The mysteries of the plot and location...revealed!

The next thing to do was deciding on the storyline of the whole film before deciding what the first two minutes should consist of and how we can grab the audience in the first minutes of the film.
To do this, Thomas Rivet, Harry Read and I, had already decided on our film being a thriller, so now it was down to creating a storyline to fit this. I went off to a quiet library, sat down and just thought about creating an original storyline not based around your typical thriller film conventions such as: a serial killer, a monster, a vampire or even aliens. I thought about what makes a good thriller - suspense and giving the audience goosebumps from just watching it. To help, I went back to our genre research of thrillers and applied our knowledge to our storyline and decided on what would fit the film that we are trying to create.

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The main outline of our film is completely original to the best of my knowledge and I started developing the film's storyline by first starting off with a small aspect that I thought of - a female stalker. This came to mind as the traditional connotation is of a male stalker, this already adding a twist to the traditional thriller storylines of today. Then from this, I developed on 'character A's background (the male character who is being stalked) and further developing the storyline through the stalker being psychotic and kidnapping 'character A'. However, I won't bore you with my ranting on about how I thought of the storyline..instead I will give you a short, but very intriguing storyline to start that suspense that will carry on until the day you get to see this psychological thriller.

** There's a women (Rose - Abbey Ingram) stalking and obsessed with a happy, loving boyfriend (Jamie - Oliver Rossetti) of the one he calls "the one and only, best girlfriend he could ever wish for" (Ellie - Agnes Rivet) Things, however, start going missing and a warning note is left, consequently luring Jamie away from his happy way of life into the deepest and darkest realms of psychology and love which will tear Jamie and Ellie apart and bring them to the brink of survival; yet they yearn for each other every second of the day. (Basic plot)
Jamie follows the clues that are left and they lead him straight to Rose's flat. Her mind is slowly deteriorating and drugs Jamie to stop him running away. Then the twist is revealed, she has actually led Jamie to this house in the middle of no-where for this man (Vinnie - Thomas Rivet) who is her step-brother. He, in actual fact, wants Ellie and will stop at nothing to be with her.

In the mean time, Ellie calls the police after Jamie does not come back from work that day and then find the picture frame missing with the note, with a video of his capture following shortly after for the capture of Ellie in return for his life. The hunt is now on to find Jamie and his kidnappers before the once, happy and passionate couple, are split apart for much longer than 24 hours...the chase is on and what is to be revealed about the psychotic minds of the kidnappers may just keep you on the edge of your seat for a very long time! (Extended Version of the plot) **

Overall ending: The police track down the location of the kidnappers through witnesses and reports. This ends with the capture of the male kidnapper while the female kidnapper takes an overdosing, dying later on in hospital. This news then gets told on national news. The couple, who are now happily reunited, see this on the news and ends with one of them making a coffee. (Stirring of the coffee, parallel to the start of the film, while fading out to introduce credits.)

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This is a thrilling story but essentially makes a perfect and original storyline for our film. For our coursework task we have to produce a two minute introduction to our film and we have decided to start off straight into the action of the interrogation scene to put the audience straight into the middle of the action and the film. Then, it returns to the beginning of his day, showing his happy and secure life in the morning. However, as the audience already know (Dramatic irony), a bombshell is thrown on to his and his' girlfriend's life.

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The location in which we will film the first scene of our film will be at Thomas Rivet's house as his bedroom is perfect for the dark, small and confined room that we need for the interrogation. In conjunction with this, we need it to help represent it being a normal house to show the audience that the hostage takers are not professionals as they are using their own place - not a warehouse or other conventional locations for hostage situations.

A picture of the bedroom which will

become the interrogation room.

The next location for scene two of our film will be at Thomas Rivet's house again but downstairs in his kitchen as its perfect with the position of the dining table (where Ellie will be sitting) and is not huge which would represent a first-time buyers house - representing the young couple. As well as this, it would help contrast the difference between scene one and two through the use of light and mise-en-scene, changing the atmosphere of the film dramatically which is what we want.

A picture to show

the kitchen.

A picture to show the dining table

just across from the kitchen.

In conclusion of this, we plan on starting our filming in these locations, in the next couple of days. Then providing our filming goes according to plan, we purpose to start editing in the following and upcoming weeks ready to be handed in. Until then..let your anticipation for this film grow!

My Group, My Genre!

Now we have completed our preliminary task for our coursework, we are now starting our research on our main task of making a two minute intro to a film. To make any film, you need to have a team or a group to work with and therefore we have stayed in the same groups that we were in for the short film we made a few days ago. The group that I am in consists of Thomas Rivet, Harry Read and Myself, who together create a team where everyone has a role to play when it comes down to making a film, such as directing or editing.

