Here is the film opening which my partner Richy and I have been working on for the past 3 month. Been through many rough decisions and obstacle along the way but at the end we were both really proud of it.
Without further ado, here is the film opening which we decided to call "The First Degree"
Today, since I'm already finished with my evaluations, I asked Mr Harrison whether I could sit down and edit a quick behind the scenes; he responded by saying "just go with it!". Therefore I sat down for the entire hour editing the behind the scenes away.
1) How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social group and issues?
Challenging Conventions
My film opening challenges conventions of a crime thriller in that we started off with there being a crime which is at a steady pace in parallel with the interrogation scene, it also shows the contrast between low key lighting and bright light of the interrogation room. We decided not to go for any dialogue as it's a film opening and it will over complicate the plot. Every crime thriller needed a death scene so we had the antagonist be dead by the end of the opening. We built up tension not through music until the fully until the interrogation sequence but before that we used the sound effect of the killer's foot step instead. The sound was really a solid thud every step that the killer takes, that make the audience felt the tension.
There must obviously be an investigation scene, we were thinking of a police investigation on the body but decided in the planning phases that we were going to have an interrogation scene with the killer instead, partly because we must acquire more actors in the process which would be quite difficult regarding we must stay until 5PM after school on a Friday.
From what is seen from the film opening, I can pick out a few shots which resembles media products done before either from video games or a film. Some of these were planned and some were just happen to be coincidences.
The zoom out shot we used right at the beginning resembles the scene shown in the announcement trailer for the game Dead Island, reason we had gone with this shot in the beginning was because it gives the audience a feeling of being confused of where they are but as the camera zooms out, the audience would be able to know what happen. This makes the film feel dark and mysterious.
The scene from the movie Se7en when we were first introduced to the killer, the slow movement of the feet help build up tension and helps symbolises the killer's personality which is a more cold and take more calculative personality
This scene from the film "The Raid Redemption" is sorta similar in a way in that the victim are both trying to open the door but can't because it's locked and there is light from the other side which indicates that there is hope on the other side. The other thing that I found unexpected and funny is that even though we never looked at this clip until now, both of them used canted angle. We use it because we wanted to try something new at the time, however in the film it is probably to show uneasiness or tension.
This scene was from the movie The Fugitive when the protagonist is running away; the handheld tracking shot shows that he both Richy and the protagonist is panicking and in a hurry, the only thing that is different is that Richy is injured.
This shot shows a top down angle shot of the interrogation room; in Luther, they decided to place the camera next to the security camera but due to the fact that our classroom do not have a security camera, I decided that this camera angle would be the perspective of the security camera instead. This shows that the killer is in a contained big space with the interrogator/detective in the center of the room.
This scene was taken from the ongoing TV series Walking Dead series when Rick met with the governor with the antagonist sitting on the left and the protagonist on the right . Although we used this scene, Richy decided to swap things around by having all the props being on the left indicating that the killer knows everything and on the right we have the interrogator with nothing behind her, this shows that she has no knowledge of what happen.
We took a shot from the film Luther when the detective is sorting out the paperwork; the interrogator in this film opening represents curiosity and the fidgeting of paperwork symbolizes confusion of whether the killer had done it or not.
This shot was also from the film Luther where we see a close up low angle but we ended up going for an eye level shot instead. Both of these shots show the stone cold face of the killer.
Social Group and Issues
My film opening aimed to portray the social groups of government officials, and in this case, is the female detective. Even though the detective is not portrayed as the main protagonist, she is however, representative of the audience- where she is finding out as much as they know within the complicated plot of the film. The use of a detective correlates with the interest of the researched audiences in their political and governmental interest. Reading from an article, I highlighted one the conventional features that our detectives possess as stated.
My protagonist consisted of the highlighted traits of a detective. We can see this in some of these points through the micro elements of some shots in the film opening. E.g. The detective in our film was inspired by the detective in the TV series Luther; both of them are an outsider and also both of them dress formally. We even with further with the idea.
