Initial Idea Video

Research - Target Audience

http://prezi.com/ewa5txkvwcrb/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Planning - News Reporter Voice Clip

https://soundcloud.com/sophie-tonks-950389374/news-report-voiceover

As shown before we wrote a script to play in our trailer of a news reporter reading out the case of  missing girl Rosie Jones. We decided the best person to read this out would be an English Teacher as they have strong reading skills and would project our message as accurately as possible. 

Planning - Communication Between The Group

As a group we have decided to create various group chats via social media and iMessage where we can plan, discuss and talk to each other outside of school. These group chats include one between our group members, Sophie, Kenzie, and Rob. And also one with actors such as Alissa. These screenshots show plans of finding days to film and other important information regarding our media film.

Initial Clip Ideas

Clip Ideas

 

-  Mid Shot Mum and Daughter hugging, laughing- equilibrium

-  Close-up gloved hand taking young daughters hand

-  Extreme close-up hand over girls mouth

-  Handheld shot, perspective of hidden antagonist in bushes watching Mum and Daughter in park

-  P.O.V view out of car, pouring rain, pathetic fallacy.

-  Close up of police tape around park scene

-  Close up of Mums hand around man’s neck

-  Establishing shot of park

-  Two shots at beginning to establish 

-  Camera placed on floor, little girls feet walking past

-  Teddy Bear on floor

-  Close up of torn clothing 

-  Extreme close up of phone calling 999

-  Shot-revere-shot used in detective office- detective questioning the mum

-  Long, tracking shot of car driving-mum looking

-  Take pictures of suspects- mum looking at them

-  Two shot of Mum interrogating suspects-tied to chair-knives?

-  Over the shoulder shot Mum watching News-explaining daughters disappearance

-  Shot of Mum drinking alcohol, smoking etc- going crazy-desperation

-  Mum in street showing picture of daughter to strangers/passers-by

-  Aerial/crane shot of Mum in bed- not sleeping

-  Close up of someone smashing window

-  Close-ups of Mum picking up weapons etc

-  Two shot of Mum revealing the situation to her Mum- Diegtic conversation-Shouldn’t have had a child so early

-  Bible?

Planning - Script for Mother + Detective Scene

Alissa (desperate and angry) - Detective Moor you HAVE to help me, I will do anything to find her, I mean anything

Detective (calm, cool and collective)- No Sarah, you will do nothing. As much as I hate to say it, this is not your business now.

Alissa - Not my business, how dare you! This is my daughter, my everything.

Detective - If you want to find Rosie, you must leave it to the police. They know what they are doing.

Alissa - what exactly do I do then? sit here and wait?

Detective - No you can help us. So how old was Rosie?

Alissa - she IS 4 years old.

Detective - and you are 18 I believe yes?

Alissa - yes, is that a problem?

Detective - no of course not...

Planning - Change in Casting

Our original ideas for characters in our crime thriller was a mother, a daughter, grandmother,  detective in our production. We decided to cast one of our main characters as a little (5) blonde girl as this would be best for a 'daughter' role. The grandmother was decided to be an older, elegant lady with a wise tone to her character. For the detective we wanted a stern, smart, patriarchal man with a big physical build.

During planning we had an idea to cast our mother as a 'teen mum' to best relate to the target audience we intended of 15- 35 year olds. By changing this role we are able to back up our storyline of a mother loosing her child by blaming the mistake on maturity and her being young and irresponsible. Another positive of this character choice is that Alissa (or Sarah in our production) has a little sister age 5 who is happy to be filmed alongside Alissa and play the role of the daughter. This way both actors will be comfortable filming with each other).

We understand this may appear unrealistic to audience members who see a young girl playing the role of a mother so we decided to include shots, voice clips and edits to ensue this was communicate more clearly to the audience. These include voice clips of voices in her head saying "what did you expect" "I told you you were too young" etc.

Initial Planning - What Makes Us Scared?

Word cloud

Researching Different words associated with crime thriller's and adding them to my word cloud will help me when coming to planning my film, as it helps me to understand the conventions and type of thing crime thriller fan bases will want to see within the film genre. For example, research shows that words such as ‘crime’ ‘violence’ and ‘blood’ are all common conventions and therefore I shall include these in my film to achieve the largest possible target audience. I have also chosen the layout, font, and colour to connote with the genres by placing red (associated with blood) font onto a black (connotes with death) background. This adds to the overall effect of the image, and so I shall use all of these techniques in my film to ensure I attract a mass audience.

