Wink Murder Evaluation
For our final production we put together the opening clip of a film that we made and called wink murder. The genre of this film is thriller and we chose this as we thought it would be a great opportunity to learn new techniques to filming and editing. In order to make a good film, we looked and analyzed many different films that already exist in the industry, and saw what conventions we would need in order to create a film that was to be similar to a real one. Watching these films inspired many ideas, and at the end of watching we had a big discussion to see which of these we should put into our film, and which ones we shouldn't. We later decided to base our film upon the story line of a girl coming back from the dead to haunt somebody that she was once hurt by.
Getting the audience's attention is the key to the start of a film. We were given two minutes to start the film off, hoping that it would be interesting enough for the audience to want to watch more. We knew that if we managed that, our short film beginning would be a success. From the films that we analyzed we had to decide what we had to do to achieve this. We studied the mise en scene, the story lines, the sort of characters you would find in these films and the editing techniques they used. The film that went best with our story line was Saw, so we decided that this would be interesting analysis to look at very closely. The saw films were very successful films which told us that there is an already existing target audience out there. Also the fact that Saw started as a project for some students just like us, very much inspired us to make our own film in this genre. Saw films have extremely twisted narratives and are always leaving the audience wanting more. As we could not copy the film we had to come up with our own ideas and see what our target audience would think of these .
In order to get the opinion of our target audience we had to carry out some market research. We thought one of the most effective ways of doing this is a questionnaire. The person filling out the questionnaire does not have to talk to anyone face to face, so would hopefully be more honest with their thoughts. We used a sample of 50 people, the majority being teenagers, as this is our target audience. We analyzed the results from the questionnaires which gave us the drive we needed to follow through our ideas into our production. We found our that our audience wanted to see a dark and mysterious film, that focused mainly on one character. From one of the questions we found out that the audience prefer their films to be based upon something that happens in real life, as a pose to something that is made up. From this we decided that our main character committed a sexual offense on the girl who is now coming back to haunt him. Before we tried to put this into a film, we thought that we would take a look at our preliminary task to see how we could improve our final task from this one.
For our preliminary task we had to put a short clip together of a conversation between two people. This was our first time filming together as a team and my first ever time filming which meant that we had to learn how to do everything from scratch. Factors such as the lighting and the sound became a very common problem for us when filming as we found it hard to make the sound and lighting blend in to the next shots. Also when filming we didn't film certain scenes for long enough. We would stop the camera as soon as the actor had stopped talking which meant that when it came to editing the speech was too quick after after the scene before, which seamed unrealistic and did not make the clip flow very well. As we did not have enough time to reshoot we tried to use some basic transitions to make it flow a little bit better than it already did. When filming we did take a few different shots of the same thing to give us a bit of choice when it came to putting the film together which was an idea we carried on using when it came to our final task. The software we used to edit this clip was Windows Movie Maker as this was a piece of software we where quite familiar with and decided it could do everything we needed for the preliminary. But due to the software being very basic we decided to step up a gear for our final task and use the Apple software Imovie and for some parts that you could not do on Imovie we used Final Cut Pro. We had no experience with these two programs and had to learn everything right from the start again. We found this particularly hard for Final Cut as it was very advanced and complicated to use unlike Imovie which had a similar interface to Windows Movie Maker. Another thing we decided to change was the camera that we used to capture the footage. In our preliminary we used a regular video camera that recorded onto a DV tape and for our final production we used a high definition digital camcorder.
Harry decided to take the role of the main director as he had come up with a lot of the ideas we where using and new exactly how he wanted to create what was in his head on the screen. He watched a few more films for yet more inspiration and to make sure what we where planning to do was the same kind of thing you would find in real films. Keifer took the role of the main camera operator as he enjoyed this part of the project most of all after filming for his preliminary. He took many different shots from all different angles and distances. This gave us a big range of different shots to work with when it came to editing. As i enjoy playing around with different software and felt that i could learn how to use it fairly quickly i decided to take the role of the main editor. I spent a lot of time trying out different effects and trialing different parts of footage and was happy with what was later produced. We all still worked as a team but working different roles gave us the space to do what we wanted and trial different things. We still helped each other out with ideas within each others roles but left enough space to avoid any disagreements.
