Final AS title sequence

Editing process #2

In order to create a basic layer of diagetic sound for our film opening, we used the Garageband software on Bruno's Macbook.

Bruno learnt from a video on Youtube some editing tricks and techniques in order to edit appropiately. The one above is called the ken burns effect, it artificially pans and zooms within the frame.

Another editing technique is the 'clip trimmer', it either trims or lengthens the base soundlayer for the whole film and makes it easier to line it up to the video clip.

One other straight forward editing technique is cropping, which is used to remove unused and pointless space around the borders of the shots. This is an easy and useful technique that we used as it helps focus the audience on the character within the scene.

Another technique Bruno learnt to use is the inspector tool. This was used to finely edit a lot of the shots and sequences. This was used in our running scene, as we felt it was at a slightly slow pace, so we used the clip speed editor to adjust the frames per minute.

Here we decided to play with the exposure, contrast and saturation as we thought this scene where Veronica is in the abandoned factory was too dark and she was verging on not being visible. By playing with these edits it enabled for her outline to show up more.

Again Bruno used the ken burns effect to zoom and pan on the 'Welcome to hell...' this enabled us to draw the audiences attention to the writing.

Bruno used the youtube to mp3 downloader to download a track of guns shooting. We then selected a track we thought was most fitting with the gun we used in our title sequence. After cutting down the track to the one we wanted in Garageband, we had to export it to iTunes before it could be used on iMovie.

Main characters in our film (film proposal)

Again my group and I discussed the personalities of each of the main characters within our film, and what their characteristics would consist of, however Bruno composed both descriptions which are as follows...

Veronica (protagonist) -

Veronica is a teenage girl who has had a tough upbringing which began with her family fleeing from Poland due to political tensions in her neighbourhood of 'Ursynow' between her father who was head of the local communist party, and the local Neo-Nazi political group who chronically vandalised her family home, they finally fled when her house was petrol bombed and her father was brutally beaten. After this her family fled to Miami in America as they had family living and working there. As Veronica entered her teenage years she began to experiment with drugs and alcohol, once her parents discovered she had developed an addiction to Methodrone, her family spent their life savings sending her to a top treatment clinic in Chicago, which she escaped from in a desperate state to score some more Methadrone. She from then on severed connections with her family and spent the last few years of her life alone and fending for herself by living in abandoned houses and industrial estates, being left no other option to make

money Veronica reluctantly turned to prostitution as her only means to fund her addiction.

iLL Manors was a huge inspiration in the construction of the character of Veronica, the story of a teenager getting an addiction to hardcore drugs and becoming destitute is not an uncommon one, which we felt was well portrayed in iLL Manors as the character Michelle was portrayed as a stereotypical drug addict in the form of most of her behaviour (eg, prostitution, petty burglary, etc) but also shows a different side to her which is unexpected and widens our views on her due to breaking the typical behavioural conventions of a drug addict. Below is a short clip of the actor who plays Michelle explaining the fundamental factors of her character.


Rodney (crime lord) -

Rodney is the leader of the crime syndicate that has main control of the criminal underworld of chicago. He was born and raised in the Eastend of London where he became a notorious drug kingpin who was responsible for most of all the cocaine, cannabis and firearms in London. He is third generation Ghanaian and he started his criminal life when his uncle used to send him on little 'jobs' around his area (delivering pay as you go phones to his uncles contacts). As Rodney grew up he started taking bigger jobs and climbing up the criminal hierarchy until his uncle was kidnapped from his home by a rival gang and executed. Rodney then started taking over his uncles position when he reached twenty five and became the notorious man to fear by the time he was twenty eight. He expanded the business from drugs to firearms which he was arranging to be brought in from the west indies and latin america, but while inspecting a shipment of automatic weapons from Peru a rival gang stormed his warehouse headquarters and killed most of his men and left Rodney with bullet wounds to the leg, arm and a punctured lung. The rival gang soon took over his business killing all Rodney's associates, and putting a price on his head. Being too dangerous to stay in London he fled to the United States and settled on Chicago as he had associates who were controlling the synthetic drugs trade in from the Canada to the north of the United States. He started recruiting within the Chicago crime syndicate and he and his new crew executed the bosses much like the rival gang had back in London and took control of the operation. He started to branch out into pimping prostitutes to bring in more money and expand his drugs market. He has remained anonymous by bribing political figures within the Chicago sector of the government, police officials, DEA agents and executives who control the press. He is rarely seen by anyone except his second in command, he never directly handles anything in his business unless absolutely necessary to prevent what happened in London happening again. He has built a small army of hired thugs, who wear the black suit and with no tie as an inconspicuous uniform to make his presence know in the criminal underworld.