Props

These are images of items we plan to include in our production as props.

 

This is police tape that we ordered from Ebay that is stereotypically found at a crime scene. We planned to wrap this around the park we have chosen as the setting for the daughters last appearance. We believe this will add to the verisimilitude of the trailer. By adding clips such as long shots of the park, and close ups of the tape this add to the realism of the production exciting the audience further.

Another prop we decided to include was a clock. As we plan to include the ticking of a clock as sound in our trailer we realised this would connotate well with a clock being shown. Therefore we have decided to include shots of the clock at the 'breaking point' for the main character. At this point we will show a close up of the main character Sarah smashing up the clock with a base ball bat. This is because we want to depict to the audience how Sarah is losing her calm and is becoming psychologically distressed by what has occurred. The two images show the clock before and after it was smashed during filming.  

This is an image of a missing persons report. We have included this as a prop because during the trailer we plan to include shots of Sarah becoming obsessed with finding her daughter and missing children etc. Therefore we planned to include clips of her aggressively searching through websites and news articles online of missing child. We have shown this through close ups of her hands on the mouse, aggressive typing and also a shot of this missing persons report being printed out of the printer. 

To further indicate to the audience our main characters deterioration we have decided to include clips of her reaching for alcohol bottles, taking pills etc. This is an image of a bottle of vodka we have filmed being smashed and our main character holding the glass. We plan to slow this clip down in adobe premiere pro to show a slow mo of the glass breaking. Foreshadowing the breakdown of our main character mentally. 

Costume For Main Character

When considering costume and make up on our two main actors we have carefully thought about how to portray the best possible identity for their role. Our first main Character is Mother, Sarah (Alissa). Sarah is a young mother (19) so we wanted to show this by dressing her in smart but trendy clothing. 

Our first item of clothing for Sarah is a long pink trench coat 

from Topshop. This coat is a long, smart, tie up coat that shows 

she is a smart and a well dressed middle class women, however the 

pink gives away she is still young and slightly immature.  

Other costume items will include a black pair of boots typical of 

a young adult in this season. 

(similar to this)                                                                                             

 

Script Plan for News Reporter Voice Over

"Rosie Jones, aged 4, was reported missing on Thursday the 13^th of October. She was last seen at Priory Park, St Neots in Cambridgeshire, where she was with her Mother – Sarah Jones. The police have been looking for five days, and are still appealing for witnesses to come forward with any information."

In our trailer we plan to include a news extract of reports that the little girl has disappeared. By portraying this to the audience as a voice over we can communicate the plot to the viewers without having to act out every scene. This is important in a trailer as short clips and montages are shown at a fast pace. By also conducting this report in a news form we are  conveying generic conventions of the crime genre. Before writing our script we researched other similar news reports of missing children from real news websites such as the guardians and daily mail. We then found key conventions of a news report by revealing the victims name, age and date of the disappearance. 

These are the websites we used in our research:

http://www.huntspost.co.uk/news/can_you_help_police_trace_missing_huntingdon_woman_1_4398993

http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2016-12-08/body-missing-woman-found

Initial Idea Plan

As a group we came up with a few initial ideas for our plot.

Mise En Scene for Here I Come

Initial Idea Pitch

This is a video of our group pitching our initial idea's to our teachers and class mates.
The feedback from this was generally positively with comments such as "a creative idea for a crime thriller" and positive views on our storyline. The audience agreed they liked the title of the production and how it ties with the storyline. Also we were appraised for our use of miss en scene such as setting and costume in our initial planning. However a character's role was question when we were asked "would it be more appealing to cast a mother of a realistic age such as 30+?" We have decided to take this into consideration and revaluate our casting options.

Target Audience for Here I Come

https://youtu.be/PmrqykLL180

In our crime thriller we decided to include suspects to add to the realism of the plot with coinciding characters

original 1

original 3

original 2

Therefore we photographed two men and a woman as our suspects.

