My Introduction

Hello! My name name is Alistair Price (candidate number 9137) and this is my A2 Media blog. As a member of group 1, I am working alongside Amber Mota (candidate number 9114) and Shayam Utting (candidate number 9164). To see my work, please use the labels on the right named "A2 Research and Planning", "A2 Construction" and "A2 Evaluation".

'Trip Switch' by Come What May

Our Album Cover

Our Album Cover
Outside Digipak Panels

Our Album Cover 2

Our Album Cover 2
Inside Digipak Panels
Our website navigation bar: please click on it to see the website

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Research and Planning 12: Our Animatic

We will follow up our work on a storyboard by creating an animatic. An animatic would be used in professional film making to lay the foundations for the structure of the film. We have decided to create an animatic; not only to replicate the process used in the industry, but to give us a better idea of how our opening sequence will look. We will be able to test the transitions of each shot, the amount of time each shot lasts and how the shots fit together with the script. A storyboard will be helpful for a lot of this, but an animatic will allow us to create a replica of how our real sequence should look.



Originally, we had created sticky notes for our credits. However, we feel little need to keep these in our animatic as it would be easy enough to replace these with better titles using Adobe Premiere Pro. We will also able to add our actor credits over different shots to see how we should space our titles within each shot. It would be very difficult to do this in a storyboard, which is another reason as to why we believe producing an animatic will be beneficial.
After producing our animatic, it is clear that it was very helpful to us. We have been able to recognise different problems that we may face during our test shoot which were much more difficult to spot on our storyboard alone. One major issue we discovered was that we have a lot that we want to tell in our story but the brief only gives us two minutes for our sequence. Our animatic has helped us to cut down the length of our sequence, which would have been troublesome if we discovered this problem when editing our test footage.

Tuesday 24 February 2015

Research and Planning 11: Our Storyboard

In order to visualise our film during the development stage, we decided that it will be beneficial for us to produce a storyboard:















We have decided that we will use sticky notes for our storyboard as it allows us to move the position of our shots with ease. Furthermore, we will be able to colour co-ordinate the sticky notes we use so that we can easily identify what type of shot will be used.

Yellow sticky notes will be used for close-up shots












Blue sticky notes will be used for mid-shots












Pink sticky notes will be used for long-shots













An example of one of our transitions
Furthermore, we will also able to show how each shot will transition into the next by adding small sticky notes in-between each shot. This will help us visualise the progression of our opening sequence as a whole and will be useful when we produce our animatic. This is why we will likely use sugar paper and sticky notes for our storyboard as it gives us a great amount of flexibility.

Friday 20 February 2015

Research and Planning 10: Reflections so far/looking ahead

I am very satisfied with the amount of work we have been able to complete so far. Everyone in the group has taken an active role in the project and we have all made valuable contributions whether it be in our own research or our work as a group. Our research has been very thorough as we have a number of different sources to reference our ideas.

One issue we have had so far is securing our location for the shoot, as we have planned to use the school's studio for our opening sequence. The problem with this is that we will only have access to this studio on a limited number of days. Furthermore, these days have to be agreeable with our actors, which makes finding the appropriate time for our shoot somewhat difficult.

As we progress with our project, we hope to produce a storyboard, animatic, shoot-board and rough edits of our sequence. We strongly believe that these materials will help us shape the image of our film and benefit the project when we reach the shooting and editing phases. We aim to continue with our group meetings in order to produce a high quality piece of work that we are all happy with, but I also plan to step up the amount of time I contribute to the project as an individual. This is because I want a truly exceptional opening sequence which I can use to learn more about film production.

Friday 13 February 2015

Research and Planning 9: Our script

The script for our opening sequence is as follows:
When writing our script, the priority was making the portrayal of both Blake and Jen equal. Both Blake and Jen are strong characters, which is why they have an equal number of lines and are both capable of progressing the conversation. The pace of the conversation is quite fast, to show that both are able to respond to each other quickly and confidently. Whilst writing the script, this scene from Casino Royale was used for influence.
This clip is a good example of the tone we were trying to set through the conversation between Jen and Blake. The conversation between Bond and Vesper is driven by both characters and the dialogue has undertones of humour to make the conversation witty and interesting. The script was written to imitate this conversation but without the humour, as it would be out of place under the circumstances of our sequence.