Storyboarding was one of the first steps we needed to take before attempting to film anything. As Harry and I have no artistic skills what so ever, Keifer volunteered to do most of the drawing for the storyboarding which we did later help with in order to get them done in time. While Keifer was doing the storyboarding Harry and I produced a schedule of things to do such as going out in the car to find the perfect locations to film, finding props that we needed to include in the production, and rounding up other equipment that we needed such as the camera and the cast. Our friend Rob decided to help out with our production and said that he was happy star in our film as he had previously done it for harry in a different course and did a good job. Rob recruited his sister into the team to play the evil girl who if we would have carried on with the film would have had a very large role to play.
What made our film a bit different from most other films was the fact that we put the end of the film at the very beginning. This gave the target audience a taster of what was to come in the film and we thought this would be a great way to get the audience's attention in the first two minutes. We started him off in a room followed by a number of different flashbacks . He held his head and moved it around almost as if he was in pain. This showed that he was having these flashbacks from what happened before and they were not nice ones. We had the date flashing up on the screen before the clip started to show when the scenes happened. After all of the flashbacks it comes up saying 12 hours earlier to give the audience an idea of how long it took for him to be in this room from the moment he was in his own house. We started off filming some of these scenes at night time which we found out did not work at all. The camera was not picking up the right picture we wanted and was not very good quality. As we did not have proper lighting equipment we decided to film during the day and i later worked out how to make the scenes appear to be at night using the editing software. We also had problems uploading the video we had captured onto the mac. We later found out we had to use different software to import it into imovie.
We all got together to view the footage we had shot. We filtered through the footage we had and got rid of any footage that was not very good or not relevant to what we needed. We then put all the footage we needed into order of how it would appear in the film. This meant we didn't have as much to look through as much footage when we were putting the film together on the timelines. When we started putting clips together we quickly established that the sound was different for each clip making the transition from one scene to the other not flow. We decided to completely remove all the sound and start from scratch. If we had the correct sound recording equipment this would not have been a problem. We added our own sound into the film by either directly recording the sound into a microphone and by uploading sound effect and music we found to already be on the different pieces of software. We decided to add a breathing noise into the clip for when rob was wandering around in the room and also added some non-diegetic mood music into the background to help build up tension. We also changed the music half way through as the car drove off as the flashback was a full one instead of snippet. We found it hard to make the sound all the same sort of volume and found it hard to mix the music into each other. After hours of trial and error we managed to get the hang of it and it all seemed to flow rather well by the end. From working on this part of editing i learnt a complete new set of skills including uploading and editing the video and swapping between different types of software to achieve different effects.
After we had finished putting the film together we created a DVD menu to make our whole project look more professional and realistic. We thought that this didn't need to be too complicated so we kept it simple and used the mac software IDVD. These give you a range of different themes that you can pick and edit or personalize to how you want it to be. We added a few different options to click on the DVD menu including deleted scenes and end credits that we added so there was more content for the menu. The only problem we came across once putting it onto DVD was the quality of the picture. Even though we used a HD camera. When we first imported the footage onto the computer we don't think we used its optimal settings which we didn't learn until it was too late to start again. Also importing and exporting from one piece of software to the other did not help with the picture quality. This is something i would improve given another chance to make a film.
Lions Gate are the distributors of the Saw films and if we where to get our film distributed this is the kind of company that i would attempt to approach and would hope that the would show an interest. Our film has the right kind of characteristics that the films they distribute have a similar target audience to ours. The flashbacks in our film are the kind of mysterious and dark things that i think this company would really look for when they are approaching film makers. Our film doesn't really have a main social or ethnic group represent as it is not a film about everyday life. It is something that would happen out of the ordinary. the only part of our film that represents anything is the swings represent that the girl is still young and would go to a park like any other young child.
Just to make sure that our film was the best it could be we decided to a sample of 10 people and gave them a questionnaire to fill out at the end to give us a bit of feedback. We got a lot of positive feedback and a little bit of information of how to make it better next time. A favourite was the P.O.V shot of Rob stumbling around and looking at the floor. people thought this was a good way of engaging the audience into knowing exactly how the character is seeing the situation. We also got a lot of positive feedback about how we did the flashbacks. We also showed the film a couple of media studies teachers in our school who were also very impressed.
I am happy with how our final production came out and think that it was a massive improvement from our preliminary. We worked brilliantly as a team and think we achieved a lot as we started off with pretty much no knowledge on how to make a film. We came up with good ideas and managed to pull of what we wanted to do. We also learnt that making film is a very long process even once you have worked out what to do. It involves a lot of trial error and a lot of persistence. We learnt how to use all different types of equipment such as the camera and the Apple Mac and feel a lot more confident that given the chance to do this again we will be able to achieve something on a whole different level. We enjoyed this experience and hope there is many more to come.
