Final Project Preparation

We have begun making mind maps for our final movie, Sweet Vengeance. Since we will be doing Opening Titles, we have decided that we want to make a thriller/slasher film. We have mapped out the following considerations: audience, narrative and institutions to help us approach our filmmaking in a more considered way. These mind maps will help us to improve our movie and to make it more interesting for the people who will be watching it. We have also been researching the kind of institutions that produce the kind of film we are making. This genre would be Hollywood (although you know Hollywood has copied the grudge from some other country- so you should write about that- and how other countries also produce slasher films but Hollywood dominates because they have money and because English is so commonly understood), and we hope it will be successful at the box office. We also plan to use a questionnaire so we can find out more from a potential audience and to try and get an idea of what the statistics say about people watching thriller or slasher films. We also plan to conduct a Focus Group as a way to get additional information about what an audience thinks of our film once we have completed it and our media teacher has suggested that we change one thing in our films e.g. our ending or introduction so we can find out what works better, and I believe this is a good way to have a backup just in case our audience does not like one of the things in our movie. The institutions that I think is most relevant to the film we are making are either Universal Pictures or Columbia Pictures, as these institutions have produced some of the most famous slasher movies. We are making progress and what is left now for us to work on is the costumes or props, the place where we will shoot and the final cast. We also have completed the script. Once these tasks are completed, we will begin all the technical work of our movie i.e. the shooting and editing and the rest.

Media Final Project and Poster

We have begun working on our final Media Studies Video project and have nearly finished the script. The Group that I will be working with includes Afia, Saad and myself. We have decided to do a slasher/thriller film for our opening titles. We came up with the story in class and so far have come up with the location, the props and the setting of the story. The story is about a man taking revenge from another man for something that the second man had done. The story will not really matter too much as the opening titles will just require a few shots and the name of the film. We still need to figure out what kind of lighting effect we want to go for and how we will achieve it and our script still needs to be finalized and as soon as that is done we will begin shooting our film. In the meantime, we were given a task to make a poster for our preliminary film. Unfortunately our prelim was not that good and there were no photographs taken during the shoot. Therefore my group decided to make a poster of our upcoming film which for now has the working title "Sweet Vengeance". I have attached the poster to this post.
I had viewed posters of some of Hollywood's Thriller/slasher films, like "I Know what You Did Last Summer", and the posters of such films had pictures from certain scenes merged and positioned in an attractive way. The posters had dark colors (mostly black) and they depicted the thriller effect of the film in the poster. The textures that I used in my poster were given to me by our Media Practical teacher. The teacher had sent us the background textures via email to help us use them in an exercise in class using Photoshop. I had used the textures in the class and the teacher taught us how to blend the textures together to make them merge and make an attractive background. At first when I was making my poster, I decided to use really dark colors, but then the idea did not seem to work out as I was unable to figure out how to blend the text with the color black, therefore I tried blending old paper texture with another texture that I had, and so the color seemed fine. Then I added the text. I thought of writing the word "Sweet" in italics because I wanted to have the effect of a love story or a relationship, and just to make the word seem like it is i.e. "Sweet". I added a rose at the end of the word "Sweet" to enhance the effect. I took the image from the site, "clicker.com" as the images there were not right protected.
The word "Vengeance" is written in a crooked font and this is because I wanted to depict the feeling of killing and torture, which is also the reason why I chose red as the color for the font of "Vengeance". To give it a more creepy look, I added a line under it, depicting that it has been made by someone's blood. 
I darkened all four sides of the poster with dark brown to highlight the center of the poster i.e. where the title is. I also added the same red color at the inside if the poster where the dark brown color ends, with a slashing effect to make it look creepy. 
I added a few sentences before the title to give a little information about the poster and to make the title sensible and understandable for the person who sees it. 
One thing that I forgot was to add the label or logo of the institution that I had made the film for. I have also not used any photographs as it is a poster of a film that is yet to be made. There may be some changes in the future regarding the script, however, we tend to stick to the same theme and idea for our final project.

Media Prelim

On the 1st of November we decided to use the very first media video project that we made at the start of last month for our prelim because there was not much time to waste on a prelim that would eventually not even be marked while the main project has a lot more weightage so we hope to score well with it. The first video project was a simple task. Our story was about a bully in a school who has been called into the principal's office. The video was made keeping in mind the main task that the OCR demanded i.e. showing a person walk up to a door, open it, go inside and have a conversation with another person. Therefore, the story of the bully and the principal was fine for our first video. In the shooting we made big mistakes with the Mise-en-scene which made the video unrealistic and interfered with suspension of disbelief especially as the actor playing the role of principal was not of the appropriate age, the film failed to be realistic or believable. There were also mistakes with the camera angles as all the shots were shot from the same side of the imaginary 180 degree line- this was because we were working in the media lab which is a very small room and so we couldn’t place the camera as it should’ve been placed- but we realized that we should’ve shot in some other room where there was more space.  Also the camera angles are something that we will need to improve in the future. The last mistake that we made was with sound. We will be using a mic in the next video that we make as the prelim lacked a good sound quality. The mic will enhance the sound quality and will help us produce a better quality film. I will be discussing the script of the next video project, which will be the final project. I hope that the final will not miss the important points that we missed out in the first project.

Media Preliminary Exercise

On 17th October, our group had begun the Preliminary Exercise for our Media Studies Practical coursework and now we have nearly completed the video. The video is about a murderer who has  been tortured and tormented by people in his childhood and he decides to take revenge for this treatment. One of the tormenters is main character’s father, who killed the murderer’s mother as well as his only friend. We shot a scene in an interrogation room and the murderer was shown being dragged in. The interrogator was shown talking to him in the scene that took place. The clip that is shot takes place in the interrogation room and the interrogator asks the murderer some questions about the murders that he has committed. The shooting is incomplete, although a large portion has been done. We have learned a lot from our mistakes with camera movements and angles and are working on our current project keeping these experiences in mind.

Saad, Afia and I have begun the storyboard for our final project- the opening titles. Hopefully this project will be even better than the first two. Since this year we will be working on the brief of opening titles, our group has decided to work in the genre of Thriller Films. This is what has been decided so far and we seem to be committed to this genre.