The Treatment

Our treatment was yped up from the document we hand-wrote in december...

1. The action: identify the event your idea is based around; what actually happens (discovery of a body, an illicit meeting, a witness seeing a crime being committed, a criminal act taking place, a telephone call, a chase, a short journey etc)?

Our idea for our opening sequence isbased around a computer (instant messaging) conversation between a young teenage girl and two older men. The identity of the men is kept mysterious, so the conversation is being interpreted in two different ways; the audience knows the truth, but our current heroin, the girl, does not. This is the first part of the action, as the second is more fast-paced of the men packing up their "kill kit" and getting ready to leave their flat to do murder. The rest of the film will be based around a detective tracing internet clues of the men to try and find them, and of more killings, more suicide notes and crime scenes. We would want to keep the rest of the film fast and montagey, mixed with slow suspense-building scenes, to create a nice contrast.

2. The theme(s): what should it make the audience think about or feel, what ‘issues’ will it raise (revenge, sexuality, voyeurism, stalking, obsession, greed etc)?

Our main themes are depression, sexual stalking and investigating. In our film as a whole, we wanted to create a continuous sense of being watched, of searching for clues and of knowing that there was so much that you didn't know - danger could be just around the corner. To convey this in the opening sequence, we will leave our main murderer's identity ambiguos, and make it clear to the audience that the girl has no idea what she was getting herself into. We will also make it clear that the issue of internet safety will be a central one during the film, as it is the first thing we will open with.

3. The narrative: how is it structured - classic narrative pattern or break with convention, real time or different time zones, flashbacks/forwards, dreams etc. Will there be dialogue? What about diegetic/ non-diegetic sound?

We have not chosen a classic narrative pattern as we begin with disruption, breaking you usual convention of beginning with safety and then straying into danger. However we have chosen to shoot in a linear, real-time way, with no flashbacks and crosscutting between a real time conversation, as memories do not feature as an important part in our plot. We want to include dialogue for most of the sequence to show cross-cutting techniques, and this forms the main base of our storyline, too. All the sound, apart from the music, will b e diegetic.

4. The character(s): who are they, identify their roles, what are their characteristics, including gender, appearance etc?

Emma: female, 17 years old, white, pretty teenage girl. She is clearly sweet and typically girly in her pink room, but very fragile (in tears) and expresses whiney desire to kill herself. She is the victim.
"Julie": male, 24 years old, half-black & half-white, well-built man. He is the clever, cunning man of the operation who lures girls into his clutches by wooing them. He wears a mysterious black coat and has deeply thoughtful eyes.
Man 2: male, 53, white, very tall and fairly stocky man. He wears all-black, black leather coat and a black hat, looking very thugish and does not smile. His voice is harsh and merciless. He is the muscle of the opperation, killing the victims.

5. The setting and choice of location: where is it set?

Our first setting is 'Emma's' bedroom, where she taps away on her computer. We will use Laura's actual bedroom to shoot this. The second location is the men's flat, where they talk to the women and get ready to find them. We can shoot this in Laura's art studio, which is perfectly dark and cobwebby.

6. The mise-en-scene: identify colours, lighting, dress codes, the overall visual look

The girl's part will be very pink, saturated, girly and inviting, with lots of pink fluffy pillows and her wearing jeans and a pink top. In contrast to this, the men's flat is dingy, dark, dusty and ominous. Their clothes are black and concealing, they see by desk lamp and hanging lightbulb, and there is a nearly-finished bottle of whisky on the table. We will see flashes of knives being sharpened, tape and matches, all being piled into a black suitcase. The lighting will also be very pale and ghostly.

7. The camera work: the style you are aiming for

We have decided to shoot in a range of angles, including CU's, LS's, sutch tilts and shakey P.O.V angles. This will give a sense of being watched, of a webcam, and be slightly disorientating. Only some shots will be static and normal.

8. The editing: edited as a continuous sequence, use of cross cutting, use of montage, or combination?

We will have a continuous sequence and then move into a montage at the end, to pick up the pace, and at the same time pick up the music. This is when the action begins. Before this, we will use crosscutting between the two screens and cutaways.

9. Has your idea been ‘tested’ against the key criteria (the 8 questions)?

Yes - we were able to answer yes to every question.

10. Group responses?

We had two other strong ideas that we could have moved forward with, but we all agree that this idea is the strongest. We are all excited about the uniqueness of the idea and the opportunity to shoot in some quirky,unconventional angles.

