Planning the task

What we need:

·         School uniform

·         Photos of family

·         Dart

·         Knife

·         Big Coat

·         Digital Clock

Synopsis (Blurb)

Deborah Strongman is a detective searching for the killer of her daughter against the wishes of the police force that she works for. When she gets a call to come to a scene of a crime, she has no idea that she will find her dead daughter only minutes from her home. Despite the promise from her co-workers that they will find the killer, Deborah decides to take matters into her own hands, desparate to know what led to the death of her teenage daughter. We witness a series of events in which Deborah risks both her career and her safety in this longing search to bring justice for both her daughter, and herself. Upon months of searching, we conclude and Deborah finds herself in a familiar house. All too familiar. Finding herself face-to-face with her ex-lover, she realises that his next target was to be her 11 year old son. Avenging her daughters death, she shoots him. She has found justice.

Thriller Genre Research

For the opening to our film we decided on the genre of thriller. We found from our research that the usual target audiences for thrillers would be young men (around the ages of 18-25.) Films like Layer Cake and Kidulthood were found to have more men watch it than females. However, we want out film to include more female characters, which would draw females into the film more. We also took into account that we know many females (including myself) that love thriller movies so we decided we wanted our target audience to be males and females from the ages of 18 to 25.

In our research we found that people in the target age rage we are focussing on, being quite young, feel that "anything is possible." They feel they can "branch out and find themselves" at the age they are as they feel once they hit 30 it is time to settle down. From this research I can imply that our film would be good for them as it is quite adventurous and exciting. If our research is correct, then I'm sure 18 - 25 year olds would love to spend their money on a cinema ticket to see an exciting thriller like ours, as, like I said before, for them "anything is possible."

Task genre

In the process of deciding what we wanted to do we looked at different types of genres and different openings.

We looked at Kidulthood to start with and liked the idea of having a lot of drama about young people as it would relate to our possible target audience, teenagers.

We then looked at Lord of War as it had a very edgy feel to it, following the bullets around from the camera which presented violence and action, a genre we were considering doing.

We then looked at Juno as it is a very humorous film. The opening of Juno is very quirky, with quite memorable music, something we would like to put into our film introduction.



Peter Pan

Over the christmas holidays I watched Peter Pan, the 2003 version. Although it is a movie aimed at people below my age, it has always been such a classic to me ever since it came out in the cinema.
The film has an all star cast, including Jason Isaacs and Olivia Williams. What I love about the film is how it brings the cartoon version to life, and is a wonderful adaptation.
What I like a lot is the setting of this film. I feel it really brings to life neverland and Peter Pans world. Everything about the setting is so perfect and precise, and I think what a lot of people don;t understand is that without the setting, films would be no where near as good as they can be.
Jason Isaac steals the film in my opinion. He is such a credited actor, and handled playing two rolls (Mr Darling and Captain Hook) incredibly well. I thought he really shone and I truley believed his Captain Hook. It's a film I would reccomend for all age groups as it never gets old.

Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task

Our film tackles the issue of drug use between young people today. We felt it is a very relevant issue in society today, and also something quite interesting to learn about, so therefore, this is what we based our script and filming on. Our film genre is a drama. For our film we aimed it at a teenage audience as we feel it is relevant in their lives. Furthermore, me looked at other TV series such as misfits and skins, which tackle the issue of drug use. Their audiences are for young people, so therefore we felt that's where our influence lay. We decided to name our film 'dépendance' as it is French for 'addiction' and we felt this was an artistic and expressive name for our film. We wanted to achieve a quirky and dramatic film which displayed an issue in societ today, and would make the audience think and want to know more about the characters and their stories. This is our film:

I worked with Ava Coyle (http://avacoyle-media.blogspot.co.uk/) and George Kinsley (http://georgek56sasmediastudiesblog.blogspot.co.uk/) to produce our film. Ava was in charge of costume, positioning and lighting. It was her job to make sure all the actors looked right for the part and worked well with the camera. George was director, and made all the main decisions about how to shoot and wear to shoot. I was in charge of the camera, so I filmed all the shots and made sure they all worked with eachother and flowed to make good match on action.

I felt we fufilled our breif relatively well. We were asked to film a character opening a door, which we did successfully at the beggining of our film. We were also asked to have the character sitting at a table opposite another, which we also did successfully when having two characters exchanging drugs in the middle of our film. Furthermore they exchanged lines of dialogue, which was also required in our briefing.

Our briefing also included what type of filming techniques we needed to use. We were required to have correct use of match on action which I felt we did really well. We made sure all our filming flowed together well. One issue we did have was we had to film over two different days, and we were worried that the lighting etc would be wrong as we filmed outdoors. However we resolved this well by filming at the same time of day, making sure the weather was the same. We also made sure our actors looked the same and had the same costume. We wanted our film to be unique, so decided to include a montage at the beggining with music in the backgroud to set the scene. We shot different things around our school which looked edgy and a bit dodgy, to give the idea of problems and drug use. Within this montage we used a panorama shot, which I felt showed off our knowledge of different types of shots.

Although I felt our task was very successful, one thing we did wrong was unfortunatley our shot reverse shot. We analysed and understood our mistake and considered filming it again, however we were happy with what we already had, and felt changing it wouldn't make it as good. However to show our skills of shot reverse shot, we then filmed 20 seconds of another example of shot reverse shot, which is shown below:

Overall I felt although we had a problem with shot reverse shot, we resolved it in a mature way, and actually ended up with a very unique and interesting film, which not only had a good story line but also demonstrated our camera skills and our knowledge in media.