Friday 18 February 2011

CC - The Plot

We have decided to do a blog about the plot of our film as people after seeing our rough cut seem to be confused about what is happening.

To start with this is done on purpose as the main character is supposed to be disorientated and in a dream world as he sees visions of what has happened to him or what he has done to someone else.

The plot is that the character has apparently killed someone or maybe more than one person and he doesn't know why, where, when etc he has killed this person and who this person is. This leads to the character going on a search for truth to find out what he has done or if he has even done it. 

We wanted our film to be confusing to add mystery to the circumstances that has led to the character seeing these horrific images of what has happened.

People seemed most confused about the end of the opening when the character wakes up in bed, this is supposed to be confusing and for the audience to determine what reason it holds themselves but the reason he does wake up is to show that he was dreaming. This further shows whether or not what the character has seen is even real.

Thursday 17 February 2011

CC - Use of Audio


In editing we have added sounds of a babies laughter in a very haunting way, the audio is supposed to further show the characters deteriorating mental state. 

This is cut with sounds of indoor drops which are supposed to echo around the characters vacant mind, the drops are the sound that the character hears as blood drips off his hand into the sink and adds to his dream sequence and furthers the idea of reality vs imagination.

All of the audio is there to add to the seemingly psychotic dementia of the character as he stumbles around his house wondering what is real and what isn't.

We are currently still deciding how to use the soundtrack that CO has made in the film, we want the music to add versimilitude to the character as he is a teenager, the music is heavy so that it adds gravity to the situation, currently we are most likely to use Laments of an Icarus which CO did a cover of.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

BH - Intertextuality in re-shoot

Another aspect concerning intertextuality in our re-shoot is that of the incorporation of the books American Psycho by Brett Easton-Ellis and Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik. We chose to subtly include these books in the background of typical teenager because they have both had a strong influence on how we chose to film and what we chose to film about. The books, and indeed the film variants of them both include strong psychological aspects, but they also include elements of violence that we have tried to capture in our film.

A screenshot from iMovie of American Psycho being present in the main character's room. 

CO - Photos from Filming II

Here are some photos from the shoot we did yesterday, which took place mainly indoors.

Filming the wakeup scene

The filming position for the majority of the scene

Filming a close up
Filming in the dark and editing the viewfinder position for practically





CC, CO - Notes and Details about Final Shot

We finished shooting our final shots for our production. We have included more shots to tie our film together and make it more understandable to the audience. We have used more blood including a particularly gruesome scene where our main character bites into his arm and blood pours out, we are hoping that these more gory scenes will add effect to the film and not included just for shock value.

In addition to the bloody theme recurring throughout the cut, we have also used more supernatural and psychologically haunting aspects as well. This is mainly portrayed by the recurrence of eyes throughout the film. These are meant to be hidden in the background and are included for subtlety, they are used to make the viewer think and decipher the concealed meaning. To portray the eye theme, we used both homemade drawings that are posted up around the location, and we also set an image as the main character's wallpaper on his computer, which crops up at certain points. For the computer image, we used the cover for the Johnny Truant album, No Tears For the Creatures. The album cover is a painting of an eye, widened in panic and paranoia, and this is similar to the protagonist's mood throughout the film.

We also chose to add intertextuality in the form of a typical teenage boy and his setting which we failed to do as well as we could have done in the first rough cut. We have worked hard to ensure that the main character has the normal setting of a standard teenager, such as aspects like a guitar, a pc, books, cans, junk food, games and more. This adds versimilitude to the gravity of the situation.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

CC - Our film's BBFC rating

According to the BBFC we must follow these guidelines to create a 15 rated film


Suitable only for 15 years and over


No one younger than 15 may see a ‘15’ film in a cinema. No one younger than 15 may rent or buy a ‘15’ rated video work.

Drugs

Drug taking may be shown but the film as a whole must not promote or encourage drug misuse. 

Horror

Strong threat and menace are permitted unless sadistic or sexualised.

Imitable behaviour

Dangerous behaviour (for example suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied. Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised.

Language

There may be frequent use of strong language.

Sex

Sexual activity may be portrayed without strong detail. There may be strong verbal references to sexual behaviour, but the strongest references are unlikely  to be acceptable unless justified by context. 

Theme

No theme is prohibited, provided the treatment is appropriate for 15 year olds.

Violence

Violence may be strong but should not dwell on the infliction of pain or injury. Strong sadistic or sexualised violence is also unlikely to be acceptable. There may be detailed verbal references to sexual violence but any portrayal of sexual violence must be discreet and have a strong contextual justification.

