Today we planned the driving routes in preparation for our filming on Sunday as we have a lot of shots within the car.
Ally's route:
As it is too busy to film the cars by Lambeth Town Hall, we decided to just film the car parking on Wandsworth Road which looks very similar to Brixton Hill.
Jaspers Route:
We're starting Jaspers route outside the Clapham Fire Station because it looks very similar to a police station and similarly we will have him pulling up on a busy road (North Street) which is similar to Brixton Hill.
Today we constructed a newspaper article based on the court case within our film which is needed for shot 20. The shot is necessary in showing the audience what the relationship between Jasper and Ally is based on and also what the court case is about. We constructed the newspaper article with a basic headline and subtitle with a picture of Jasper just to put the idea of what is going on in the plot. We then cut and pasted different newspaper articles to give the body of a newspaper after writing some text at the top of the article following the story of our film, and added simple adverts to make it look more realistic. We plan to stick it into a newspaper after messing it up to look more natural. The shot will only last a couple of seconds and from a distance meaning that the audience won't be able to read too much detail into the article.
Today we worked on putting the opening credits together and the positioning of the text on the screen. We first looked at the website, 'Art of the Title' to see what credits we will need to include, and decided on the following headings and order:
'A Silver De Courcy Film'
'A Film by Bea Hope'
Brittany Johnston
Luke Forryan
Roz Marston
Cecy Bullard
Ranya El-Refaey
Looking back at our pre-proposals we reminded ourselves of how we wanted the text to be positioned and the font of the text. We trialled lots of different fonts within Final Cut Pro and finally decided on the simplistic font, 'Designer Thin.' We originally wanted all of the text to be white and to appear separately but we encountered problems of seeing the text on shots with white skies and so had to change some of the titles to black. We also wanted all the names to appear before the flashaback so we overlapped some of the titles so they appeared staggered but in the same frame. For the 'A Silver De Courcy Film' we followed the style of many other films with having a blackout which we will add a soundbridge to later.
Today we paused filming and editing whilst we began our ident. For the title of our production company, we decided to use a collaboration of our friends names Sylvie and Felix De Courcy Ireland, resulting in the title 'Silver De Courcy Films.' As we wanted to make it clear that our production company was low budget and so our film was more targeted for Arthouse and Indie cinemas, we wanted to use a simplistic symbol such as a classic film roll:
We noticed similarities of the sections of the film roll with the 'BBC FILMS' logo and so decided to follow our ident in a similar manner with the initials 'SDC' printed inside the film roll with 'Silver De Courcy Films' written underneath. Our idea is to have four or five images of the film roll unravelling to reveal the SDC and then the full name appearing underneath.
We then started to construct the drawing taking photos of each section so that we could run them together in Final Cut Pro as one movement. We then looked through the transformation effects on Final Cut Pro and we really liked the mosaic movement and also the ripple effect. Looking at the BBC films logo, we noticed they used a similar mosaic effect and so decided to make ours more original we decided the ripple effect would be better and would also work better with the genre of the film.
This is our thriller opening recce. Willa and I went to Southbank to film the location we would eventually be filming our opening in. We wanted the setting to be grey and city like, but we used the yellow staircase as a way to incorporate some colour and make the audience look and hopefully it will catch their eye. We did not have Brittany or Luke to act during this because she was busy, but this does not matter too much as we used filmed each other standing in place of her. It was mainly about filming the location and not the actress or actor.
Filming day 2
Unfortunately I was ill during the first day of filming on Southbank, but today we did day two of filming. We shot the scenes of Ally and her mother's conversation in her bedroom, and the scene of her coming back from her run and slamming the door. Filming started smoothly, with no major hiccups. Brittany arrived at my house in her running gear she had been wearing in the running scenes, and we filmed her slamming the door shut and walking up the stairs looking disgruntled with something clearly pressing on her mind. We then filmed her in my bedroom (posing as hers) when she is getting changed and ready for court after having had a shower, so she was wearing a towel. After reviewing and uploading the shots onto Final Cut Pro, we noticed that we probably should have wet her hair to make it look more like she had just had a shower. Also, when we put the shots together of Brittany going up stairs and then my mum talking to her in her room it didn't quite make sense, so we've decided on reflection that we will include a graphic match of Ally's cup of tea being stirred by her mother and Ally turning the shower handle on. Over all it was a successful day of filming.
