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.