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Research and Planning 8: Our opening sequence idea

Opening Sequence
Our opening sequence will start by showing an unknown man holding a ring in his hands. This shot will take place after the events of the film, so we will connote this difference by creating a dream-like effect through a grey filter. Following this, our scene shall depict a conversation between two of our film's main characters; Blake and Jen. Blake - an ex-police officer who has since become a private detective - has met his old colleague Jen in order to ask for her help in recovering a police file on a gang suspected of kidnapping his partner. Jen is reluctant to help as she has been fired as a police officer due to a gambling addiction, which is the reason for our setting of a poker game. The conversation will be very back and forth, with both characters getting an equal role. At the climax of the scene, two thugs at the table will get angry at Blake's comments and pull out their guns, but Jen will react to this and shoot the two men. We decided to have Jen shoot back rather than Blake because we didn't want Blake to be represented as a killer.

Titles
Our sequence will start with credits for our distributor, production company and director followed by the title of the film and the names of our actors. We will style our credits similarly to the credits of The Usual Suspects as it is one of the opening sequences with the most similarities to our own.

Setting
The setting of our opening sequence is a back alley poker game. The key factor of our setting is that the background area isn't visible. We chose to have a dark, black background as this makes it look as though the game is occurring in a memory: only the specific features of the scene are included. This effect was created in order to provide sustenance to our plot, in which the events of the film are a recollection of a story.

Saturday 7 February 2015

Research and Planning 7: Our film title and plot outline

The title of our film is Payoff

Our film follows Blake: a man who worked as a police officer before quitting his job to become a private detective. He is a relatively recluse man who prefers to work alone more often than not. The only people he has been comfortable with are his ex-colleague Jennifer and his partner Rachel. But not long after he quit his job, Rachel is kidnapped by a criminal syndicate that Blake was pursuing during his time as a police officer alongside Jennifer. He is threatened with a ransom he is unable to pay, so with few other options, he turns to Jennifer to ask for her help in finding out where he can find the gang in order to rescue his partner.

The beginning of our film will start with a shot of Blake holding a ring. Chronologically, this shot will take place later on in the film, but we will leave this ambiguous to create a sense of intrigue in the audience. We have seen this method of story telling used in a number of our different references, such as The Usual Suspects and American Beauty.
In the opening of American Beauty, the first scene showing the conversation between the girl and the boy is an event that happens later in the film. However, the scene is revealed at the start of the film in order to make the audience question its relevance. When we see the scene again towards the end of the film it makes a lot more sense as the plot of the film provides information towards the impact that this scene has. This is a technique which we will use in our film using the shot of the ring.

In order to develop our story, we will need to consider which narrative theories can be applied to our production.

Theory of Binary Opposites: 
In our opening sequence, Blake attends a back-alley poker game in order to meet Jen. We aim to use costume and mise-en-scene to create an opposition between Blake, a private detective who represents law and the other players at the game; criminals who represent villainy.

Theory of Equilibrium:
The event which disrupts the equilibrium in our film is Rachel's kidnapping. Blake goes on a 'hero's journey' in order to rescue her, with the end of the film marking the progression into a new equilibrium.


Thursday 5 February 2015

Research and Planning 6: Our chosen genre and how we plan to connote this

Our chosen genre for our film is Action, with our sub-genre being Thriller. We have chosen to work with these genres as they have a very wide appeal and there is a good range of exciting and intense stories you can tell in an action film. Furthermore, these genres are ones that we were quite eager to work with, as all three of us in our group enjoy action films. Recently released action films that have been successful have had quite gritty or thought-provoking themes, such as 'American Sniper' and 'Lucy'. These types of films have also been successful in previous decades, with examples including Casino Royale (2006) and The Usual Suspects (1995). The major difference between our film opening and these examples of mainstream films is that the setting of our opening sequence will appear more abstract. However, an abstract look has been used before in successful mainstream films:
In order to create a successful film, our chosen genre must be obvious to the audience. To make our genre clear, we included an action scene at the end of our opening sequence. The scene will denote a stand-off in which the criminals will pull out a gun on our two main characters. This event is the climax of our opening sequence, so before this stand-off we will aim to build up tension through music and dialogue. Our setting will also create tension as the dark background isolates the characters. The setting of The Usual Suspect's opening scene was similar as it was made to be very dark to keep the identity of a character ambiguous.
As would be expected of an action film, our opening sequence will end with a short action sequence. The focus of our film is the story rather than the action and special effects so we will only use special effects for gunshots. An example of one of our influences for the end of our opening scene is Se7en (1995) as the action scene is trigged through key events in the story rather than for escapism alone. Although we will have special effects to offer escapism, the purpose of the action scene at the end of our opening is to foreground the story as a significant element of our film.