Final Version of IN THE RED

Below is the final copy of In The Red. I am pleased with what we have done and feel I put in as much effort as everyone else did through the process. I think the film accurately represents all the hard work we put in to filming and editing and have learnt not to rush things. Good things take time!

Compromise

Having debated about the music for a lengthy period of time, we as a group have decided that we want to have one final version of the film, not two separate ones. This means compromising over the soundtrack. Now we have all stopped being stubborn and accepted other peoples view point the soundtrack is much better!As a group we managed to compromise over a lot of things, we all commmunicated well and eventually (sometimes after weeks of persuasion) other view points were takne into account and things were changed. All of us were happy with our soundtrack and the film which is a relief!

Production Companys

I watched a lot of similar style films all of which had relatively similar credits in terms of style. We changed our name from ASE productions to SEA productions and tried to create an animation on adobe flash but it wasn't very good. I nosted that most of the fuilms had simplistic credits so we mirrored this. Most of the films I watched had "in association with" on them. So we thought we would do the same and ADMILNA INC was created.

Soundtrack

To produce a soundtrack to the opening sequence we had to use garage band. The sequence starts off at a very slow pace and the weather is not particularly nice which shows pathetic fallacy. To create a mellow mood, we used a piano sequence at the start. The pace is slow until the main character reaches his apartment. To create suspense when he entered his apartment we used a high pitched sound. The chase sequence starts off with a gun shot and grime song Mike Lowry is played, except it is not the version by Skepta.
Due to disagreements within the group, we made two versions of the soundtrack on garage band. On one version there are sounds of traffic in the background and one without. There are different piano sounds in both of the versions at the start of the sequence.

Soundtrack issues...

Unfortunately, we discovered that we cannot use our sound track due to copy right infringements. We looked for another soundtrack to use by an unsigned artist.Eventually we found one, thankfully his lyrics fitted the opening sequence better thsn the one we had originally chosen!

Miss Thrashers Comments and the Average Scores over all.

Miss Thrasher gave us alot of compliments for our film and also gave us things to fix. Below is the sheet she filled in and the comments that she made:

On the peices of paper they were given, the class were told to rate our film out of 10 on editing, sound, camerawork, control of narrative, characters and whether or not they would watch it all. The average scores were as followed:

Editing: 7.1/10
Sound: 6.7/10
Camerawork: 7.4/10
Control of narrative: 7.2/10
Characters: 8/10
Would you watch it all?: 7.4/10

The Showcase

As it turned out, we were the first to complete our film, or at least be near to completing it so we had a "show case" whereby we showed the class our film and they critiqued it. On the whole it went well, but we realised our credits still needed a lot of work and that the sound needed to be edited as some of it was inaudible. The main issue that was raised was the sound not being as good as it could be. The film was good, but not great yet.Above are 2 of the sheets which were filled out about our film.

Our First Draft

Above is the first finished version of our film. I was pleased with it and was pretty sure it wasnt going to get slated at the showcase next week.

Editing Process

Editing was surprisingly easier than we had first thought it would be. We had well over 2 hours worth of footage which needed to be filtered down into the most suited and most effective shots. We filmed much of the footage from 4 or 5 different angles and shots on purpose, because we were not entirely sure what would look best and figured it is better to hace to much to play with when editing than not enough. When editing we realised that in order to depict a realistic film we had to stick to traditional cuts and edits and not use the exciting more elaborate ones as they would make the extract seem unrealistic.

A.S.E Productions and Twisted Pictures

A.S.E Productions is the name of our production company, we put this into the opening sequence by making it appear that as the central character is walking the credit is following him. We added the production company "Twisted Pictures" to our opening sequence as it went well with the theme and the mood of our opening sequence.

Changes From The Story Board

The film stuck to the story board, for the most part. However after getting to the location we saw an oppertunity to enahnce the story. The original story board did not include the betting shop as in hindsight we hadn't really thought about the story after the opening sequence. We then came up with the idea that the central character had a money problem and this was portrayed with the camera at first so it appeared that he had a gambling problem. This also meant we had a reason for the gangsters to appear, the small twist was that he doesn't have a gambling problem, he owes a gangster money and the gambling was his last hope of getting it back. Consequently we had the idea of the central characters girlfriend being abducted by the gangsters as we figured it would seem realistic and we also decided as a group we like films where the action happens immediately. The changes made the film opening more exciting, more realistic, easier to relate to and also added more connotations of the action genre; a damsel in distress.