Our first stage of creating our film is to decide what genre we shall make it and how well it would tie in with other people’s opinions so we get a better idea of our target audience. The genre that we have chosen is Thriller as it is not only an interest to our entire group, but it also leaves a variety of camera angles available to us to enhance our film as well as special effects such as monochrome and colour focus.


An example of one Thriller that I have seen is ‘Silent Hill’. By looking at this film in depth, it will help mine and my groups understanding of Thrillers and what characteristics they consist of, this will in turn help us to produce an exciting Thriller film with many different elements included.

‘Silent Hill’ is about a woman called Rose Da Silva who has a daughter, Sharon, who keeps having restless nights and nightmares. During these nightmares, the only place that is mentioned is a place called Silent Hill. When Rose decides to take her daughter to this mysterious town, they end up in a high speed chase with the police which ends in a crash and Sharon going missing. At this point, Rose is plunged into a dark, blind trail for Sharon in this town that is far from the ordinary.
This film is certainly a Thriller as I expected but I think that it could also be a hybrid and be classed as a Thriller/Horror as it includes supernatural creatures which may scare members of the audience, therefore making this film quite similar to other films such as ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Doom’ in terms of structure and plot.

The main characters are quite typical of Thriller movies, such as the main character, Rose Da Silva who is played by Radha Mitchell. She is the Mother of Sharon who becomes very hysterical when Sharon is lost and she is very young which is quite typical as young characters are more likely to appeal to the target audience which is likely to be teenagers and young adults. Radha Mitchell has also played other characters in Thriller films such as Kelly Shepard in the 'Phone Booth' and Peters in the 'Surrogates'. I believe that she was chosen for the role in 'Silent Hill' as she had already had experience in other Thrillers and therefore would be good in that particular role.

There is also the daughter, Sharon who is played by Jodelle Ferland. She is a typical character you would find in a Thriller movie as she can help set a storyline being a child as well as it makes a good twist in the film if she is hiding something as a child is stereotypically seen as innocent and therefore the director can work on this aspect and surprise the audience.

The Themes and Values of this film are very similar to those of other thriller films. The main theme in this film is how it revolves around the supernatural element and therefore being the main point to focus on when it comes down to suspense and scaring the audience. There are also values evident in this film and one being that the mother should have told her husband where she was going as he eventually at the end finds her and helps her, but this could of been avoided by the wife telling him where she was going.


The location of the film is also a main aspect of a Thriller as the setting and location can tell a lot about the film and what to expect. In this film, the location was mainly a derelict town which was destroyed many years previously. This is in fact filmed in Ontario, Canada in a mixture of locations including film studios.

For our coursework, we will look at all these aspects of this film and from this decide what elements of a Thriller we should add in and what could create a great two minute intro to a film.

Evaluation of my own film production - 'The USB'

I have created this preliminary film in which I started off with a basic outline of what I had to include in my production. I took that away thinking of ways to tackle this project and over two days, I had expanded on the basic outline that my group was given and have now come out with a short film called 'The USB'.

The basic outline of our film was that it had to include a 'Match on Action' shot, a 'Shot Reverse Shot' and follow the '180 Degree Rule'. Once we had read through the basic requirements of our film, we watched a short introduction to our preliminary task and this helped our understanding further so we could take the task in hand and produce a film to the best of our ability.

We started off with the first rule in film-making, creating a storyboard and sharing each others ideas in the group about how to tackle this task. I believe we did this very successfully as we all listened and contributed within our group of three and gradually built a storyboard in which took in all of our ideas and put them on to paper, therefore giving us the plan that was later to be filmed.

The next step was to cast out roles in the group and then set out to work on our production of 'The USB'. We set off to the area in which we had appropriately chosen to film and then referred to our storyboard to start filming. During this process of filming the scenes, we referred to the storyboard as well as coming up with better ideas of how to film a certain scene at that point in time and this helped enhance the film overall.

While filming over two days, we did encounter a couple of problems which we had to over come. One of the problems was that on the second day, one of the actors wore different clothes to what they wore first time round, so we had to retake those scenes, but we over came this problem by retaking the scenes that included this actor which luckily enough was only one scene.

Another problem we had was when we were trying to take an overhead shot. We had to work out the best way of stabilising the camera and taking the shot from the height of the door. We over came this by two of us organising ourselves so that we could stabilise the camera and take this shot.

