DEADLINE

Our blog dealine is...

28th January 2011


I will be working to complete my blog for this date; aiming for 40 posts.

The FINAL film: The River

After months of work; this is our final production of our Short horror opening, we have all enjoyed the process of making this and have improved our abilities with video making.

Story of the final production 12

At this stage we have finally finished recording the footage for the film; we can now begin editing the production, I first added some transitions and added the music to the scenes.

I added some special effects such as the black and white effects on Michaels hanging body. Since i have some previous video editing experience i used this as 'my time to shine' i feel with the footage we captured the editing was good.

However we did have some issues with the editing process with some of the effects.

The effect 'ghosting' was a prominent feature in our opening. However, when it came to exporting the production the ghosting made the film look amatuer due to technical difficulties, we have since replaced the effect with slo-mos. For example, when the two killers walk towards Rowen ghosting was used to make them seem paranormal, we then had to use slo-mo as there was no other effect which added to the tension of this scne.

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This stage consists of the editing i conducted on the film; at this stage the music has been chosen. We are about to begin to edit; then we realised the ending to our introduction was too abrupt. This is where Harry SMith was used. After the title sequence we go to a door where i am informing the children's parents (The slightly younger than Michael Harry Smith).

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This is the stage was to pick the music. We looked at many sites for non-copyrighted music; we then came across an amazing site which we got all of our tracks from; i feel that the music in our film is one of the highlights as it adds to each scene it features in.

We chose around 20 songs and tested each out for each scene; this was a very time consuming process but was worthwhile as it meant we were confident that each song fits with the scene.

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The next stage was to begin editing; i consider this to be my strongest aspect of media due to my previous editing experiences at home. I had to adapt to the new editing program but it is very similar to the one i use at home so i had a good knowledge of the functions. Our first task was to cut our 3 and a half minutes of footage down to two! We took out a lot of dialogue which we now see as a good thing as the dialogue overtook the opening rather than the suspenseful music and plot. We also took out the outro which was a all the bodies laying next to the river; we saw this as a better credit sequence.

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The next stage was to edit the film footage that we had. But first we needed to make our production company logo, we had many thoughts about our production logo, we chose 'Raven Productions' as the raven is the symbolic bird of death, being a horror film production company we felt this was fitting. We produced this on photoshop, a program i have very little experience with, but i used my common knowledge to produce what i feel is a good logo. We had the raven coming out of the computer as it represents the way that death is portrayed through the use of technology, quite meaningful and deep for a production company logo.

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After the first day which wasn't the most successful; we had another plan, we ensured we had all the props including the plain white masks, similar to those in the film series scream. We also remembered to bring a ball! We went back and filmed the opening 40-ish seconds of our film before it got too dark, we didn't want any continuity issues. We then went back the following day and completed the filming, these two days were conducted without anyone falling into a ditch. The next stage was to edit...

 

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We now had to arrange the times of filming and the days we set out to film. Our first day was one to forget, i was very ill and had to get myself out of bed to go into a dark dingy forest. After the walk to the location, we remembered we forgot a ball, the key to our opening; we contemplated leaving and trying again tomorrow but we decided to film parts which didnt need the ball, we also took some picture of the location. We then decided we would go back and look for a ball, Michael came on a bike so suggested he should go off and meet us at the location when he got the ball. Around 10 minutes later I received a phone call from Michael who told me about his journey to get the ball which resulted in him falling off his bike and landing in a ditch where he thought he saw a ball, the ball in the end turned out to be a traffic cone, we decided our luck was out and went home before anything else went wrong.

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The next step was the casting, we planned ahead for the casting and asked three people to help out; these being our old group member Michael Walters and our good friends Rowen Elliot ad Harry Smith. We chose Michael as he looks younger than 17, making him a suitable younger character for our film, we chose Rowen as the bossy sister, which doesn't necessarily reflect her persona but that is the beauty of acting. We also chose Harry as the Dad as he is like a father figure within our group of friends, his ability to keep a straight face is still in question.

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At this point we had decided upon the name 'The River' the next step was to plan a storyline, we had a basic idea from our name, where we would have people who conduct murders around rivers; the leave the bodies next to the river, we had some shots of the bodies laying next to the river put due to a camera angle issue we could not use them. We produced a first draft of the storyboard and had a brain storm of ideas to add to the film, we have all contributed towards ideas for the film and without each others' help our film couldn't be as good as it is today.

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At this stage we were in our groups with a few ideas of what to do, we wanted to name our production before we progressed any further, we had many ideas before deciding on the 'The River' we had some adaptations on this such as 'The River People' and 'The Lake' we decided against both of these as 'the River People' takes away the shroud of mystery behind the masked killers, the audience do not know whether they are human or not, so calling the production the river people would have given this away, The Lake would have matched another location idea which we decided against as the location was too colourful; it was also to similar to the popular film 'The Lake House'

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After this, we into our current team which consists of me Jonny and Ed, we have worked well throughout the project. We found the planning process easier than with the other group as there were less conflicting views, we co-operated well with the tasks and see it as a blessing in disguise that our groups had to split.

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We have documented the planning process as a team, i will now be posting the planning process, sorry for the lack of order i will try and re-arrange the posts soon.

Back at the beginning of our project our team was very different, we were working with fellow media students Michael and Craig, Michael helped us with our project and Ed helped act in theirs, with a similar role to Michael.

We initially decided to call our film  'The Dark' but we then found out our team was too large to enter for the course, we then merged with Jonny, whilst Michael and Craig worked together.

We had planned about a month in advance, with a screen play, storyboards and actors and actresses chose. We then had to disband which we were all unhappy about this, in retrospect, this worked really well as we had some previous disputes about ideas; our respective groups have both implemented these and are happy with the finished products.

Our ideas such as the masks were taken out of our 'The Dark' project were not going to be used to add realism; me and Ed felt they added mystery to the killers, this was then implemented into our film and we feel was effective.