This shot shows that there is confusion and also this also meant that there are evidence provided to support that the killer did it.
The mis en scenes of boxes to the left of the scene meant that the killer knows everything but on the other hand on the right side which is where the detective is at, it is totally empty indicating that the detective knows nothing about the case.
In this scene, the glass means that the detective has little knowledge of the murder case then the next shot it shows that the glass is full as long as paper works under the glass which indicate that the killer knows everything about the killing
2) How does product engage with audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Who is your target audience?
Through YouGov, I have found out a similar target audience to my own film opening. These two movies are crime based and they are Zodiac and The Fugitive
Both type of audience shows some connections in similarity such as age the age range between 40-50 and shows a strongly political on either side of the wing; people who watches Zodiac are strongly on the left wing and people who watches The Fugitive are strongly on the right wing. Despite the fact that they are are completely different in politics involvement, they still have the interest for films with government forces and police motifs.
How would it be distributed as a real media text?
In order to avoid competition from the blockbusters, we should avoid releasing the film during summer time and instead release them towards the end of the year when we are more likely to gain more audience from it.
We are more likely to release this movie towards the end of the year but probably not to cinemas worldwide, it will only be released in specific region of the world; although with the rice of technological convergence, at the same day of the release date the movie will also be released to video on demand sites and streaming service such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, therefore other audiences group who wanted to watch this whenever they wanted to can watch it on their iPhone/PC/laptop/TV/etc. I think that Netflix will be a very good way of increasing the numbers of audience as there were 93.8 million people that are subscribed to the service.
As for the distributor, I had a look at some stats and finally came to the conclusion that Lionsgate would be the best option yet. Reason being that the company Lionsgate are known for their thriller titles over the years. Lionsgate also has a division that are specialized in distributing movies onto video on demand and streaming services, they are known as Lionsgate Premiere. They are relatively new and had only been founded in 2015.
In order to reach audience worldwide in a less costly way, we could promote our film onto Facebook by creating a fan page, it also allows for me to reach the specific target audience easier.
Please take a look of this annotated version of the film opening
3) How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
Throughout the span of 4 to 5 months, I have developed some production skills that was very useful that I will be sure to remember for future uses. As a reminder to my future self, I have created 2 top trump cards that replicate me at the start of Sept of last year (2016) to now (Feb 2017).
There were 3 films in total that I've created with various different people from the class, 2 of which were sort of a practice to understand conventions and editing and the last one is the actual film opening.
This film was sort of a challenge set by our teacher to create a 1 minute film
This film is created so that we understand about conventions of thrillers more in detail
This is the actual film opening
My creativity skills has improved a tiny bit, partially because I have already been uploading videos to my own YouTube channel. I started my YouTube channel a year ago and making a bit of money from it, I tend to do lyrics video that is unique from other YouTube channels out there by going outdoors and finding a perfect fit scene to the song, I must be very careful of copyright though. Once I finish editing these videos I would then upload it on to YouTube straight away then shared onto social networks where my friends would see it. I would then show it to my family and relatives, most of the time I would get a many response out of them and that would give me motivation to do more. I would also ask people for feedbacks of what they thought of it also. This applies the same to my project as well, once I was finished with my rough cut, I'd show them to my relatives. However, due to the videos I due are lyrics base and it's just the case of me listening to it, breakdown the song in Japanese and in some case if I'm very free, translate it; the film opening and the other two requires more creativity and to get more into the concept of it, this makes it more complex than what I'm used to doing.
From October of last year to now, my cinematography skills had gone up a fair bit. At first I did not really have a clue on how I could achieve a specific camera angle. However, this changed tremendously when I changed my mindset from thinking "I can't do it" to "I can do it!". I have so many camera angles that I was unable to achieve at first; but due to the change in mindset, I was able to accomplish all these angles. It's unbelievable how much have changed. But then again, I still have many things to learn from this. Here are various different camera angles I got to explore from all the three film I had made.