We wanted to make this as realistic as possible so decided the best way to do this would be to take 'mug shots' of three individuals. A typical mug shot is two-part, with one side-view photo, and one front-view. A mug shot or mugshot  is an informal term for police photograph, or booking photograph, and is a photographic portrait  typically taken after a person is arrested.

original 2

original 1

original 3

From Google I was able to download a height chart - and create plaque board of the suspects name and number.

height chart

On photoshop I was able to combine all three elements of the image; the original photograph, the height chart + plaque board. I first masked out the face in front of the height chart - taking into consideration the possible heights of each suspects (for this reason I purposefully edited the suspects to be taller than they are naturally. I believe by adding height to the suspects this creates the effect that they are extra tall adding superiority and power to them visually)
I then edited each image black and white as police mug shots are originally. However also by editing these images black and white the viewer cannot be distracted by colour within the photo and focus on the contents more so.

suspect 2 

suspect 1

suspect 3

These images will be included in our production when the protagonist is searching through the documents in the detectives office. We also plan to include these on an investigation board as part of a prop for our detective.

suspect 2

suspect 1

suspect 3

Analysing Trailers - Gone Girl

Gone Girl 

Gone Girl is a 2014 American thriller directed by David Fincher and written by Gillian Flynn, based on her 2012 novel. The film stars Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Niel Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry. Set in Southeast Missouri, the story begins as a mystery that follows the events surrounding Nick Dunne, who becomes the primary suspect in the sudden disappearance of his wife, Amy. 

The trailer begins at a slow pace, showing an 
establishing shot of a garden to start. The lighting in the frame is very low key and appears to be at dawn or dusk. The trailer continues by playing long/wide and mid shots of a man (Amy's Husband Nick) standing suspiciously outside of a house at the same time of day, he appears alone in the street and very isolated from society. The low key lighting is carried through the first three shots of him, as dialogue of a women voice is used as narrative to introduce the character Nick as "The most hated man in America right now". The woman continues to ask "Did you kill your wife?" this instantly suggests an insight of the storyline to the audience and conveys conventions of crime/thriller trailers. After the question is asked a close up of Nick is shown with a guilty facial expression, suggesting to the audience that he is the protagonist. The trailer then shows a wide shot of him sat in what appears to be an interview and with the women who asked if he killed his wife. Through miss en scene we are able to depict the interrogation interview for example the setting appears to be as though he is on a talk show or being filmed. Both characters in shot appear to be formally dressed wearing a suit and tie and a black dress. The lighting remains low key with only a lamp in the background as a source of light. 

The narrative of the trailer is clear after roughly 22 seconds when missing wife, Amy, is shown. A cross fade between a close up of her, and somebody writing a diary is shown before a voice over is introduced, reading what is written in the diary e.g. describing what her and nick's relationship is like. This indicates to the audience the narrative of the trailer is the thoughts in Amy's head. Shortly after the trailer reveals a shot of husband Nick talking into a microphone with an enlarged image of a missing persons report, showing an image of the blonde woman who appeared before, clarifying the main character and plot to the audience. Verisimilitude is shown in long shots of billboards advertising Amy's disappearance. 

The low key lighting in this shot conveys the mood within the atmosphere coinciding with close ups of sad family members etc. The lighting in the frame places emphasis on the missing persons poster as it appears the clearest/brightest part of the scene. 




At 40 seconds in the trailer shots of main actor and husband, Nick, are shown of him in a police station. Mise en scene elements such as costume and props reveal the setting in this scene and conventional police uniform such as police badges, shirts, guns, gloves and swabs creates realism within the thriller as the investigation begins. The low key lighting remains constant throughout the trailer as the plot thickens and the drama begins to build. Although the narrative has clarified Amy is missing from the very start of the trailer, clips of her at home and with Nick are played at the start of the trailer to show equilibrium and how they were together before the disappearance. This allows audiences to relate to their stereotypical heterosexual relationship and therefore builds empathy for the characters when equilibrium is disturbed. In this shot Amy is shown in the Bath, as she is naked, vulnerability and purity is emphasised showing she is an innocent women. Juxtaposition is shown here as she appears to be living a normal life, this contrasts with the storyline of the plot and her disappearance. The next shot shows a close up of her face in the bath still, after her husband walks past the door, the close up shows her sinking down deeper into the bath after being in his presence. The shot fades to black and suggests that time has passed and that things aren't the same anymore, as often trailers appear in non chronological order, or with non continuity editing.

 

Poster For Stillborn

Recreating a Magazine Cover

Magazine Analysis

Discussing Location Possibilities

Film Magazine Research

 Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. Empire is the biggest selling UK Film Magazine company and is also published in the United States, Australia, Turkey, Russia, Italy and Portugal. It reviews both mainstream films and art films.
 “each monthly movie issue delves into the world of commercial and arthouse cinema to bring you film reviews, features and set reports. If you want the essential inside track on
what's going on in Hollywood, a Empire magazine subscription is the one to buy” – Empire magazine.

