As level media studies: G324 Research and Planning

Hey I am backkkk , time to get the media head on and start this.....

Genre

lesson log 1

We have finally started , its crazy it's the second year already , We have been set a task to create a 5 minute short film. Now thats a big jump from a 2 minute opening to 5 minute full production with beginning middle and end. First lesson we got put into our groups (Archie , Charlotte and me). Then we was off with the brainstorming, so many ideas came out. We came up with 3 rough ideas so we had a variety but we came to the final decision after a LOT of trials of narratives and conversations.

What genre will you be choosing?

we will be choosing drama because we think with its wide range of sub genres and how much we could impact the audience would really gives us a much more narrative ideas and more room to add scenes that could really impact and create a atmosphere for the audience.

Drama film is a genre that relies on the emotional and relational development of realistic characters. While Drama film relies heavily on this kind of development, dramatic themes play a large role in the plot as well. Often, these dramatic themes are taken from intense, real life issues. Whether heroes or heroines are facing a conflict from the outside or a conflict within themselves, Drama film aims to tell an honest story of human struggles.

Drama Film Examples:

The Shawshank Redemption - A former banker convicted of murdering his wife develops a lifelong friendship with a fellow prisoner, and ultimately tries to defy the odds by keeping hope alive inside prison walls.

The Godfather - The aging patriarch of an organized crime circle must secure the future of his family’s empire by leaving it in the hands of his reluctant son.

Casablanca - A jaded nightclub owner must choose whether or not to help his ex-lover and her husband flee Nazi-occupied Morocco.

I decided to research more into the drama genre and a few examples that are classics. Last year we did drama as well meaning i have some good knowledge of it

What sub genres?

We will be having tragedy and hints of romance.These 2 sub genres could really impact the audience and bring out emotion ( who don't love a soppy film sometimes come on) . Also we can achieve high quality shots that we can play about with. We also decided on these genres due to having so many ideas , knuckling down and choosing the 2 sub genres was challenging as we had ideas which consisted of many different sub genres but FINALLY we decided on the 2 main ones.

what inspired us ?

1st influence

Initially we had 3 different ideas we kept switching around with , different genres and different narratives. We had complications with narratives and how everything would come together including budgeting and locations. What inspired us is a short scene from Charlie St. Cloud. The emotional connection and impact on us made us want to go down the road of tragedy of death and loosing a loved one. The interesting narrative kept us infatuated. The main protagonist having meaning to the film makes it more emotionally impacting and the strong relationships between these characters. From my personal experience i cried like a baby like typical girl.

2nd influence

Another influence was sixth sense reason why is because there is a connection with the dead and living world , the little boy can see dead people and it seems like they ain't dead, which is a big influence on our narrative idea. we liked how the ending played out , the doctor realising hes no longer alive creating n emotional connection and realisation from the audience leaving them shocked at the end.

3rd influence - Tanika - In you

This is something different , a music video with a start and and end. I loved how it took us by suprise the death of the girl and defiantly impacted me emotionally. I found it while looking for some new music. What i loved the most was that there was no speaking just music but the whole story was told , also the modern style of the video could influenece what time period we set our film in.
I love Tanikas music, when I found the video it was like a 'omg this is so going to be our film' moment.

ohhh yeah I thought I'd just throw in the lyrics and analyse them a bit as they apply to the film as well (smart monica) , we could take some ideas for the script or scenes as this has a lot incorporated into it with the genres we have chosen.

Do you feel that love between your high?
Do you when empathy feels alive?
Do you know that losing kills a fighter? - represents the girl being stronger and loosing the love of her life kills her strength

Do you?
Eh...
Do you know what broken hearts do?
Make it harder love to have it all the truth- after losing someone its much harder to love again and trust
You can't get it right
Just can't get it right

[Hook]
It vindicate me, teach me patience Lord- talking to the lord shows trying to find strength in something else
I need real love and affection, no more promises or confessions
I think I just found my lesson Lord
I need real love and affection

[Chorus]
I think I just found my blessing in you
I think I just found my blessing in youKnow I found all my blessings in you - realising the love she had for him and how much he impacted her life
In you
In you

Think I just found my blessing in you
I think I just learnt my lesson with you
I think I got all my blessings for you, oh
For you, oh
For you, oh
Gotta get all my blessings for you