Our film follows the guidelines of the BBFC rating system for a 15. Use of blood in our film is strong but we never show any acts of violence as the film is more about the psychological health of our main character rather than showing violence. There is no imitable behaviour in our film due to its surreal nature and there is no language barriers as we don't ever swear in the film.

Sunday 13 February 2011

CO - Compositions

I have finished recording and editing two separate songs for use in our production. I have covered Laments of an Icarus by Dutch metal band Textures, mainly because it is extremely fast paced, atmospheric and will fit in well with pivotal points in our film, and I also remixed Icarus Lives! by Periphery, for the sheer brutality of it, which will have a similar effect when applied to certain scenes. In addition, it also includes simpler, gentler and more ambient parts, which is important in our use of dream patterns. We will probably break up the second song into a light side and a heavy side.

I was originally going to use a dynamic microphone to record the audio with, but whenever I tried to do so, the audio levels kept fluctuating wildly, and it didn't sound good at all, so in the end I just used a LifeCam VX-3000, which recorded audio well to an extent.

I used:

  • Drums
  • Bass
  • Guitar (3)
  • Audacity Audio Engine
  • Kristal Audio Engine
  • LifeCam VX-3000

Here are the original songs for reference:

Textures - Laments Of An Icarus


From the album "Silhouettes"


Periphery - Icarus Lives!


From the album "Periphery"




Here are the finished covers:

Textures 

Periphery




Pictures from recording

Editing recordings

Drums

Recording drums for Textures


Friday 11 February 2011

CC - Updates to filming

We plan on filming on sunday in the late afternoon/evening.
The reasons for filming is we want to add more shots to make the opening make more sense, to give it more context , we also thought we could touch up what we have filmed already to be sure that we don't have any unstable shots.
We want to make the shots more abstract as at the moment the shots they are quite mundane. We also will film a larger variety of shots such as including more dutch angles to signify the dream world that the character is in.

Thursday 10 February 2011

CC, CO - Vodcast 2

We are going to be recording our second vodcast, which is primarily about audience feedback from our rough cut.

CC, CO - Podcast 3

Our third podcast, detailing progress so far with our production.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

CC - 3rd podcast complete

We have just finished recording our third podcast and we are in the process of uploading it now.
We talk about showing our rough cut to the class and their feedback, we also mention updates to the filming schedule and music additions to our film. Keep up with our progress and listen to the podcast.

CC - Updates to filming

We have decided to film some more shots for our opening so that we can hopefully give our film more content, add surrealism and to make some shots look cleaner. We are also filming any shots we see as unsteady. The reason for this reshooting is in our audience feedback of our rough cut we were told that the flashback/dream sequence didn't make sense so we are going to try to make sense of it to the audience.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

BH - Lost Highway Deconstruction

BH - Lost Highway Deconstruction






Dir: David Lynch
Budget: $15,000,000 
Gross: $3,796,699
BBFC rating: 18
IMDB Rating: 7.6/10

Lost Highway by David Lynch is a strong influence upon our film, it features a wide range of talents and techniques to create a prolonged sense of dread, that lasts throughout the film. 




The introduction opens with some titles in yellow font, over a scrolling road which lasts for 2 mins 13 seconds, and then opens into the films first scene, which is a close up of Bill Pullmans character smoking a cigarette in the dark at 2 mins 17 seconds, with only the cigarette lighting up the scene and only Bill Pullmans mouth and hand smoking visible. The screen fades out and then a mid-range/close up of Bill Pullman is shown while he smokes again, the smoke clinging to the air. 


At 2 mins 40 seconds the screen lights up again to show Bill Pullman clearly. 


However at 3 mins 5 seconds the door buzzer goes to indicate someone is at the door, the character gets up to listen to the message. 


At 3 mins 21, a close up of the door buzzer and the characters finger pressing 'LISTEN' is shown. Then at 3 mins 37, we hear an ominous voice saying "Dick Laurent is dead."


At 3 mins 33 seconds the the camera pulls out to a mid-shot, with the character silhouetted against the light, he then walks closer towards the camera and as he does so the camera pans to follow him, as he goes to a window to investigate who has left the message, in the background we can hear police sirens.


At 3 mins 56 seconds, the camera shifts to a point of view shot, to show the character surveying the scene- checking if anyone is outside- however he can't see anyone so he goes to see if he can get a better view.


As the camera pans we have the character looking around, confused and unsure about what has happened, and finally we have a final exterior shot of the outside of the house.  





Lost Highway Intro from Benji Hudson on Vimeo.

