Construction: Updating Eve's personal blog x filming the friends blog scene

Today we filmed two separate parts of the film which would be merged together to give to an impression that Eve was looking at her old blogs with her friends. We filmed a scene where she was scrolling through her blog and clicked on an old video she had made in the past.


When filming  key scenes of Eve's personal blog, I had to go back to the Wix editor website that I created a while back (post was made about this lower down in my blog) I have to go back and make sure small tweaks were made and more content was added to give a sense of realism when we see her scrolling through this blog.

This scene mainly consisted of a over the shoulder shot of Eve scrolling on her blog and we added a special feature; a screen recording made on Quicktime.  Which I edited in using the ken burns effect on iMovie. We were able to transition form the over the shoulder shot to the screen wording of her clicking a exploring her old blog.

This gives the viewer a different perspective/ outlook of Eve's world and almost entices them to want to see more as she pauses the video 'halfway' through.



Risk assessment:

Planning: every frame of painting

I have been inspired by films such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) because of its use of framing. 
In the video tutorial Every Frame A Painting, on Drive -The Quadrant System, I learned how narrative complexity is achieved through using the creative use of positioning characters in different quadrants. Here, for instance, attention is focused on Ryan Gosling in the upper top left quadrant but also on Carey Mulligan and her boyfriend whom he is gazing at, in the lower right hand quadrant. We are invited to visually compare the two men and see the long shadow one casts toward the other. 

The two sides of the frame tell different stories, which enriches the filmwork.

In my own work, I intend to pay careful attention to composing the frame in the park scene and the scenes in Eve's bedroom, as I wanted to make sure the  audience knew where we were and in what context were meeting our character. The framework was able to frame the playground and the highlight the doll who is Eve's childhood friend. The character is not seen as much throughout the scene but we are able to establish her presence and dominating power over the doll by comparing how much bigger she is and comparing who is pushing the swing-the person in control. This also applies for the bedroom scenes as Eve's is framed in a way where we hinted to focus at her taking her opioids or of her listening to music for example, which is a way for her to distract herself and escape form her tormenting reality.

Risk assessment:

Construction: Eve's bedroom blog scene

We started shooting the first bedroom scene with Lydia O'Reilly as Eve and Chloe and I as co-directors and editors.

To make sure we were able to capture the audiences attention, we derived from filming eve doing her daily stuff to her filming her blog with Elizabeth in the background.  This only elevated the level of suspense and tension as the doll sat quite realistically on the bottom right frame  of the camera.

When it came to sound effects, we felt like using  silence was the best option when it came to recording the blog scene as it created even greater tensions and a more spine chilling atmosphere as a diegetic sound. We also create a sombre mise-en-scene as we played with the lighting-we turned the lights of and covered the window with the curtains so a decent amount of natural light would be used.

One problem we encountered was a sound recording issues when filming one of our scenes as our initial ideas was for Eve to wear a weird combination of clothes which included a raincoat. The problem when we were recording is that the sound of Lydia's

(Eve) movements were enhanced by the microphone which left an annoying and constant burden when trying to hear her speak and engage with Elizabeth. We had an outfit changed and resumed to recording using our phones on the app: voice recorder.

The scene was later edited by me. For the editing of this scene, I had to align the clips in chronological order and make sure the lighting was reflecting the atmosphere we were trying to project by adding a slight filter which would make the room feel colder and obscurer.  I proceeded to adding diegetic sounds of Eve's speaking into the camera for her blog as she is expressing her direct feelings about her current situation.

When filming the extract of eve filming herself on the blog, we had to position the camera infront of her and record using a tripod  just like a real blog would. This enhanced the realistic features of the blog and creates a different connection with the audience as she seems to be addressing them directly. We can almost say she is breaking the fourth wall as they looks straight in and talks directly in front as if she has got an audience watching her.


The use of the prop Elizabeth the doll, shows her attachment to her as she is featured numerous times through the film.  She adds tension as typical doll connotations are that they are creepy and give off an obscure feeling.

When looking at the film on a whole we felt one element was missing. We thought that the transition between clips, seemed rather basic therefore we decided to add a green screen to our scene and use a recording camera's frame to portray that idea. The typical REC sign helped illustrate this very well as it is a universally recognisable sign.

This really helped show the difference between Eve's blog moments and Eve's usual routine. 

Risk assessment:

Construction:creating the park scene

When looking over the call sheet, we saw that the next scene needed to be shot. We figured that filming the park scene with Eve and Elizabeth would be most useful as the weather and scenery of the West End recreational playground seemed appropriately dark and windy which connotes gloominess.

Using the weather as a key advantage, we were able to incorporate this  element as part of the mise en scene.  I helped create a mood we can interpret as a mirror reflection of Eve's mood and her state of mind.


I took part in directing and editing the clips for the park scene using editing tools such as fade into certain scenes, adding in voice overs and sound effects such as diegetic sounds of screeching playground swings and wind spot sound effects despite the real wind blowing during our shoot.