[Verse 2]
Do you have faith even when you don't see me? - hope and faith , ties into religion
When my voice shakes would you still believe me?
When the water falls does it run dry, when nobody else is by your side
No down the ride, we get it right
Do you know galaxies and beauty in it?
So magical you can hear me breathing
You give me life
You get it right

[Hook]
It vindicate me, teach me patience Lord
I need real love and affection, no more promises or confessions
I think I just found my lesson Lord
I need real love and affection

[Chorus]
I think I just found my blessing in you
I think I just found my blessing in you
Know I found all my blessings in you
In you
In you

Think I just found my blessing in you
I think I just learnt my lesson with you
I think I got all my blessings for you, oh
For you, oh
For you, oh
Gotta get all my blessings for you

[Bridge]
I surrender myself
I surrender myself
I forgot how it feels of heavenly fall
Ohh
Could you hold me close, I swear this is real- missing him and needing him closer

[Chorus 2]

I think I just found my blessing in you
Know I found all my blessings with you
In you
In you, oh
I think I just found my blessing in you
I think I just learnt my lesson with you
I think I got all my blessings for you, oh
For you, oh
For you, oh
Gotta get all my blessings for you

Target audience

Our target audience is young girls. Reason why is they enjoy emotional and tear triggering films going through puberty and growing up and have and ideal picture of life. We can range what happens as young girls as they are all going through personal problems while growing up meaning they can relate to emotional impacts.

this explains our generation A LOT

Online survey -

Would give us a range of audience all ages also its world wide meaning we will achieve a big amount. Anonymous meaning its unbiased.

Family -

Would achieve a range of age and gender making it a variety of audiences to apply it to and adapt to the film

Friends-

Would also give us more results . more of age meaning we can get a rough idea if they would love to watch it as the younger audience watch more films.

How we developed into the idea?

we really went through lot of ideas within the audience choice. Defiantly was hard , we thought through who would want to watch it and it ranged and we needed to narrow down our ideas. We finally came to the conclusion of

Questionnaires & charts

As the rest of the group researched into certain groups , Archie did online survey which was prominently men and Charlotte done teen girls , I decided to do a mixed age group. We needed to see how different groups genders and ages would look towards our film.

I put the results into pie charts to get a clearer idea ....

also we chose only a couple important answers to put into the charts to simple it down and get more of a clearer idea as if we used all of the answers we would have got mixed up.

so basically I decided to drop in some of my groups charts as well , why not....

Character profiles , lets meet them ...

Sarah Smith

Age: 45,

date of birth : 1971

Height: 5ft 2

Appearance:wears glasses , blue eyes, long brown hair

Religion : Catholic (roman)

nationality: British

Personality: Shy, a very private person , likes to have control , dominant

Family: parents both in the army , was always close to the grandparents but they passed when she was 16

Background: middle class family , been to private school and went to uni in London (met Ryan there)

traits: loyal , trust worthy , helpful , kind , caring (has a big heart)

Grandparents passing changed her life scared to let people in due to the loss.

Ryan Smith

Age: Born in 1971,

death: would be 45 now, died in 1993 he was 22

Appearance: Wears glasses, pale skin, dirty blonde hair

Height: 6ft

Religion: Catholic (roman)

Nationality: British

Personality:very opinionated, intelligent , happy , looks forward to things

Family: parents are teachers , has a younger brother named Sam , was 4 when grandparents passed

traits: hardworking , determined , honest , kind

Background: middle class family , same as Sarah went to uni in London but didn't go private schools

was in a car crash when young due to not wearing seat belts (law was not yet installed)

Locations

House

We decided to use this location to show marital status between the 2 characters , she bought off the house as she was very attached to it showing the strength between their relationship. The different rooms will show how they built the house together.

High beach

We are using this area due to the sifinificance to the end and it would set a good scene and represent the atmosphere thats around. Also a significant place for the characters as you wi

the room shows the martial status. Where they spent the most time together ,

symbol of love and strength. Im loving the covers.

kitchen is where the providing happened for both of them.

Their cute little dinners cooked.

aw this is where they ate their dinners. The table

shows the close connection and being able to eat just them 2.
just the 2 of usss hahahah

I think these are the best ones so far and show exactly what we want to come through

this is where the first and last scenes take place

we choose this area as it applies to our location setting very well

and will present what we are looking for very well

living room represents their unity , where they spend a lot of time together

I think this area is a good location as it represents a married couple a lot.