This introduction links in strongly to the ending, which has several call backs to the intro as Bill Pullmans character is coming outside the front of the house and he comes to the door and says 'Dick Laurant is Dead" Giving a certain sense of ambiguity to the entire events of the plot, we don't know what has happened to the time frame of the plot for this to happen, and as the film draws to a close we have the final shots of Bill Pullmans character driving away along a dark highway.


Lost Highway Ending Scene from Benji Hudson on Vimeo.

This means that the entire plot is rather ambiguous in its nature, a rather traditional aspect of the psychological thriller. This is because often the endings of thrillers are left up to the audience to decide what happened.

Thursday 3 February 2011

BH - Poster design stage 1

BH - Poster Design STAGE 1

Thinking ahead to target audience and marketing, I've spent afew hours desiging and creating posters of diffrent design, exploring the use of fonts to create a relevant poster, I wanted something simplistic that really gave a clear message to the audience, something that would attract viewers, so to start with I played around with some fonts in Microsoft Paint, downloading them from http://www.dafont.com/

So heres what I came up with at first:










  • However I thought that the 'Torment' font looked too horror esq and maybe too gothic for a psychological thriller. So I worked again on the fonts, searching and in the end I chose to use the font I used for the 'Dreamscape' for the 'Torment' aswell, a serif font gives the implication of horror quite strongly as a title font.
  • So with my fonts sorted and decided upon I scoured google with something I could use as a place-holder image, something I could use just to check how it looked in reality on diffrent backgrounds.
heres my first attempt:














  • It's simple and the knife gives a slight hint at the plot, the text is easy to read with a nice clear white background, however my initial thoughts where it seemed horror esq, however initial feedback given via Facebook seemed to be posative, aside from the fact it appears the knife is lodged in bread. Here is some initial feedback...from the poster the genre was correctly guessed.


  • So for my next attempt I decided to try something more complex and psychological in focus rather than physical.




So using some art from the band TOOL I  produced this:















  • However I was unhappy with the level of detail in this image so I got hold of a higher resolution version, once again to test how it might look, checking diffrent image types to see how we might compare and emulate them in the final finished poster.

My next attempt:




















  • I did like the image, but I felt that it was too dark and it lacked the appear and 'look at me' nature of the initial blood splatter and knife poster so I managed to make one final attempt on the poster design.

 Here it is:


















I personally liked this poster design however initial feedback from the target audience on it was slightly less warm:









CO - Vodcast feedback

Our first vodcast was tried and tested on different people to gather a few different reactions. Here were some of them


  • The spot could have been better, as there isn't much space, influencing the shot. Also, we filmed it in a fairly public place, meaning a few people entered the vicinity during our shooting, causing a disruption
  • The audio could have been louder, because at some points, the speaker is too quiet as we were quite far away from the camera
  • We could have focussed more, and we get distracted a few times
  • However, there were some very interesting points made concerning our influences and inspirations
  • This informative dialogue was relevant to our production
Feedback from Facebook.

ALL - Vodcast 1

CC - First vodcast shot

We have just finished shooting our first vodcast in which we discuss our influences in filming such as American Psycho, Donnie Darko and The Shining. We talked about the themes in the films and why we have taken influence from the films. We plan to upload the footage tomorrow. I also wore a hat as well that made me look like a christmas theif.

CC, CO - Music Additions

As a group we have decided that we want to add in music to our rough cut and our first vodcast.

For our vodcast we have added the song Djent Satisfaction by Monarchist, we used this music because there are no vocals so it provides some adequate background music while we talk about our influences.



For our roughcut we have been brainstorming the following songs as we think they are suitable for a psychological thriller


  • Ripe with Decay by Nine Inch Nails
  • Rammstein by Rammstein
  • Driver Down by Trent Reznor
  • Samsara by Parkway Drive
  • Djent Satisfaction by Monarchist
  • Jetpacks was Yes! by Periphery









































Wednesday 2 February 2011

CC - Idents complete

The two idents for our  group have now been completed, Experimental Studios and Weathered productions.

For the Weathered productions ident we chose to have a fog background and a serif font. For the audio we chose a heavy rain soundtrack and for the last second or so a loud thunder clap, we chose to do this because it related the name of the production company.


For Experimental studios we used a very metal audio like clanging and bashing, we chose this to simulate a frequent audio in psychological thrillers when the main character is descending into madness. In the background we also had sharp sci fi themed background.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

CO - Filming updates

We plan to film additional material at Ben's house on Sunday 6th February. These scenes will include valuable connections between the scenes in the rough cut, making them more clearer as to what they mean. The filming will take place at dusk, so we have a bit of natural light to use, but we can also wait for the darkness to arrive so we can film outside.