BW: Recce For Shoot

These two photos were taken on a small road in the woods between Southborough and Speldhurst. This is the potential location for the part in our opening sequence where an abandoned car is alongside some woods, before our antagonist drives the car off.

This is one of two locations that we are considering for the scene, the other one being Haysden Country Park.

BW Film Analysis - The Hole

The Hole (Nick Hamm, 2001)

I recently watched the psychological thriller film, The Hole. I thought the film would be useful in terms of film research as it follows an asynchronous film narrative, starting at the end of the story and slowly working it's way back through in the same way that we plan to make our opening.

I noticed the following points:

1. If we are jumping between time zones or points in the narrative, these need to be made clear using titles. As well as this, sharp contrast in colours often suggest a change in the point of narrative.
2. Starting with the ending works well. Although it means that the audience knows that the character in the end does not die, it retains the mystery and the suspense as the audience knows that something will happen to the other characters.
3. The film will become confusing and disorientating if the narrative jumps between time zones too many times in the opening sequence. We need to keep this down to a minimum.
4. Having the end as the start is engaging and is likely to 'grab' the audiences attention quickly.

Group: Pitch - The Rushes

• We found we mostly got positive feedback from our pitch, and were pleased as a group with how it went.
• A potential issue we discussed was the main light source when the protagonist is watching the television, as it really needs to come from the television itself. This means we will have to shoot our woodland footage first.
• It was also pointed out to us that when the protagonist is watching back footage, it will be very static. To try and combat this, we will be using a lot of extreme close ups to make the sequence feel less static.

Group: Preliminary Task - "Wake Up Call"

This is our preliminary task named "Wake Up Call" showing continuity editing in a conversation.

Learnings from preliminary task:

• We were pleased with how our preliminary task turned out, and like the look of the HD footage and music to enhance our piece.
• We feel that the whole task could be 'smoother', especially in terms of camera movement - the slow pan at the beginning in particular.
• To make future footage feel smoother, we will try to use a track and dolly, especially if we want another slow panning shot.
• One of the biggest lessons was the importance of storyboarding. Where we had planned well ahead, the footage looked better, and the parts we tried to 'improvise' came out looking less professional.
• We also realised how long editing takes, however simple the line of action, especially in overlaying music.

Group: Concept Development

Concept Development on Prezi

Above is our Concept Development presentation which we made on Prezi. The concept development outlines what we plan to do for our opening, and how we reached some of the decisions that we did. The ideas outlined here are still being worked on.

Group: Audience Research

For our audience research, we have created a survey using the online survey creator Survey Monkey. We've asked a number of questions, including how people rate our film, our title and the font we have chosen.

Below is a link to our survey.

Click here to take survey

BW Location Recce - Southborough Scout Hut

Here are some photos from my recce to Southborough Scout Hut. We need a large hall, which can possibly decorate / set up to look suitable for our horror, so this is one of our suggested locations.