Preparations

We've been planning the coursework film, which is supposed to be the opening four minutes of a feature-length film, and we now have a good idea of what we want to do.

The film is going to be a melodramatic piece, with a focus on the main character, a depressive, abused teenage girl. At the moment the idea is to tell the end of her story at the beginning - with her writing in a diary, picking out certain words such as "slashing", and other words with similar connotations. We will add flashbacks in to show the events related to those words actually occuring.

I've been learning calligraphy for a couple of months, and we thought that some styles might suit the opening page of the diary. We tried these styles:

This style was nice, but it didn't suit the diary cover for a manic depressive teenage girl, which is what we needed. This was much too old-fashioned and we decided that it was the least suitable for what we needed. The style is also complex and to get it exactly right I would probably have had to go through several pages, leaving much less space for the credits and the actual diary.


We also quite liked this style, but it was far too fancy and flourished for our tragically abused character. It, too, would have taken several sheets to get it completely right.

We also liked this. However, there is no way of differentiating the "my" as the font has no capital/lower case options - just this one format. Also, in calligraphy, the height of the letters is measured in "nib-widths" - and as I had to use my largest nib for this so that the titles were big enough to read, I couldn't make the "my" larger.

The last two styles were difficult to choose between. Originally, most of us preferred this, because the other was much more basic. This style is decorative and yet not complicated - it still looks simple enough to suit the character without being boring or difficult for me to get right. However, the main feature of the font is the loops on the capitals - see "W" and "Y" - and we didn't like this at all. Eventually, and after a very long discussion, we decided to use the other font.

This is what we eventually chose. The font is basic, but effective, and has no real defects. Because of its simplicity, I can easily get the title finished on one page - and I can do the credits in calligraphy as well, as we are planning to incorporate these into the diary. This should look excellent and work towards the effectiveness of the piece as a whole.

The Preliminary Film

We finished editing this yesterday and today managed to save it in the right format, which did take some time, but here it is... and we are rather proud of it, and although there were a few disagreements about what we should do with it, we have now reached a conclusion which we are all happy with.

This took about 15-20 minutes of filming, spread out over several hours in two days, but we feel that this is a good result and worth the extra effort. Having made this piece successfully, we now feel much more comfortable with every stage of the production process, and will be much better prepared for the actual coursework piece.

The Preliminary Film

This is the original storyboard for our preliminary film:

It shows the original sequence we had planned for how the film was going to work. We just finished editing the film, and later on, it will be uploaded.

When filming, we had a lot of difficulties to overcome. We had to keep within the 180° Rule, which meant we were limited by what angles were available. As the corridor was too narrow for us to show the camera moving past the two characters, we couldn't shoot anything from the other side, which meant that we had to sacrifice the use of some angles which we would have liked to use. However, we were able to complete the film and have now successfully made it work as an effective piece.

Filming the Preliminary Piece

Saturday: So, yesterday we filmed most of our preliminary piece.

We had to find an appropriate place to film, which didn't take long, as there is an old, mostly disused block in our school which we found had the right atmosphere for the film once the lights were turned off. Actually, since we put the compulsory table and chairsunder a skylight so that we could see the characters in the film, we found it was too bright, but if we moved them away it would be too dark, so we will have to add an effect on afterwards, which we hope won't be too hard. We filmed most of the sequence, only one essential part missing as we ran out of time, so we will finish filming on Monday. For the sake of continuity the actors will bring in the clothes they were wearing yesterday, so that they don't suddenly change clothes half-way through the film.


We filmed out of sequence, so as to make the process simpler, and started with the main conversation, during which the two main characters are both sat at the table. Then we filmed the opening, in which the first character gets up and bumps into the second as she tries to leave, and they both sit down. Finally, we filmed the corridor - empty, and with the third character, who discovers the apparently illegal meeting, standing in the corridor. We still have to film the incriminating speech - "If you tell anybody about this, I will kill you" - that is shown between the two shots of the corridor. This should only take a few minutes, and the editing should also be done by the end of the day.

Monday: We tried to get the footage onto the computer today - we failed, because the camera ran out of battery, but at least we understand how to do it all now. It took Sam and me at least a quarter of an hour to work out how to use the Vegas program. Now we understand, the footage shouldn't be too hard to sift through.

Good times.