Storyboard unfinished

I started storyboarding using Photoshop I've done about 31 shots at the moment which are just idea's i haven't put any explanation on it yet because i might change my mind and switch some shots around





James bond - Casino Royale chase scene

my 'chase' scene isn't going to be quite as dramatic as this but i want to make it look and feel as frantic as this, up until one of the two main characters hits a lamppost during a tracking shot. having the music fitting with whats happening on scene would be ideal, there are two times in the opening that i want the music to suddenly stop, once when they're waiting for the light to turn red so they can cross, and a second time when one of my characters hits the lamppost, I'll also add non diagetic sounds to this clip, the sound of a lamppost being hit but louder so it has more impact and sounds more painful! this clip does the same with the added bumps and bangs while James bond is punching someone.

More ideas

I'm sticking with the mystery comedy theme, I've got lots of ideas for it, but I'm trying to think of the best way to do it.
i want to start the opening with some fast editing, like on hot fuzz with the exaggerated whooshing noises when he moves something and the fast zooming in and out. i want to do a close-up shot of someone typing somthing stereotypical for the mysteriy genre

i plan on doing very slap stick comedy, i want to keep the opening serious up untill about 1 minute where something happens to ruin the serious atmosphere, im thinking about doing a tracking shot following 2 charaters down a road chasing somthing (not revieled yet but probably a friends pet dog thats escaped.) and one of them runs into a lampost but the camera keeps moving untill the lampost is out of the shot.

im going to be doing the titles mixed in with the shots, so when i said about doing a shot with someone typeing on a laptop, make the credit appear as the person types one letter at a time like a type writer

(embedding disabled)
Hot fuzz part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpeYvuV5J_I

i plan on doing transitions similar to how they do it in hot fuzz aswell, people walking past and the screen changes as they do so, that kind of thing.

How does a films budget affect its production

Budgets are important to the success of a film. If the production company has a lot of money to spend on the film it’s more likely to be hit because the quality of the production is higher. Warner bro’s are a huge American based company who produces big budget films.

The Dark Knight by Warner Bro’s had a budget of $185 million which is a huge budget on top of that they had $100 million for marketing having this much money allows them to get big name actors that people will recognise making them more likely to go see the film, they can also afford the best technology to produce the film like top CGI animation, explosive fight scenes and futuristic cars. The dark knight was mostly filmed in Chicago, one of America's most famous cities as well as other locations in the UK and Hong Kong to get the best locations Warner Bros needed alot of money.

smaller film companies such as working title team up with bigger companies to get more funding, working title works closely with universal studios who pay for marketing outside of the UK. Hot fuzz had a budget of £8 Million substantially smaller than The Dark knights.

The Dark Knights marketing had a lot of Internet based content, but it also had games and action figures promoting it as well, hot fuzz on the other hand, had t-shirts, video blogs and the usual posters, trailers and interviews, with more money the Dark knight could afford to do that and more.

the dark knight was filmed in huge cities while hot fuzz was film in wells, a quiet countryside town, the complete opposite to the dark knight location wise.

£8 million is still quite a lot of money, it can get you some relatively well known actors and half decent location and pretty good marketing, This Is England, had a budget of £1,500,000. Massively different from both the Dark knight and Hot Fuzz. FilmFour, again, had to team up with another company to get it distributed and marketed outside of the UK, the only marketing in the UK was the normal, posters, interviews and trailers. most of the film was done in abandoned areas of Nottingham. All of the actors in the film are unheard of, this is because the budget was no where near big enough to afford big name actors or even actors like Simon pegg from hot fuzz

the more money a company has, the more likely the film will be a success, having the best locations, best actors and best marketing are vital for pulling in the biggest audience

More idea's + Videos

Like i said in my last entery, i want to do a mystery/comedy. so i've been thinking about what i could do in it, and i want to do somthing like the following test i've done


it took about 20 minutes to do 1 second, so if i was going to do this it'd only be in short bursts, or on still images

I havn't seen watchman but this is my favourite opening i've seen so far, its really simple, but really effective. some openings can be really boring but this one was good because i kept watching and didn't look away for a second despite it being 5 minutes long. the embedding was dissabled again, so link it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=573XmVOdD2Q

i think this opening would have been just as effective without the country music in the background, the music adds a sad mood to it, but if it wasn't there just the scenes on the screen are powerful enough.
i thought it was good how the credits mixed in with the video, i hardly noticed them. i plan on doing someone similar with my opening. i also intend to use music as the base of my opening but something fast paced and a strong beat.

