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Shot List

GROUP 4 SHOT LIST

This shot list is a sample of one of many. We constructed one before everyshoot to make the most use of the time available to us on shoot (Shot lists save time. We ticked off shots as we went along so as not to miss anything out and sometimes added spontanous ones.

Editing Schedule

IMG_0014 THE WITNESS EDITING TIMETABLE

This is an example of the editing schedules we drew up for the editing process. Overall i think our schedules were very efficient, as they gave other group members insight into who they'd be working with and allowed the teachers to stay up to grips with what we were continuing to do. Not only this but they allowed us to set targets for each week to hopefully keep. We made sure each of us had an equal amount of editing for that week, so we all felt involved. Not only did we make sure we had enough individual editing sessions, but also whole group ones, as these allowed us to feedback all together and decide as a whole what we needed to change- which we could then continue to do individually.

Female Character Costume

For our female character who is a prostitute we have decided as a costume to give her:

•  A bright red strapless top, as red is very lustful and provocative.
• Ripped black tights- to show she has been through some kind of struggle and also the dragging across the forest floor would have realistically made some of these rips too.
• A short black skirt- making her seem promiscuous and eager to flaunt her body (as a prostitute would)
• Black leather high heels- these emphasise the femininity and add to the 'dolled up' look, showing us that she has been somewhere, or in the prostitutes case, been to work.
• Hair untied, messy- can show the struggle she has obviously had wit the men and also through the dragging can emphasise she is dead- cannot fix her hair- it is left messy, and clearly out of the ordinary compared to the rest of her attire.

Inspiration For Our Opening Sequence

Eden Lake is a big inspiration to our opening sequence as it is of the same genre (action thriller) and enables to encapsulate gang culture into a rural environment, much like what we intend to do with our opening sequence.

Not only this but it also uses the youth music and relatable characters to everyday life in order to attract and address its audience and also give it a realism, adding to the drama.

We aim to film at night as seen in the poster of Eden Lake above, but as we are only a small media group, we do not feel we will have enough lighting equipment a crew, therefore, as with the actual film of Eden Lake, our opening sequence will be shot in the daytime. However this seems to still work in Eden Lake, as the denseness of the forest acts as a cover rather than the dark lighting, so we do not feel the lighting will be a problem.

Again drawing parallels from Eden Lake to our intended project, in Eden Lake the 'hero' is unlikely, as it is a woman, someone who the audience would probably believe would be overpowered by the young predominantly male gang- breaking the stereotype. In our piece the unlikely hero is the young boy, facing the older male gang.

Unlike Eden Lake, we intend to have a happy ending to our film, as we feel for a young audience a sad ending can be a bit hard going. Also as it is so relatable, we feel it could even evoke hope to the audience in real life situations (at an extreme measure). 

Screening

We organised a premier of our film so that we could get feedback on our sequence and identify how we attracted our target audience by each member to fill out a questionnaire. The event was well publicised, with announcements in a whole school assembly, a Facebook page was set up by Philippa and a poster was put up around the school leading to a turnout well surpassing the 35 we expected.

Event page

Film Poster

Earlier this day I held a test screening to ensure all sound was working.

Our screening is shown below, it features the audience reactions alongside the sequence.

Also, after our preview screening, we messaged people on the event with a YouTube link to our opening sequence, enabling those who could not attend the screening to watch it and leave feedback as well as encouraging them to repost it show friends and family.

Event message

As well as this I posted our sequence on the social network site Twitter to widen our range of feedback and spread the word.

My posts

Feedback and example of people sharing our film

Character Sketches

These sketches are what we wanted our characters to look like. We followed steroetpyes when creating them, and when gathering costumes for shoots, we tried to reflect our sketches as much as possible.

Sketch of the thugs.

Character Sketch


Sketch of Jack

Character Sketch of Lewis

Feedback

We had a screening of our opening sequence with 50 members of our target audience, both male and female. We gave them all a questionnaire to answer:

IMG_0018 THE WITNESS QUESTIONAIRE

Our feedback was mostly good, and everyone rated our film between 6-10 out of 10. However, in general the boys rated our film higher than the girls with an average rating of 9/10, whereas the girls had an average rating of 7/10. This reflected our original plans, because males were a more prominent portion of our target audience, and females were only a secondary audience.

Almost all of the people questioned understood what was happening in the sequence, which meant our continuity was good. However there was a fundemental error in the opening which alot of the questionees brought up. We don't actually show Jack spotting the girl being dragged, which meant that he ran for no reason. This was something that we realised quite late in the editting process and therefore couldn't fix it.