The film iLL Manors shares many of the same narritive characteristics and the character 'Kirby' has also had a great influence on the construction of the character Rodney. They share alot of the same personality characteristics and desires.

Production ident logo updated

We already had our production ident logo, however we wanted to update it in order for it to look slicker and more professional than our previous one. We began by looking for a suitable hand drawn picture of a feather on google images, then Bruno proceeded to use the online photo editor 'LunaPic' to edit the colour of the feather. Bruno began by uploading the picture of the feather to LunaPic and then selecting the two tone colour option and then the colours we wanted to change it to.

This is how it looked after applying the colour change to the feather.



We explored with the colours we thought would fit our ident logo appropaitely which turned out to be orange. The orange we used it quite a dark orange, this represents the fierceness and deepness of our movies. We chose the font to be white in an itallic writing in order to stand out. We thought the itallic writing added to the mysteriousness of our production ident logo which is what we wanted to portray.

Film cover for our opening

Permission to use the 'J Dilla - Runnin' soundtrack

George Nolan who is a member of our group contacted Universal Music Group to inquire the permission to use the 'J Dilla - Runnin' soundtrack in our opening. He outlined that it was not for profit use but only for educational purposes. We still are awaiting a reply.

Film influences and comparisons

One film which hugely influenced the idea of our film was "Kidulthood" by Noel Clark. In this film teenagers are clearly targeted as the film contains generic conventions of an Urban Drama film. This includes having teenage characters, and encoding issues which are specific to teenagers into the narrative such as drug abuse, violence and teenage pregnancy - our media product shares these themes and youth subculture themes. Another factor that Kidulthood has in common with our film is the camerawork techniques, such as the high-angle shot used to show Katie after she has been pushed to the floor by Sam. This positions the audience to look down on her, which suggests how weak and defenceless she is towards her oppressors. This triggers the audience to feel sympathetic towards her. This is a similarity to our film as there is a scene where Veronica is being pushed around and beaten by her pimp Rodney which shows her powerlessness and fragility. Lots of close-up shots are used to portray Trevor's facial expressions when he is cutting the man's face.These help to convey how traumatising it is for him and how scared he is. Our fim also uses close-up shots to help magnify to the audience how real the emotions that Veronica is feeling are.

Characterisation

Veronica is the central character to our film and the only main character that is introduced into our title sequence. She is introduced accompanied with diagetic music, and later police sirens. This all helps indicate the type of area Veronica is in, which is a run down urban area with American inner city connotations. The non diagetic soundtrack which runs through the whole openning helps set the atmosphere and the representation of the narrative. The mise-en-scene is a low light, dull, gray urban envirnonment which helps reflects Veronica's negative outlook on life. The camera pivots around Veronica and does a close up of her face to show her expression, she sighs like she is exhausted from the stresses of life and then there is a blurring editing effect used to transition between the scenes which indicate the blurriness of her mind and life as she has a flashback.


Establishing shot

 

 



                                                                           Close up before flashback

Production companies that may distribute our film

My group and I looked into many distribution companies that would most likely distribute our film. The production company which we thought would be most appropriate was 'Revolver Entertainment'. One reason is because Revolver Entertainment has a reputation for distributing films similar to our chosen genre for example Kidulthood, iLL Manors and Offender. They also use have a range of ways for distributing their films for example cinemas, DVDs, blu ray, and now arguable one of the most important in the contemporary film industry online streaming and on demand. This is due to the convergence of media and the many different and more popular ways people access and watch films today. Revolver Entertainment clearly covers a range of distribution channels, and what we found very important is the use of social media as a marketing and distributing method for on demand and online streaming. What we discovered is that they use Facebook as a base site to redirect, advertise and stream movie files. This is a very appropriate way as Facebook as 1.06 billion active users worldwide meaning there is lots of potential internet traffic that attracts people to the site. Another way they attract people is by using promotional deals such as discounting the price of an on demand film by sharing the site to a friend, which will therefore increase the likelihood of that individual watching the film and repeating the same actions. Which will mean the site is marketed further. Another reason we were drawn to using Revolver Entertainment to distribute our film is because they also have experience from marketing and distributing films in England. We primarily would like our film to be marketed to the UK audience is because low budget films tend to be more widely watched and accepted within the UK whereas in the USA the films that gain large attention and audiences are usually big budget films with very famous actors and directors. Therefore we felt by targeting the UK audience would be more appropriate for our film to succeed. 