However, we seemed to encounter a problem when coming  back to edit as I had realised that the background noises we covering up all the dialogue between the doll and Eve. Given that we want our production to sound  and look professional, we decided not to include the sound in but add in the voice over for which I wrote the script for in my free time.  Recording the script took a couple of tries but however after, getting the rate take the overall composition turned out rather successful.



The scene starts off with an over the shoulder close up shot of the prop, to highlight the realistic features of the doll and to see where she has been positioned. From this shot, we are immediately triggered as to what the doll is doing on a kids swing in a playground.  The next few scenes are close ups of the doll in question.   this brings out a sense of unease in the audience which is used as an advantage on our part as the point of the film is  to feel slightly frightened or creeped out by this young girl's mental state.  

The rest on the shots consisted of mid shots, wide shots, over the shoulder shots and close ups, also accompanied by voice overs and slow motion editing +the sound effects used previously.

Construction: Making an Ident

Making an Ident for my Production:

Today in class we learned how to create an ident for our film production. Having no experience in doing so, I have to focus on every details and make sure I would be able to create a perfect indent for my production team. As a collaborative effort, Chloe, Liddy and I started on part of the indent together and later on I continued the ident adding my own touches and skills learned today. I completed it using iMovie.

Starting by exploring the kind of theme we wanted the girls and I each research the different green screen themes on Youtube to then decided which would be best for our ident. I found I perfect green screen which went for our theme of spooky and rather sombre. We obviously do not want our theme to relate to our film but we want our company to illustrate what it will be known for.

Getting a green screen was the easy part as all we needed to to was to type in "ss" in front of of the word youtube in the link. After doing so, I was able to download the clip and work with it from iMovie. Adding a background to the green screen would make the green go away therefore it was imperative to find an appropriate and effective one.

We then proceeding to find a background colour to place  behind the green screen. We picked a background that had quite a dark touch to it but that would not clash with the green screen. I found an ashy grey background which seemed to give off the sinister vibe we were after. I then proceeded to copy it and include it our indent. I overlapped the green screen with the background using the "green/blue screen" option on iMovie . This took away the green background and replaced it with the background we added to it.  Using "Dafont" I selected the font longshot which I felt would suit the indent's overall fit.

We called ourselves Seven Studios as we wanted to make it slightly more personal and we wanted to make sure we would be able to relate to the production name (We combined our dates of birth to create seven as the final number). We also wanted to make it memorable by using alliteration with the s'.

The final ident I completed: 

Voice over using Quick Time

Today in class, we learnt how to create a video voice over using the application Quicktime. This app can be used for screen capture, or for prepared visuals. To show my capabitity in using the software, I have prepared a smaller clip to show my understanding of it. However, here is a step by step instruction as to how I managed the recording.

1. Quiet is essential so use a quiet so there is no background noise
2. Open Quicktime
3. File > new screen recording 
4. >Internal microphone 
5. Click on your video, still photo or your PP
6. To start recording, press the red button (as below) which opens a white button (find this button at the very top right of your screen). Allow a few seconds lead-in time or your recording will be clipped.
7. Save as Quicktime 720 or 1080
8. Upload to YouTube for your blog

What I found quite complicated with this process was to remember to leave it a few seconds before starting to say what I needed to . Keeping the background noise to a minimum was also rather challenging as the microphone on my; laptop was quite sensitive to any sound from. any area of my house.

Reflection: additional scene

Wanting to add a supplemental scene to our film,  we decided to go off script and create a scene we felt may be beneficial to our film.  We decided to film a scene were Eve finds herself in a argument with her precious doll. This scene was based around the idea of Eve being in an unhealthy cycle of arguing with her doll and brutalising her.

The audience  was made to understand that Eve's way of lashing out of her doll was to show how her opioids  are beneficial to keeping her state of mind passive. In this scene we used our school playground to represent Eve treating her doll as if it was a child. Our first though was to use this as the park scene, however we felt that this would be slightly unrealistic and unprofessional as we didn't want to leave the audience feeling slightly confused.
However in this time we were able to work on ideas on how Elizabeth and Eve can interact to show the audience how intense their bond is.

Even if this was not a successful shoot we were able to learn that have a high quality production you need to;

-have an idea that fits in with all the others
-be sure you spent more time elaborating your plot rather than filming different shots
-manage time frames and use them to do other creative things relating to your film (when you are unsure of what step to take next)
...

Personally I'm quite glad we had this issue in the earlier stages of creating our production as we can avoid making another error as a team.

My Target Audience & How I Engaged Them

My Target Audience & How I Engaged  Them

Who Is My Target Audience: Action Steps

 To make sure I reached my target audience's satisfaction levels, I had to create an audience engagement profile. This was to know who they were, what they were interested in, why they wanted such a thing and where they most likely to hang out. It was also about environmental factors such as age ethnicity and social class. 