As seen in the collection of screenshots, these were camera angles that I never thought I will be able to do before; tracking shots were amongst the hardest shot to execute with no other tools other than my own hands and feet, we would take about 6 to 7 shots of them and only one of them will look the way we wanted to, in fact, in 2 of them I was required to run/walk with my back turn to the wall and find this really challenging indeed.
POV (Point of View) shots can be awkward in some cases such as the fact that I must put both of my hands whilst grabbing on to my camera and wrapping myself around the person that we were looking through the vision of and holding it still. There is this very awkward moment when we were filming the last scene for the film opening where we were looking through the eyes of the interrogator it happens that Ying was the interrogator so I must do what I've said to Ying. Thank god there were no teachers around there because we were filming after school. We took 5 takes until it actually look quite decent. However, in some cases it could actually be fun! the one we did for "The Chase" was that Bing who played as the victim in that film wasn't willing to hold the camera and do a POV shot so I had to do it since Bamm2 was already playing as the murderer. We were finding a way to prevent me breaking my back when falling to the ground, we tried looking around school for a mattress or something soft to fall on to, as we were about go to the PE department for some gymnastic matte, I thought why not use the couch in the drama room which was much closer that the PE department. We asked Mr Herbert the drama teacher nicely for it and he approved so we dragged and carried the couch to the filming location which was pretty near. So now we were able to film the POV shot without myself getting injured. Yay... All in all, POV shot can be quite challenging to execute, but once I got it, it's an amazing feeling to have.
OTSS (Over The Shoulder Shot) requires a fair bit of balancing skill which I do not have, as seen I have only used it once and didn't use it again because we didn't really have a use for it. Although that one shot alone took me 6 times to film because I kept on felling off the chair I was standing on, it was really funny to actually watch back the footage back.
Canted angle is hard to maintain consistency, especially if I wanted to film in the exact same place, this is because I did have anything to put the camera on a fixed position. Sometime, even though we nailed the performance, but a change in the angle that was too acute or obtuse made us had to reshoot the sequence again and again.
Lastly, the shot that the most anticipated and the hardest to pull off, it was the zoom out shot. At glance it seems simple to just place a camera at an angle, zoom in the most at 250mm, apreture 4.0 and then slowly zoom out. Turns out, this shot took us 15 times to record because we were having issues of how to zoom out very smoothly and spinning as well. The obstacle along the way were firstly, Richy's eye must not blink for around 15 to 20 seconds, secondly the camera was on the floor as well as myself which I will slowly spin the camera around as well as zooming out the lens. First 10 times I was spinning the camera but then we realised later that we can actually do the spinning in post production. That meant that one of our issues was eliminated. Zooming out the zoom ring was still challenging to keep it smooth. At the end when it was 5PM and it was getting darker, we started to lose light so we called it a day there. When I went home, all the shots were near unusable, when we applied an effect on premiere called warp stabilizer, it looked alright but one significance problem was that Richy's pupil was moving. We decided to just leave it be and use that specific shot.
Before starting this project, I have a decent knowledge of editing already, if I do not understand a specific area of editing I will often look through YouTube for tutorials online so I don't need to interrupt my teacher. However, there are some new things that I never learnt before which was then suggested to me by my friend who also likes editing.
One of those new things I that my friend suggested to me was "Warp Stabilizer" it was a stabilising tool which works really well, I was really surprised the first time I used it. Since then I've been using it when necessary. The first time I used it was on the home when I was capturing a still shot of just placing my phone on my car dashboard towards the window and just letting it sit there for 20 seconds. The initial footage looks really shaky but when I've applied warp stabiliser it was a totally different kind of footage.