11. Teacher responses?

Great idea - original and chilling. But be careful to loeave enough time to film both sets of footage (male part and female part). Also careful of continuity between the two.

Re-Shoot shot list...

Here is another example of a shooting script however this was for our re-shoot
Re Shoot List

Publish at Scribd or explore others:

Shooting script

Here is one example of our shooting scripts which we printed out and filled in. We found these very useful on shoots to keep track of what we had shot, and what we had left to shoot. It also showed us that it was easier to shoot all shots from one location first, and all shots from another second.
Here it is:

Shooting Script1

Storyboard

This is a sample of our storyboard. We originally devised a storyboard using post-it notes on sugar paper, so we could easily move shots around, but this wasn't worth photographing/scanning in, so we remade it using screen snapshots of our actual shots.

Holly Amelia Laura Storyboard

Hi!!

cooltings holly
i think we've donwe a couple of them anyway?

I'm dead excited to finish now.
AHHHHH

The whole thing is looking really good
I'm really impressed, we've mangaed to create a piece that looks professional, yet simple and still really chilling: exactly what we aimed for!

Final To-Do-List

We're practically finished, but these are the last things we have to do:

1. Make one more title on the mac in Mr. Dean's office.
2. Make the drone (over the whole thing) quieter.
3. Stretch the music over the end a bit.
4. Change the colour temperature on some of King's shots so that the saturation is the same throughout - make it warmer.

And then we will be onto the evaluation!

Titles...

When showing our piece to the teachers they said everything was great (or 'wicked' as Miss B says) but they both did comment on how bland our titles were, they didn't fit with the overall feel of our piece.

Being the only member of my group available, i decided to work on them. I went to Mr Deans who introduced me to a program, iMovie, on the Mac computer that allowed us to create animated and excting titles for our film.

We looked at LOADS of different styles and managed to pick our a few good ones (this was done a week ago with the whole group). I then narrowed it down to a couple, and myself and Mr Deans checked out which ones worked best.
Our favourite (as a group) however was a title animation called 'Bad Connection'
Looking at it again i saw it really worked and looked very effective. But when looking at this style on a black background (which we wanted) it didn't work very well.

Back to stage one...
We had to go back and search through all of them again. Then Mr Deans remembered one he thought might work, and in fact one we had looked at last time.
It was called 'static' and created an effect where the letters appeared in a random order to then create the word, but the lettters came in one by one. It looked very effective and i really liked it.

Now to choose a font..
It didn't take long to look through as i liked one called 'Bank Gothic' which worked well and looked very professional. Then Mr Deans created the titles, with me assisting, and telling him how they needed to be. And Voila! Our titles were done

I put them onto our timeline, made them the right time and slotted them in place. When watching the piece as a whole it looked great. It looked whole, real, brilliant

I really like them and enjoyed learning how to make the titles.

Drone...........

Our piece is looking good but i don't like how disjointed the individual clips sound. Some shots have more static than others, and some shots are a lot louder. We thought a way to overcome this would be to add an omnious low pitched drone over all the shots, similar to that of a computer humming.

After searching through a CD of horror sounds at number 88 (yes number 88..) I found a low pitched, horror-esque drone. It worked really well but it was too short. I had to cut it down and copy it over and over again to fill the whole piece.

I think the drone works well to portray more of a horror/thriller theme.

UPDATE

So we're nearly at the end...and I'm so excited to see the finished product
Laura's now gone away so it's up to me and Holly to complete the final tweaks and perfect our piece

At the moment we are working on 'jazzing up' our titles as in comparison they are a bit bland.
We need to warm up some shots of King and make sure everything runs smooth. We need to try and add the drone (see how it works)

CAN'T WAIT to see the finish product
x

Company

We've chosen to call our company "Handprint Productions".

We had made a list of possible names, which we narrowed down to three;

1. "Blinding Light Productions"
2. "Glass Eye Productions"
3. "Handprint Productions"

The way we chose was by thinking of logos/animations for each.

1. text coming up, then being engulfed by a blinding white light
2. a 3D glass eye rolling accross the bottom of the screen
3. a handprint appearing on screen

After talking to the technician, we realised that the Glass Eye one would take too much time to do and was too complicated, the Blinding Light one could work but it was quite simple, so we decided on Handprint. It had a nice ring to it, and we realised that the animation was simple enough to look professional.

