Finished Demo

This is the demo video we have been working on.

Editing

Over the past week we have been making a demo video to test out the editing services available to us in school. We have made a short video and edited it in iMovie to see what we could do. Installed on my own laptop i have adobe after effects though so i would prefer to use this for the final video. Because of this i have also been looking at some tutorials on how to achieve special effects.  I have mainly been looking at cool title scenes and lighting effects because i want a really stylistic film. 

My Films genre

I have decided on a genre for my film. I have decided to shoot my film in a Sin City style and have decided to experiment with the style in a thriller. I think that the style could be lent to the thriller genre really effectively.

Target Audiences

Every film has a target audience. For example a cartoon film will be generally targeted at a children and a teen comedy would be targeted at teens! On every film their is an age rating. This shows the level of explicit content and the target audience. U's and PG's will be suitable for most children under the age of 8. 12's will often have tame violence and mild/infrequent swearing. 15 rated films will usually have strong violence frequent use of strong language and occasional sex references. 18's can contain basically anything. There are very few restrictions on content. Every film must carry an age classification which is awarded to it by an outside classification body.

Severance (Music)

The opening of Severance is of 2 half naked foreign girls and a middle aged fat man running through a forest. They are dirty and look scared. The backing music is a calm song with no lyrics, something not to dissimilar to what you could expect to hear at a ballet recital. Although it doesn't fit the mood it works well and creates a weird sense of tension. As the continue running the two girls fall into a pitfall trap. The man looks down and they shout for help in a different language but he keeps running. A few seconds later he is also caught in a trap and is hanging from a tree by his leg. You see from his perspective and you see the lower half of a man in a trench coat approach him with a hunting knife in hand. The man continues and sticks the knife into the mans stomach. As the blood starts trickling down his body and on to his face a really happy song comes on and then it fades away to a tour bus. The contrast of the happy song with the brutal act which has just taken place gives a really weird effect. Is it meant to be quite a violent scene but with the happy tune you also quite want to laugh, it creates confusion of emotions amongst the viewer because they are unsure wether it is appropriate to laugh or not! The use of music is greatly effective here as it creates the confusion and makes the opening memorable.

Cloverfield (Camera)

Today i watched Cloverfield. A fictional story of a group of friends trying to stay alive during a monster attack on New York. The film is shot entirely from a hand held camera and as well as giving some people motion sickness it really helps the immersion in the film because it is as if you are looking through one of the survivors eyes. Also becuase it is done on a handheld camera it gives the director way to make it seem like someones personal camera which inturn gives him a way of introducing charecters! Cloverfield opens with text explaining that the following footage is confidential footage on the case named cloverfield. The film than starts with footage of the main charecter being woken up by a female charecter (whom at thispoint you cannot see because she is holding the camera) and it goes into clips of a few days before the event introducing the charecters. I would not say that the opening of Cloverfield is anything close to a memorable begining but it serves its purpose. It introduces main charecters by having thier lives before the monster attack instead of trying to introduce these charecters to you in the midst of a fight between the military and the monster!

Current Ideas

So far from the research i have done i have decided that i would really like to shoot my film in a Sin City styled manor, where i don't use color apart from the odd bit to highlight something if it is possible to achieve this effect. As of yet i have not decided on a genre as there are many genres this style could lend itself to successfully. In Sin City it is used for a Gangster/Crime genre but i think it would be a very effective style to use for a thriller/Horror film because you could make just the blood red in a scene etc! I also like the way that Sin City uses cartoon sections where it is hand drawn to do certain scenes. This could be an interesting effect to use for a death scene because you wouldn't have to worry about bad acted or unrealistic deaths. This is away around a potentially film ruining clip.

Sin City

I have recently watch the film Sin City and was completely drawn in by it. It is based on the graphic novel of the same title and with that in mind the director chose to keep with the same style of the comic books, trying to stay as close to the original art as possible. Because of this the film has a very unique look. It is filmed entirely in black an white with the occasional section of scenes in color. This adds great dramatic effect and is used effectively to draw the viewers attention to certain points of a scene which normally have great relevance even if it does not seem to have any relevance at all at the time! This effect makes the viewer think why the attention has been drawn to that specific character when there appears to be nothing important about them and in a certain case the character is highlighted to the viewer (through having her cornea in color) quite early on in the film but it is not until much later in the film that you see her importance in the plot.

The use of camera angles is hugely effective. If you were to compare sections of the graphic novel to clips of the film they are very similar. Creating an angle in a graphic novel is alot easier than it is in a film because you create the scene and you can make it exactly how you want where as in films you are restricted by space and the 3D area around you as to where you can get the camera and although the film industry has improved alot and the range of camera angle a film maker is now able to achieve has vastly improved since the beginning of the film industry you can still not get the same diversity of shots as u could create with pencil and paper. The way that the director has tried to keep the camera shots as similar to the stills from the graphic novel as possible creating a great effect especially for fans of the series.



The only thing I found with Sin City is that you must be paying alot of attention to the film because the plot jumps around alot and the different story lines intertwine and all link together, meaning this film couldn't really be watched casually unless you don't care for story and your just watching for the over the top cartoon action. The main thing i would take away from the film though is the style in which it is shot. i would love to use this effect in my film as i think it could be used effectively in various genres(action, horror/thriller, gangster/crime) and still not look out of place.

The Hills Have Eyes

Today i watched The Hills Have Eyes, a horrer/thriller based on the orginal 1977 film of the same name. There is lots of stong violence throughout the film but the part i found most striking about the film is the intro. The film begins with a small block of text. The text explains the contreversy of the use and testing of atomic bombs during the the late 40's and how the american government to this day are still denying the fact that the nuclear falllout caused during these blasts has any genetic effects on living matter. The scene then cuts to a small group of american researchers in Bio-Hazard suits scanning an area of american dessert for radiation when they are ambushed and killed by a group of "mutants". The death of the final researchers triggers the opening credits. Behind the credits are various film reels of the testing of atomic bombs with quick snaps of nutated faces and bodies. The videos used are very strong and hardhitting, showing the power of the bombs and linking it to the mutants you have just seen, Comparing the huge destructive power with the incredible violnce of the mutants from the previous scene.

SE7VEN

Today in our media lesson we watched sections of the film Se7en. In this film you can really see the importance of locations for ambiance. The hallway scene with the police entering one of the victims room is especially effective because there is no dialougue but the way the producer chooses to have a barely lit hallway with a 4 men with barrel mounted torches on thier rifles moving through the halls. The way the torch light is used creates a creepy and suspensive mood to the scene.