Masking is one of the editing aspects that I was once trying to stay away from just from the fact that I did not have a stylus, that was a bad choice on my part when I realised how simple it actually was. Initially I did not use it in the film opening at all until the rough cut came around where as a class we get to watch each others film opening and gave feedback to one another. Some of the feedback mentioned that water was too clear to see.This either requires a reshoot or editing so I said to Richy that I will try to fix up the water, I didn't have a clue at first how to fix it but then I duplicated the sequence and try to mess around with the glass until I decided to touch upon masking. What I did was I masked it so that it only highlight the water and colour correcting it to a more light blue look. Although it looked a bit weird at first, it's certainly better than nothing right?
Furthermore, I went even further with masking by combining it with key framing! This was when I was really finding it fun to mask points, normally premiere would automatically track the points we've chosen automatically, however this wasn't the case for this project. I must manually move the mask around for each frame. It was tiring but sure is rewarding.
Key framing was something I knew a bit of at the first of the year, I asked my media studies teacher Mr Harrison for a little advice on it and he essentially taught me how the positions, scale and rotation of the sequence can be moved all at once and requires a little bit of patience. I then applied this to the most anticipated clip which was the zoom out shot on the eye which was then combined with Warp Stabilizer to create the smoothest footage I can accomplish.
This was the key framing timeline for the eye shot.
During this project, we had so many paperwork for filming, risk assessments, storyboard and more, in order to keep track of all these, we have our own thought book to put everything into. Bamm2 who I filmed "The Chase" with had suggested an app that I can keep my paperwork digitally, it's called "FasterScan" and it's totally FREE which was a relieve.
The scan is very reliable as long as the image is clear, this is great because I can organise all the paperwork on my computer in the order I wanted to. In terms of organisation of how we get things done, me and Richy will first plan together at the beginning of the week of what's happening on the week; for the first few weeks they were straight up planning and location evaluating and anything besides the actual filming. Here are some examples of the scan, in this case it was the risk assessment and the storyboard for both the film.
Around three weeks in is when we started to do some actual filming. My equipment were prepared properly e.g. camera, battery fully charged, tripod, laptop. However, on the day we were supposed to film the chase scene for the film opening, I forgot to bring put my SD card into my camera the night before so I ended up needing to borrow one of ICT services. My SD card that I forgot was 128GB and the one they let me borrow was an 8GB which mean that we were limited on how much we can shoot because Canon are known for their ridiculous video file size.
If I have not forgotten my SD card, I would have given myself a 5/10 rather than a 4 because other than that I have never did anything wrong this major because without an SD card I wouldn't be able to film anything. At the end of the filming session I was left with 620MB which was less than a GB left. What a relieve that we did not overshoot the capacity or else we might need to borrow one more from them which I would not want to do that because getting one was already a hassle.
Sound has always been a big part of my life ever since I started my YouTube career. To finally get a chance to work on projects that sound is quite important was really exciting, first time that I was placing each footstep sound effects was very repetitive but once I get to see the big picture of why sound is important for communicating the mood to audience, that made me want to do more. My placements in the first few sequence were very out of place and as I kept on going it started to get more "in sync" with the footage and so when I finish with everything sound related, I would watch the film from the beginning and see in which area it's not in sync At the end, the echoes falls right into place and it definitely adds the tension to the film and gave the film a lot more depth. To study more abound sound, there was a brand new "Mod" which is essentially an add on to a game called "Minecraft" called the "Sound Physics" mod. Essentially, it give us the player an atmospheric feeling of actually being in a giant world with more realistic sounds. E.g. when in caves everything will be a lot more echoey. This made me motivated to make a video on this particular aspect. From that point onward, it made me felt that sound is quite a major part in movies.
In terms of how I find these sounds, they were ranged from several sites such as YouTube and websites that I used maybe once or twice which is caleed freeSFX, it's a website which contains more than 1000 different sound effects and all of them are unique and free with no extra cost for them. When I do find one effect that I happen to like but they sounded a little bit weird, I would fix up the sound by using a software called Audacity. This program is so useful if I wanted to add extra echoes to a sound effect. This program is widely used by many film director because extra plugins can also be installed on this software.