Once we had completed the necessary filming, we went onto the final process of editing. We cut sections that we didn't need and fitted scenes together with transitions and text when needed, for instance, letting the audience know the characters names. Then finally we added the credits and had finished editing our film.

In conclusion, I believe that our film went very well and we not only learnt a great deal about filming and editing, but we also learnt how to contribute ideas effectively and learnt other skills that would be required of us when doing our coursework and making our two minute film.

The Film Industry - Warner Bros

There are three main stages that a film goes through:

• Production
• Distribution
• Exhibition

The company that makes a media product is the most obvious institution and is in the production of the film. However the companies that distribute and exhibit, publicise and merchandise the product are also required to release a film and attract customers to watch it. For example, Warner Bros.
On the Warner Bros. homepage, it is very brief as it includes a wide variety of links which in turn make up the site map. From here your able to quickly navigate through the website and you are made to realise the diversity of Warner Bros., from movies to video games and a lot more! The homepage can be found at www.warnerbros.com/main/homepage.html

I then looked at their studios which are based in Burbank, California. Here I gathered five main facts about the studios:-

• It is home to 29 sound stages and has a 20acre back lot to build metropolitan cities, jungles or even Main Street.
• The facility covers 110 acres of land
• Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons were born at Warner Bros.
• In 1972, Warner Communications and Columbia Pictures joined together to create and form a single facility called The Burbank Studios.
• Warner Bros have created big hits such as 'ER' and 'Friends'. Also have created films such as 'The Matrix', 'Goodfellas' and 'The Bodyguard'.

Warner Bros. also owns a number of different companies, for instance Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, which distribute Warner Bros. movies, television, Internet streaming sites and even interactive gaming content. Another company that is owned by Warner Bros. is Castle Rock Entertainment Inc. which have produced the likes of 'The Shawshank Redemption' and 'Harry met Sally' which are then distributed by Warner Bros.
Besides Warner Bros. owning different companies, they, themselves, are subsidiaries of a company called Time Warner. Here are five main facts about this company:-

• As of March 2009, they employ worldwide, approximately 38,000 people.
• It is the world's largest entertainment conglomerate.
• Major operations are in film, television, Internet services, publishing and telecommunications.
• Their Headquarters are based in New York.
• Time Warner has many subsidiaries besides Warner Bros. like AOL, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and HBO.

Memento - Opening Sequence Evaluation

As part of my media course and gaining the knowledge that I need to be able to create my own film, I need to evaluate opening sequences of films. One evaluation that I have written is on the opening sequence to a thriller, Memento, which was directed by Christopher Nolan.

The opening sequence of this film consists of a number of scenes which sets the plot for the audience. As well as setting the plot, it also helps build mystery and curiosity amoungst the audience who are watching. It does this by the use of cinematography, sound effects, lighting, mise-en-scene and the use of certain special effects such as monochrome.

In the first scene the audience are shown a close up (cu) of a photo in which at first the audience believe it to be just a normal photo that shows blood which starts to question the audience's mind. Then the photo, bit by bit, starts to gradually fade, while the camera is still on close up, and the audience realise the photo is going back in time and a reversing timeline effect comes into play. This signifies to the audience that there will be a time element within the film and helps keep the audience wanting to carry on watching as they want to know why it is going back in time and what will happen next.

This is just the first scene of the opening sequence and as any viewer could say, it certainly grabs the audience's attension.

I believe that the director, Christopher Nolan, chose these effects to not only grab the viewer's attension but to also give a sense of what the plot will be about and how the film will protray it. From my point of view, the opening sequence succeeded in protraying the start of the plot and making the viewer want to watch more as they are curious and intrigued of what will happen next.

References:
Memento opening sequence - www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XzNIUt1dBQ&feature=related
Memento storyboard artist talks about Christopher Nolan - Video list

Lights-Camera-Action! My media production starts...

The anticipation of starting our next film is building...our ideas are now going to start growing...finally our own film skills will be developing..this is..my NEW film project!

I am creating a new film for my media coursework soon in which I have to plan, work and then create a two minute intro of a film of our choosing. We work in groups of two to four people and choose the genre of the film that we want to create. Once we have created our intro to a film, we will then have to edit our footage and piece it all together to create a masterpiece of production!

I have already used many media skills and have created and edited two films so far. I have not only built my skills and knowledge up through my media course, but have read up on elements in my free time, watched countless films (particularly action, comedy and thriller genres) and been to a university taster day recently which taught me many aspects relating to narrative and story-telling. The next step from here is starting to think about my new film production. What genre shall I choose?