Filming...

We decided to film on 23/02/2011, we had also decided that we wanted to film the entire opening sequence in one evening, not to do it in sections as it would make it easier to edit the whole sequence together. We were filming where Adam lives so we didn't need to obtain much permission in order to film. However, we wanted part of our film to be in a betting shop- William Hill, but due to us being under 18 we were not allowed on the premisses, let alone allowed to film. This was only a minor hiccup that we dealt with by filming Adam walking in the the shop and walking out of it and we agreed to use a dissolve cut when editing to make it appear time had passed. Filming went relatively smoothly with no major incidents that prevented us from getting the footage that we wanted. There were a few times when filming that we didn't realise there was mirrors in the shots and it was possible to see the camera in the shots. We dealt with this by re shooting, this was a somewhat irritating set back but not a major one. The filming took longer than we had anticipated but by the end of it we all felt as if we had enough footage to be able to put together an opening sequence which reflected the hard work we put into planing and filming it.

I enjoyed filiming as we got it all done and were happy with the stuff we had filmed. there were no major disputed as we all had pretty much the same vision for the film so it went very smoothly.

Preparing for the shoot...

What we will need:

* Camera
* Memory card
* Charger
* Tripod
* Plastic bag to put over camera and umbrella (it might rain and the show must go on)
* Wallet
* Mobile phone
* Adam's moped
* Sami needs to come ON TIME!
* Torch as the lighting may be rubbish

In The Red

We decided that the best word that described the narrative was debt as the opening sequence shows how someone who
has owed money has come to collect it. However, we did not think that word really stood out or sounded dramatic and so we put it on thesaurus.com to see if there was anything else:

It was when we saw the list that we decided to call our film "In The Red" as it did not completely give the narrative away and we thought that most people of the audience may not completely know the meaning which would build enough suspense for the opening sequence to be a success.

Thinking of a name...

After showing our classmates our storyboard, we were constantly asked what the name was going to be, so, as a group, we thought about the narrative of the opening sequences and thought of names. Below shows what we came up with. We each thought of a word that we thought best related to the narrative and looked up other words with the same meaning to see if they sounded more effective.

Where did we get inspiration from...

There is no single film which as a group we based our film idea on. There are a varity of different films of the same genre which we considered whilst deciding the final idea for the opening sequence. We had decided that our opening sequence was not one set genre but many, it was a combination of UK drama and action. The films we considered ranged from the £600,000 Kidulthood/Adulthood; because of the fact that its a UK drama and the film's are aimed at a similar target audience, to multi million dollar blockbuster Taken, primarily for the infamous phone call scene and that one of the central characters gets kidnapped in our opening sequence. We looked at a lot of UK based films to gain inspiration for the credits, one film we looked at in particular was Football Factory, even though the films have entirely diverse plots, they're both drama/action films and we wanted to have a sense of authentisity by means of representing UK drama appropriately.

Our Storyboards

Below show the storyboard that we came up with for our action genre film:

Our Chosen Genre

We decided to choose an action type genre as we thought that this would allow a lot of opportunity to involve a varied number of shot types and angles.

Thinking of Opening Sequences

Before coming up with a storyboard, our group decided that it was a good idea to brainstorm features of different genres that would be possible to make a successful opening sequence, for example, we did not include sci-fi or western as  we knew that it would be almost impossible to create an effective opening sequence. Below shows what we came up with:

Group Work: Preliminary Sequence

In order to have a better understanding of how to produce many different shot types successfully, we created a preliminary sequence. This contains a large range of shot types and demonstrates different ways in which we can go to another scene that we discovered during our experimentation of the technology provided. When it comes to planning and filming our film opening sequence, we are now able to look back at this sequence and see what shot types provided the most creative and interesting effects.