Thursday 19 December 2013

Practice Shoot

Me and Sarah have shot and edited our practice shoot. We did a practice shoot to test angles of the camera and as a practice for the real shoot, so we can see where we can improve on the real shoot. This helps us make a better film and link better to our genre.

Here is the practice shoot:


Wednesday 18 December 2013

Intertexuality vodcast for our movie opening

This is our vodcast talking about intertexuality in our movie opening and how it links to other movies (such as Scream) that also involve intertextuality heavily in their movies.



Intertextuality: the relationship between two texts.

SDB: Location and Props

Before...
... and After
We chose the bedroom location in our film opening, based on the main character - the blonde scream queen. We needed the bedroom to emphasise the stereotype behind her character, by using a pink, teenage, girly room. The room is almost entirely pink, however the bedding was not pink before so we changed it to a pink duvet. The room was also quite cluttered with school work before hand, so we tidied these away as they would not of worked well in the mis-en-scene, as it did not fit with the representation of our character- as she is not perceived as studious, but a more "dumb blonde" character.

SDB: Actors

For our film opening there is five main characters; a girl running in the opening scene (film within a film), the murderer also for the opening scene, the scream queen for the actual film, the scream queen's boyfriend, and the masked killer. 

The outfit used for the second scream queen
Firstly for the girl running in the opening we needed a blonde scream queen, who was willing to wear figure-hugging clothing, heavy makeup and would run through a field. We actually chose Poppy Potts to do this, the producer of our film opening, as she fits the scream queen representation and was willing to act. Poppy also knew of a good location to film this opening scene so this was very helpful. For the murderer who chases her, we needed a fairly tall, lanky actor (preferably a boy) to represent an initimidating character, even when masked. Poppy decided to use her brother for this, as he fit the representation and was accessible easily, and is also knowledgable with filming, so was able to help film the footage aswell.
 
For the actual film, we needed a blonde scream queen who was also willing to wear heavy makeup, revealing clothing - and also needed to be confident with acting skills, as this role includes a lot of speech. Poppy and I wrote down a list of possible girls to fit this role, we had a choice from about 5 people. We then asked the first girl on the list, Kathy Allen, and fortunately she was willing to participate. We tried out a practice shoot with Kathy and her acting was a success.  Poppy and I both agreed we would not need to ask any of the other girls.
  We used the same technique when choosing the actor to play the scream queen's boyfriend, and fortunately again, the first boy we asked was willing to take part, Alex Osborne. For this character there wasn't too many specifics required for representation as the actor is not shown up close, but only on CCTV. We just made sure Alex was wearing suitable 'teenage' clothing, such as a t-shirt, jeans and trainers. This was easily acssesible as Alex himself owned many of these clothes.

Tuesday 17 December 2013

Genre Research: Scream

Scream  
Wes Craven, 1996
 (prod.)


Budget: $15M; US box office: $162M

Rottentomatoes.com 80%; IMDB 7.2.



Synopsis: A killer known as Ghostface begins killing off teenagers, and as the body count begins rising, one girl and her friends find themselves contemplating the "Rules" of horror films as they find themselves living in a real-life one.


The film links very closely to ours, in the plot, and in other ways too. Here are the ways in which our film links to Scream:

The film is post-modern, and so is ours, it has a film within a film.

It has lots of strong intertextual links to other movies, such as Halloween and Terror Train.

In the opening, a scream queen and her jock boyfriend gets killed off by a murderer with a mask on.

The murderer contacts the scream queen via a phone with a distorted voice.

Narrative vodcast for our film opening

This is our narrative vodcast, discussing the narrative (storyline) of our movie opening, characters in our story and how they are represented, and clothing and props choices.




Thursday 5 December 2013

Mise-en-scene vodcast for our movie opening

This is our vodcast talking about mise-en-scene in our movie, and what we would be doing to make it appropriate for our movie, and locations.


Mise-en-scene: the arrangement of scenery and props.