In my investigation I looked how brands are a key part of my audience's life. For example,Looking at  Bauer Media, NME and SkyI saw how they were able to define their audiences. Moreover, I looked into my audience's interest to find out what pleases them cinematically and how I could achieve such a result.

I had to investigate:

Who is my primary target audience? 

Our target audience is teenagers and young adults from the Occidental world which we want to appeal to using our intrepid thriller genre and our storyline. They will range from the age of 15-25 which we feel is the perfect age gap to create a bond between the film's characters and the viewers.

What kind of films and television are they likely to prefer?

Our audience would be interested in TV reality type of shows and the everyday American series which would feature on Netflix and other types of streaming networks.  Films such as November criminals and NERVE can definitely be apart of our audiences 'watchlist' as these movies are targeted towards our audiences preferences nowadays. We feel that we can relate to our audience's needs as our age gap fits into our target market's. This will ensure us being able to provide the best possible final outcome to suit our needs which, in most part are our audiences.

                    

3.What platforms do they choose to watch films and where are they

 likely to see information about films?

Our audiences will mostly to hear and learn about our film from their favourite social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc. This will give the audience a chance to entice their thoughts about the film to their friends and peer groups around them. The typical teenage/young adults platform nowadays will go out to the movie theatre as social outings. This sort of gathering definitely conforms to our audiences' preferences as they like to be quite active and sociable.

     4. What brands do they prefer? 

Proceeding with some research, I came to a conclusion that brands such as Urban outfitters,  Pret A Manger, and social media platform such as twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Were most likely to feature on our target audience's life. Personally I am a fan of all these brands but I do have individual preferences and so do they. They will be taken into account as our audience consists of a multitude of people classed into these rather restrained categories. 

5. What makes my film stand out from the competition?

When Eve, a teenager, loses her mother, she lashes out at her friends for being unsupportive. Eve is prescribed opioids to help her cope but soon becomes addicted. Confiding in her online blog, she reveals her inner rage as she nurses disturbing vindictive  tendencies and confides in her only remaining friend, her doll, Elizabeth.

The USP-unique selling point is key to making our film stand from the rest of the competition as we are able to stand out and provide a platform never been covered before by others.

6 . Why should my audience watch my film? For example:  Total Film / Empire / Cinema Scope / Slant / Sight and Sound says: Most powerful psychological thriller since Don't Look Now!

My film is a great combination of thrill and entertainment, our special features added such as the opioids addiction and the psychopathic character that is Eve, create a real sense of reality for the viewers. The character's soft spot for these painkillers just make her more human as we are aware that the path to mental destruction can come easy with any type of abuse.

Time spent understanding my audience has helped me create a profile of my ideal audience member. This information was then useful when I created my marketing and distribution strategy.

Construction: recording and editing the party scene

Construction: recording and editing the party scene




We used a  canon 750 camera to get the best quality of shot possible. The camera was placed on a tripod to stabilise the establishing shot. We then took the camera off the tripod and made the main character hold it to create a point  of view shot to create a real sense of movement and to make the viewer understand what the character was feeling during this time.

Props used:

• LED lights-set on strobe effect
• Empty bottles
• Canon 650
• Glass of water
• Projected background
• Tripod

We hired some extras to help us create a party atmosphere.

The dress code had to be casual party wear to make sure we were able to create a realistic scene.

Using this backdrop really added dimension to our filming space as we wanted to create this effect of a an excitable and packed crowded. I think the background worked up to a certain point as the image was quite still therefore it seemed slightly obvious in some shots that the people behind us were just standing still. 

We had to box everyone in so we wouldn't get the rest of the classroom in the shot-keeping the atmosphere as real as possible.

We started shooting one of our movie scenes, where we felt was going to be one of the trickiest of all.  The energy of each character was key as we needed to create a scene which would create a real sense of lightheartedness and gaiety.

The were sourced from Amazon where we spent about 10 pounds for a set of two stick on set of lights.
I proceeded to edit the numerous clips, to create a realistic party atmosphere where we would be able to follow the main character,'s Eve, feeling progressing throughout the party.

 List of shots used:

-establishing-point of view-high angle -medium close up-close up-cut-in shot-extreme close up 

All these shots used were used to give different perspectives from the character, and of the character.

We were able to concentrate a decent amount of shots and add in some filters to create effects of dizziness and to show the character's physical state deteriorating gradually after her drink it being tempered with.

Adding sound effects like pumping party music and background sounds of people talking creates a better clip as the audience can visualise the scene realistically. I also took the liberty to slip the clips and add in blurry transitions in between them when the character is filmed reacting from what was put in her drink. 

The editing had to be quite sharp as we did not want the scene to be boring. We wanted to concentrate the audiences attention on the subtle hints at the characters energy 'slowing down', throughout the film.