This is the image we manipulated in Adobe After Effects. We inverted it so that it was a white hand on black, then we tinted it a dark red colour to make it seem sinister, and indicate blood and danger and horror stuff...

We chose to have simple white text (in courier to look like typing) underneath the handprint logo, and added the copyright symbol and 2009 in roman numerals to make it look more realistic and professional.

We're all very happy with the company logo :-)

Progress update

Hi, back from Christmas holidays, into this snowy weather..

We're deep into our editing, ploughing through clips and takes to find the perfect ones.

We're all going to start our written work now (ish) but the main focus is still on editing (of course).

We still need to come up with a company name (or choose one from a list we made a while ago) and make a logo...

Its do-able..

Laura x

CHRISTMAS HOLS

22ndDecember-5th January

Merry Christmas xxx

Shoot - more photos

Here are some photos from our shoot including photos of our cast and crew, behind the scenes, and screen snapshots to help when resetting a scene.

feedback notes continued....

If the girl bit is first the story will make much more sense and create more enigma, because the audience will think that the girl is talking to an agony aunt, which will be anchored by the text on screen of the illusive charcter 'julie' and then they will see that julie is in fact a man. This hopefully will provoke some sort of frightened emotion of shock.

We could show an establishing shot of her house (lauras will do fine) and then show her, so that everything is all happy and nice
and then the shots of his and the bungalow....showing the contrast
or we could have no house at all??

Editing stuff - feedback

i think that would make it clearer, but i suppose what we should do is try it where it shows her talking to "julie" and then show that to random people to get their opinions as to whether or not it makes sense.

About the "F word" - I KNOW!! im very confused, because if it was a certificate 18, then there definitely would be swearing, however, i suppose since it is a school project, the rules are different?

Try some different things, maybe swap the orders of the clips on another timeline or something...

Good luck!

Oh by the way, the film clip looks helpful, i like that film, but what language is it dubbed in?!?! Lol.

Laura

Feedback Feedback Conversation

Hello ill people, hope you're feeling better.
I agree that it doesn't make sense at the moment...it does look like her boyfriends and there isn't an indication that she thinks he's a woman...But when we do screen shots of typing and show "Julie" on screen won't this make it clearer? I don't know how to change this....if the girl bit is first how will it make it clearer? But we should try it anyway.
Also if we remove the "F word" from the line it sounds stupid - we deffinitely can't have it?? But it's a horror movie that would be an 18!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More shots of King, yeah we were planning on doing that anyway.
And the briefcase bit we should try differently because it can go anywhere, really.


In this editing session, shall I try some new things? Can you give me some specific things to do and I'll try them? Or shall I just leave it.

Holly x x

Shooting script for Saturday 13th

Our shoot is scheduled for 10.30am - 4, on Saturday 13th December at my house. We will arrive at 10.30, King will arrive at 11 so that we are all set-up by the time he arrives. We need my Dad for one short scene (walking out of the cellar), so we will bring him downstairs to the cellar when he is needed. We need King, and Amelia, but we will do King's scenes first so that he can go, as Amelia has to be there the whole time anyway.

Location: Cellar

• King's lines from all the different angles (which will be decided on location)
• King retrieving the print out
• The two men leaving together
• Typing on the screen (King)

Location: My Bedroom

• Typing on the screen (Amelia)
• Re-shoot Amelia's OTS shot of her typing as it was on blogger and not our forum
• Shot of forum (can be done anywhere, but bedroom is easier as there is more room)

Hey guys, just thinking, since we need to do a group treatment, I've done an individual one, so what are your thoughts on it so we can make a group one and agree on a final idea? (It's on my blog btw)

X

Male actor number 2

Name: Kingsley Zachariah Ben-Adir

Age: 22

Height: 6ft?

Role: Man 1 (name tbc)

As mentionned before, King is an actual actor, so we are going to use this to our full potential and give him most of the lines.

Shoot 1 - feedback 4/12/08

Here is a summary of the feedback from Ms Thrasher of our first shoot.

1. Good attention to detail
2. Look at titling after you have edited and filmed your whole piece
3. Careful not to get bogged down by minute details
4. Don't run out of time
5. Maintain standard by planning

Overall lots of positive feedback, which makes us feel confident in our next shoot.

"Extremely well done!"