Roles

Archie:

actor editing & sound :

Archie hasn't been an actor in his previous projects so he thought why not challenge himself , he fits the male character very well and will do the job to a high standard. The other 2 roles Archie has preformed and is very skilled at meaning that it would be a strength to the group and add a high standard to our film.

Charlotte :

lighting , producer & frame work :

Charlotte has a strength in being a producer due to the fact she was doing it last year meaning that it would make our film even stronger (don't i have a strong team) and make our film even better. She has taken 2 new roles on so she can challenge herself and her abilities as she has done the same roles the couple past years meaning she wanted to step out her comfort zone , go Charlotte darling.

Me (monica) :

director , actress & props , hair and make up :

I think the 2 main roles that act on my strengths are acting and props hair and make up. I do A level drama which really benefits me in the acting process i can add techniques and emotion to the right atmosphere ti impact with audiences which our film defiantly needs . Also the second role I do make up for people outside of school meaning I know techniques and great ways to get the look we are going for. The last role is a massive role , I'm defiantly going to need help from the group and we are all going to act as the directors so we can add the best ideas , our team is defiantly about team work.

Props Hair and Make up-

My favourite part , what girl dosen't love make up. What we focused on is making the characters being and looking from the generation they are from (both 45 ) we wanted her to be a bit stuck in time as he passed away and she can't move on making it easier to style and do the make up (90's make up simple and easy).

As my role is props , hair and make up ill focus on making sure the make up and the hair relate to the specific time in the era. Im going take ideas from these pictures and also make a mood board and i'll also include specific make up items i used ti create the looks to add a bit more Monica into this blog.

I thought why not look more into 90s make up so I looked for tutorials and came across this video which has inspired me for the make up look for Sarah....

Haulll timeee ....

well time to do a little haul for you guys.

Here is what we bought for the film i'll be explaing why below

We decided to buy the grey hair spary to age Sarah's hair , she's 45 so we need to

add a little bit of age into her . Bought it at Claire's (can clearly see)

£3.40

Marriage rings , well not really getting married they was only £1

don't think i'll take that as a marriage band in real life no way . Simple traditional marriage bands for Ryan and Sarah

Pj's for Ryan that he won't be using as it as he can't , hes a ghost so won't work. Going to use

these as a symbol of him not being there and they are going to be laying at the bottom of the bed

Music

We wanted to have a song that was signigfiant to our film and the situation. We went with Adele - chasing pavements. The reason why we want it played sometimes through because we made it their song and it has a lot of memories to the song (something like the first dance at their wedding) . It being so significant we wanted it to play in important parts of the film. A stereotypical song for a soppy film , typical ay.

Also the music video applies to the narrative a bit as well as there is a tragedy (car crash occurs).

other music I looked into for the film ;

Adele - when we were young

this is another song that I think would fit in within our narrative . Also the lyrics correspond as they was young when he passed away

positive:

the linking in with the narrative and

Treatment & Narrative

So I'm back and i think its time to let you in on what this 5 minute creation is about . We started off with total of 3 ideas which are completely different to the final idea , I guess none where good enough to develop until we came across our last narrative ;

Narrative:

A woman (45) is dealing with her husbands death. She sees him and speaks to him not coming to terms he is already gone until the end of the film she visits his grave and sets him free and herself of the tragedy.

Treatment

Starts off with Sarah sitting down next to the tree, she has her picnic basket and shes unpacking and packing stuff up, you can see her nerves and anxious face . She keeps looking at the time and she gets angry and packs up. She throws everything into the back of her Toyota car lastly her blanket which will cover up the camera. Next shot shes in bed day after the picnic, a male is in the room (Ryan) he looks tired but it looks like he hasn’t slept in the bed. Sarah tries speaking to him but doesn’t say nothing and she follows him out to the corridor. Then it cuts to the scene when shes walking to work, chasing pavements comes on by Adele and we are taking a route down to the tree, she sits down and it seems like she's reminiscing . She receives a message from her boss about her meeting so she rushes off. In the meeting she's looking at the computer which has a picture of her and Ryan happy and in love, voices around her are muffled as she is concentrated on he picture picking out little details.