Often Empire uses a similar type of layout for all of their covers, for example Empire always place their masthead (title) at the very top middle of the page most commonly in bold red writing to stand out.
Empire are not afraid to overlay their main image over their masthead – this suggests Empire is a well-established organisation as they do not need to advertise their brand name, this may be because their covers are recognisable enough as it is.

Another convention of Empire – and many other film magazines is to place the anchorage text/ Cover lines around the main image – this is to further entice the consumer by offering more stories and reports on something they may enjoy more than the main story. 

 

Another popular film magazine is Premiere.
 Premiere was an American and New York City-based film magazine published by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S between 1987 and 2010. The original version of the magazine, Première, was established in France in 1976 and is still being published there. Premiere was released ten times a year, with issues dated February, March, April, May, June, July/August, September, October, November and December/January. It sold all over the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain and France, among others. Each issue of Premiere included regular features, such as: The Backstory - An introduction by current Editor-in-Chief, Peter Herbst. Letter Box - Letters from readers, which also often include comments from industry insiders. Take One - A series of short features that include: Action - Behind the Scenes & Ahead of the Curve Ask Glenn - Questions posed to film critic Glenn Kenny Scene Stealer - A brief look at three performances from a random actor-of-the-month's career YES, It's True - News You're Not Supposed to Know - Tidbits on Hollywood wheeling and dealing First Look - Dispatches from the Moviemaking Front - Brief visits to films still in production The Slate - Who's Doing What, And With Whom - A quick roundup of greenlit projects David Strick's Hollywood - A candid black-and-white shot from a film set or location Previews - The Movies That Matter This Month - Synopsis and bottom line prediction Reviews - Film analysis and opinion from Glenn Kenny

Analysing Trailers - Girl On The Train

How many shots in total?	In total there was approximately 109 shots. The trailer varied in a wide range of different camera angles and movements such as long shots, wide shots, tracking shots, pans, high angles and low angles. The trailer built in speed as it progressed and intensity grew.
How long is the trailer?	The trailer was 2:25 minutes. This is the conventional time for trailer’s that can range anywhere from 2-3 minutes.
How many characters and narratives?	The trailer showed 11 different characters from the main antagonist Rachael, to other actors such as ex boyfriend Tom, and baby sitter Megan. The trailer begins by showing a close up of the missing women Megan, a voice over is played leading the audience to believe it is the voice inside her head. However as the trailer progresses other audio clips of dialogue are played to convey the storyline to the plot and establish characters and setting.
How many settings?	Within the trailer several different settings/locations are shown from antagonist’s houses, street shots, train/train station pans / wood & forest areas / police stations and other restaurant and public areas. As the plot revolves around different families/couples these settings create verisimilitude.
Who is the target Audience? What is your evidence?	I believe the female demographic would be the most suited as the target audience for this trailer. As the plot revolves around couples and deals with their relationships/break ups/ adultery this type of drama would most appeal to women. The main characters in the trailer are also three women therefore I believe as the age certification for the film is 12A, age 12-35 year old women would be the target audience for this trailer.

How many music tracks/sound effects?	Both non-diegetic and diegetic sound was played throughout the trailer. For example at the start of the trailer a voice over is played as a close up of a girl is shown, this suggests the dialogue is of her talking, or her talking to herself. However as the trailer progresses other dialogue clips are played along with instrumental backing music eg. The piano that plays at the start, as the trailer increases as does the intensity, the pace and rhythm of the piano does building the suspense and climax of the trailer. Other sound effects were used as inter titles were shown, raising the pace of the trailer.
How many inter titles?	1 – ‘1 Week Ago’ 2 – ‘ At 4.36pm’ - establishes setting & genre- 3 - ‘A woman disappeared’ - establishes character and plot- 4 – ‘Based on a thriller that shocked    the world’ 5 – ‘From Universal Pictures & Dreamworks Pictures- -       production companies – 6 – Girl On The Train 7- ‘October 2016’ - establishes film title and release   date  -
Which camera shots are most used? Why?	I identified close ups and wide shots/tracking shots as the most used shots within this trailer. I believe the reason for the excessive use of close ups is to reveal facial expressions and emotions from important characters. Close ups can point out important shots or key emotions within a trailer. For example in this trailer a close up of a girl smashing a mirror with a base ball bat is used to express the emotion within the frame and show she has reached breaking point.  Wide shots/ tracking shots are also commonly used within this trailer to establish settings and narratives. Wide shots can also be very conventional for crime thriller trailers as they often reveal mystery within the frame.