Ideas and More videos

I have a lot of different ideas for my film opening but i'm not sure what genre to do so i'm watching some more videos for inspiration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8hqExgrxQU

This is the hot fuzz trailer, the embedding is disabled so URL will have to do.
i couldn't find the opening sequence so i watched the trailer instead (even though we're watching it in Media now i'd been meaning to watch it at home anyway its one of my favourite films)
i'd like to do something like this with my opening, action, but funny as well



spider man 2 opening titles.
i could do something like this with Sony Vegas, it would take a very very very long time but i've done something similar in my own time before

my idea for my opening is to add my credits/titles into the clips so they are coming out from behind objects



the pirates of the caribbean opening sequence, in which there are no credits and only the title at the very end, its a really effective opening because it gets straight into the action.

im trying to think about the time of year when we start filming so i no what kind of weather there will be, because it would be difficult to do a film about a beach party or something in snow! :D
i have to remember that i've got limited locations and limited people to be in my opening as well as weather and other facts that could affect it, so trying to take all that into consideration, while thinking about genre and an idea is proving to be quiet difficult
i was thinking maybe a mystery/comedy because it would be easy to work around location/people/weather and is a pretty wide genre for ideas

Institutions and audiences

We started a new topic for the exam "Institutions and Audiences" in the first lesson we did a class survey and came to the following conclusions

1. Almost all the films we watch are american made

This is because they are bigger companies in comparison to our British companies and they have much bigger budgets with there films, this is also why British film companies are partnered up with american ones when making a film normally for publicity.

2. we watch films in lots of different ways.

compared to how people used to watch films we have a very broad choice

• TV
• Cinema
• Download
• Youtube (Or other video sharing sites)
• DVD
• Skybox office (or other TV film channels)

3. More genres, hybrid genres.

this is because people dont want to watch the same kind of film over and over so mixing genres and having more genres allows people to keep enjoying films

4. Audience is in control of how, when and where they watch there films.

We did the survey by each filling in a grid that had the headings Film, Certificate, genre, where watched, pro's, Con's and British or American? after we had all filled our grid's in we fedback and put it on the board to so we could see the four points above.

on my own grid i did 8 films heres some examples:

Tranformers 2

• Certificate: 12
• Genre: Action/Fantasy
• Where watched: Cinema
• Pro's: Big screen, good audio
• Con's: No control, disturbances,
• American made

Dark Knight

• certificate: 15
• Genre: Action/Sci-fi
• Where watched: Cinema
• Pro's: Big Screen, Good audio
• Con's: No control, disturbances
• American made

Kung Fu Panda

• Certificate: PG
• Genre: Comady/Animation
• Where watched: DVD
• Pro's: Control, speical features
• Con's: Waiting for release, costs money, may break
• American made

Video openings

I've been watching some video openings for ideas for my own video i've watched some on DVD's at home but these are some of the ones i found on youtube.



This is the opening to the pink panther, i won't be doing something like this because its all animation but its still good because of the way they show the titles so they mix in with animated action, i could do something like this in my own video!



This is the opening to James bond - Golden eye. its a typical Bond opening with all the figures as silhouettes, guns and explosions, again not somthing i could do easily, it is possible with my own softwear to do somthing like this but it would take a long time, you have to do masking frame by frame and it takes forever to do just a minutes worth of clip. I can do the clips overlapping and fading through though!



not a practical opening, it goes on for a very long time before the titles start, but it fits the films genre (Comady/musical) and hooks the audiance in straight away, introduce the main charater and does it all through song! again, this isn't a very good for my video because its long and i can't do musical things

i watched Titanic aswell, but the embedding was dissabled so heres the URL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPQYUVvh2xc

