variety of shot type this scene would work better if the camera was inside the fridge and the door opened, and this is also a long take so it would break the long takes up if there was a variety of shots instead to make it more interesting.

Here instead on being 1 shot there could of been a match on action shot as the character goes to put the kettle on , then also after he realises it's already on to show his reaction and emotion a close up shot should of been used so the audience senses he's reaction.

This scene is where we included the false scare and we get a great effect from natural lighting and the framing is very effective too. however, a dutch angle might have further accentuated the signification of threat though.

This scene unfolded with a single long take. The framing is initially effective, but when George enters his head is cropped off so it needs to be re framed, and in any case we need shot variation to sustain audience interest, applying the 180 degree rule as we do. Also, the Declan character was meant to be isolated in this scene - so he should be framed separate and alone, with 3-shots for the others signifying their togetherness and Declan as 'the other' (the outsider).

 

This is the scene where the character George meets his death , but the lighting in the first scene could have been done better as the camera light was on .But the natural light when George opens the door was used to a good effect. Also it was a long take and in a violent scene it would be better to do short takes and keep it fast so the audience are on edge and so the more convincing the scene is, and so the preferred reading of seriousness was lost and the oppositional ready of comedy came in.

Also the angles in this final scene were important as we should of created a claustrophobic feel, as the more space there is (ELS-MLS) the more sense the victim will/can get away.

So overall i feel for our first attempt it wasn't too bad , but we could of included a more shot variety and demonstrated a range of cinematography.

MICRODRAMA: EDITING

In our group of 7 we split up into 2 group2 to edit and I went in a group of 3 which had it's advantages and disadvantages, for example we had more variety of ideas when it came to editing techniques but it became awkward when it was only 1 person doing all of it on the computer whiles the others just shared there input.

We started by importing all our footage from the memory card into the computer's hardrive then into final cut pro, where it appeared in the final cut pro library, from here we could then delete all the footage that we didn't want and cut or edit the ones we did want, then added them to the time line where all the shots build up to make a final piece.

These titles at the start of the microdrama were made using the titles tool where you could choose the design for the titles to appear and what they'd say and the font, we used a red font on black to go with the slasher genre.Also using the transition tool we could use the fade from black to normal transition to go form our titles to the opening scene, this transition is used at the start of most films so we thought we'd use it here.

Also all the sound effects that we added to our edit we choose from the music and sound library where there's a wide range of sounds and music to choose from so we choose the best suited for the scenes we used them in. Also we could make our own music from a keyboard which we composed ourselves and then imported it to this library that added it to the scenes which we wanted the music in.

MICRODRAMA: THE SHOOT

We planned to shoot our microdrama at Ben's house , a member of our group, and we planned to use up a whole day to shoot it, because as it was a microdrama it shouldn't of take as long as a normal film would and we already had most of it planned and ready so all that needed to do was shoot it.

We didn't have many problems organising the shoot as we just communicated over mobile networking and organised a time and place for the shoot. However straight away we encountered a few problems during the shooting. For example,  our arrival scene was next to a busy road, even though there wasn't any dialogue at this point in the film we still wanted to get an extreme long shot which meant crossing over the road and waiting for no cars so we could get the house and the characters in the frame. Another problem we had was the lighting because some of the rooms in the house were dark so we attached a hand held torch to the camera, also we had the problem of natural lighting as it was getting dark sooner because we're in winter so we had to get all the day scenes filmed quickly before it got dark. Also we obviously couldn't get hold of real blood for the slasher scene so on the day we used our creativity skills and used a fake blood recipe to create some blood.

With assigning roles we all thought it was best to let George film most of the difficult scenes as he had the most experience with camera work, so this meant that as we were all involved in the acting we had to change it round so that George's character was killed first, and also at the start of the microdrama when all the characters but the killer were in shot we had the killer, Jake, to film it which worked well, we also had a tripod and a rode dead cat microphone to make it look better on the panning scene and stability also with the dead cat microphone it helped to not pick up any unwanted sound.

Something we did learn however was that we should of had some documents with well structured plans for the variety of shot types that should of been used in each scene, so in our next task we'd organise this better so we'd then have a much larger range of shot type and variety.

MICRODRAMA: PLANNING

LADS ON TOUR.

Lads on tour will be the title for our micro drama as we've decided to base our micro drama on a group of male (lads) to go for a break (tour) to a rented out holiday home, however the genre of our micro drama will be horror as there's a twist to this story where all the lads will be killed off 1 by 1 by the supposedly owner of the holiday home.

We've decided on having 7 characters as there's 7 of us in the group with 6 being the lads on tour leaving 1 to be the killer.

At first we planned on only have 5 lads and 1 killer leaving someone to film. However we needed everyone to play a character so to overcome the filming problem the killer would film the scenes where all the 6 lads will be filmed then in the scene with the killer and the victims the lads that aren't involved in the scene will film this way everyone in the group plays their part in the creation of this micro drama.

We've planned to go with the stereotypical plot of a slasher film where the person that survives at the end is the innocent,nerdy cautious character, and the killer kills off his victims with knifes.

In the oppening sequence we plan to use narritive enigma with the characters by revealing them 1 by 1 , and with the killer using narritive enigma all the way through the micro drama till the last scene where he's revealed.

Binary Opposition.

Throughout the micro drama we'll have binary opposition between the characters from some being loud and rebelious compared to the quiet sensible character that survives at the end. Also the binary opposition with the killer being taller than the other characters.

We'll also include some signifiers for example the clothing that the killer will be dressed in to give the symbolic meaning of his weirdness or in this case he's a farmer who owns the place, and the dark cellar to symbolise the darkness that'll happen there.