Night time comes and its movie night , her and Ryan are sitting there , shes trying to have a conversation with him but he don’t acknowledge her , she realises and shouts at him " you won't even look at me" and he leaves. After he leaves she listens to voice mails and seems to get upset and angry , replaying them over and over again. Cuts to the scene where she is in bed listening to the voice mails again analyzing them, she turns them off and lies there thinking . Next morning shes acting like nothing has happened she’s making breakfast for her and Ryan while chasing pavements starts playing on the radio. It zooms out to the TV and there is a report going on about a death, we zoom into the report and we end up walking up the path where there is Ryan’s grave and we realise he has passed , the camera zooms out (drone) with chasing pavements playing in the background.

Script draft & final

we roughly drafted our script with ideas we could possibly

have , it was hard as we needed to also add shots and how we gonna set the scene.

this is the full script we decided on , script is one of the challenging things in my opinion

as not only the lines but the placing of characters and setting needs to be sorted

Story board draft & the real thinggg

This is a drafted story board without the pictures

we roughly decided how its going to happened and what scene goes after the other , it was challenging

as we had to make it flow and make sure we didn't give too much away defiantly took us time.

Costumes/clothes

Halloween is coming so best subject to talk about even though these are not cool costumes lets look more into them and i'll explain why we picked these specific clothes....

Casual day out for Sarah , classy dress with a grey cardigan and her favourite booties :)

I decided to pick this dress as its plain and could be dressed up older as you can see my fashionista side came out , calling Chanel right away. Also her being stuck in the past the dress has a 90s feel towards it with the spaghetti straps , but it has com into fashion a lot recently....

here is a picture which inspired the look , Naomi campbell and Kate moss wearing 'iconic silver spaghetti strap dress'

classy but trendy

feel like I'm writing a magazine column about fashion.

Chosen this becuase its again classy and respectful for work.

It covers her up very well as she is still mourning and dealing with Ryan's death.

comfy and casual

Even her pjs are stylish , oh Sarah.

jogging bottoms and grey top matching as they have to be quite plain.

Sarahs normal day outfit , looks aged and grown which what we are going for but

hints of younger her in their as she is stuck in time and hasn't moved forward as much as she could have.

Ryan's clothes , only have one pair of clothing for him as

bless his soul he passed away.

white plain t-shirt and jeans show young him as he died when he was 22

Age rating

Research

Rated G: General Audiences – all ages admitted. Rated PG: Parental Guidance Suggested – some material may not be suitable for children. Rated PG-13: Parents Strongly Cautioned – some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Rated R: Restricted – under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

our age rating will have to be 15 due to the fact the film because it has adult themes (death , tragedy) meaning we can't have young viewers watching them kind of scenes
another reason why i'd choose 15 is because they wouldn't fully understand the plot

FILMING AND A MASSIVE CHANGE...

Day 1 of filming :

we really didn't know what we was getting ourselves into with filming , we planned to film. we decided to do the first couple of scenes after school yet that did not work out (sadly) we was disappointed that we didn't get to film much due to the weather and other circumstances.

Day 2 of filming:

we really tried to film all of the scenes , we done all of the forest scenes. Absolutely freezing which meant i couldn't feel nothing. 2 hours of hardcore filming ended and back to school we went.

Day 3 of filming:

so basically we filmed all of the clips we needed to film and now its all about putting them together , its bee succesful filming went pretty quick. OR AS WE THOUGHT....

EVERYTHING HAS FLIPPED

we scrapped the whole film and now we are left with nothing. After putting the clips together and trying to make it look good it did not work and we decided we need to change round the whole film , lovely jubbly.

We went to Charlotte house and a long discussion lead to starting our film again and going off the back of our heads , no storyboard no nothing just our creative ideas.

10;30am - 6;30pm filming has nearly bee finished the whole day has been spent out and about filming thinking what we could do and how we could make it the best we possibly could. 2 more filming sessions and it will be all done and finished....

video

Back to the new idea ....

well its back to the drawing board , so much has happened and changed that we need to again think of basic things and ideas.

Narrative: Sarah and Ryan are a happy couple , spending quality time together , falling more and more in love , they are very affectionate and in love. Suddenly Sarah dies due to a car accident and she is taking her death as a spirit very tragically and not accepting that she has passed away until one day she realises Ryan is coping so she should come to terms as well and decides to fade away.

Genre : Drama // subgenres- romance tragedy

Target audience: Teens/older women- reason why we went for older women and teens is because they would enjoy the film the most out of anyone. teens and older women enjoy watching emotion hitting films , having an impact of death probably in their life means they can also relate to the characters.

Characters....