This opening is really simple, its just a montage of old style videos of titanic setting sail for the final time. the opening doesn't need to be anymore then that because its powerful enough as it is, Titanic is the most famous ship wreck in the world so most people know what is going to happen. i could do a simple opening, but it would have to be something people could recognize easily, i could do a shelf of Sherlock Holmes books, or something else most people know about

Preliminary task 2: Magazine cover/contents

P

My drawn plan.

i did do some changes to it later, i switched which side the text was on so it didn't cover up the picture and it just looks better.

i liked this task as well as the first one, though i didn't learn much because i already have Photoshop on my home computer and use it on regular basis. there are some differences though, like my Photoshop isn't as simple to use and some of the things are in different places.

we had to make a magazine front cover and contents page for this task, the target audience was students at school, so basically just a school magazine. i worked on my own so i decided to use our schools colours as the 3 colours for the front cover and contents (Green, blue, white). I used a mid-shot action photo for the front cover so it looked interesting rather than just someone standing still. I tried to stick to the things that magazines should include with a check list i made which including things like:

• Masthead
• cover line
• main image
• colour/fonts

the masthead should:

• Go across the page
• reflect the magazines style
• go over/under the cover photo.

I followed all of these, the title "L.C news" goes across the page, the style of the text is aimed at my age and the writing goes over the cover photo.

the cover lines should:

• seem like special feature (Plug & lure)
• hyperbole

i don't think i followed these very well, i made the main story hyperbole with "missed it by a long shot" but i didn't have a plug or lure unless the subtitle counts "Dare to read this?"

the main image should:

• big enough to fill the page
• young person (because its aimed at students)
• only use one photo

i stuck to all of these, i took about 30 pictures so i had a lot to chose from I'm happy with the one i picture though!

the colours and fonts should:

• only have 3
• reflect the audience
• title should stand out from background
• mixture of fonts (tops 3)

the only one i didn't do was change the fonts because i didn't think it looked right with different fonts.

Preliminary task 1: Video

for the first preliminary task we split into groups, in my group we had Sian Ball, Abi Edwards and Jezz Maxey. the task was to film a short sequence where someone

• Walked through a door
• walked across a room
• sat down in a chair
• some lines of dialogue

we had to include an over the shoulder shot. we story boarded our ideas quickly which i sketched out, before we began filming so we had a vague idea of what we were doing. we new what we wanted to do but we didn't no where to do it, i think that was one of the big time wasting problems we had. one of the shots we wanted to do was kicking a door open, it would be alright if we had done it after school but we couldn't kick a door in with great effect during lesson time. we didn't plan our narrative either, at the beginning anyway we wrote them down when we got to the point when we needed to film it.

we ended up doing filming/editing three times. the first time included:

• a long shot of me walking down a hall
• then a close up of my feet from the floor as i walked past
• then me going kicking a door open
• then me walking through the door
• slamming my hands on the table from a low angle
• and a mid shot of me shouting "Where is it!?"
• then we tried to keep to the 180 degree rule when me and jezz were disscussing where 'it' was.

unforuntally, we lost alot of the film and it didn't flow very well so we had to film it again. this time it was abi and sian who acted.

we stated off with a panning shot of sian walking out of a door, this covered the 'walk through a door" part we had to include. then we did a mid-shot of sian walking through the door from the front followed by a long shot of her walking round the corner to the bench abi was sat on. as she got closer to the bench we switched to over the shoulder breifly then switched to her sitting down next to abi.

because we didn't have much time left we went for quick simply diologue, sian has done an exam and she thinks she failed and abi is asking how she did.

we started editing it, but when we came back to add sound/effects/transitions the year above us had saved over our work so we had to edit it all over again which wasn't so bad because i think we made it better than it was before, accept we didn't add any music but the diegtetic sound that are already on it are enough i think.

i did like the task, but it was annoying when camera's didn't record everything because you dont no what your doing wrong. I can't wait to do the real thing so i can use my own camera. its a hard disc drive camera, so normally i can just take a video, stop it, that makes a new file on the camera then start again and then when im finish with the shots i can just drag on drop them into sony vegas on my laptop which is a lot easier.