We also looked into 'Film4' as a potential company to distribute our film. Film4 is a well known and recognised UK institution that funds and commissions a lot of UK films. There is a high likelihood to receive their backing as it primarily targets to develop (new) British talent, and seeing as our film would be completely new on the scene it would be appropriate for them to distribute our film. We believe our film has some distinguishing features that can be seen as innovative for a British film which is what Film4 tend to look for. One other reason we were drawn to Film4 is because it has a huge audience and distribution channel. They commit to showing all their films and TV series on Channel 4 or Film4 Channel, which are on all TV cable/satellite distribution companies eg: Virgin, Freeview and Sky which indicates their huge audience across Britain. Channel 4 also has a good ethos which attracted us to them which sets them apart as a commercial broadcaster as its primary concern is to fulfill public needs instead of marketing its shareholders money.

Film proposal

Although my group and I discussed our film proposal amongst ourselves and decided what it would follow, Bruno took charge of writing the proposal which is as follows..

Plot:

Veronica is a young teenage girl from a refugee family living in Chicago, USA. She been abandoned by her family at the age of 13, the state do nothing to help her and she spent a lot of her life all alone and isolated. Unable to work or find a job as she was too young, Veronica turned to prostitution to survive until she was 15 until where one of her clients kidnapped her and brought her to his boss, Rodney. Rodney is a london born and bred crime lord who came to America to get away from people who wanted to escape from his enemies  and begin a new crime syndicate based on mass import and export of drugs and prostitution. Veronica was taken to Rodney and was offered protection and a place to stay in return for being pimped out by Rodney. Due to Veronica's desperation she accepted. Veronica spent two years under the thumb of Rodneys criminal organisation, having no one to turn to and nowhere to go she was virtually alone. Over the two years her anger and resentment grew towards Rodneys organisation for what they had done to her. She discovered where the money from rodneys criminal misdemeanours was kept before it was laundered. She had always managed to take a couple of notes when they weren't fully focused on the duffle bag filled with money. Her emotions got the better of her and she struck out at the men watching the bag, grabbed it and made a run for it narrowly escaping by jumping out of a second story window. Thanks to this she essentially painted a bullseye on her head and subsequently Rodney sent his hired 'goons' to go after her, kill her and get the money back. Veronica hidden her money in a place of great emotional sentiment to her as she knew it would be safer there than carrying it around with her. Veronica begins to spend her money on alcohol and drug fuelled night when she has a sad moment of clarity on a comedown from her methodrone high at the end of the weekend. She realised how alone she was and how empty her life is. She realised she now had the means to make something of herself and do something valuable. She spent the remaining money she had on her on various bus tickets to get her to Los Angeles in California. In the early hours of the morning she made a dash to get the duffle bag of cash and to begin her new life. When in California she met a social worker who was the first person she opened up to for the first time in her life and who she begged for to help. She was directed to some people who ran a charity called 'Children of the night' which helped child prostitutes be taken away from that lifestyle and dominating pimps. After having been helped by the charity, Veronica realised that the money she had stolen would be better put to use donated to the charity. The Charity was so grateful for the donation they wrote an article about her on their website http://www.childrenofthenight.org/index.html, it was through this became getting famous on national television, telling her story to the millions who watched and being a source of inspiration by the fact that she overcame her hardship. One night when Veronica was coming back from a fundraising event to her apartment. She heard the click of a pistol being cocked directly behind her head, and she died that night.

Length of film:
We want to keep it to be a short(ish) film as we want to have a sense of constant intensity throughout the film without having any scenes which are unnecessarily elongated, and also due to the fact that we are a small and independent production company we simply do not have the budget to afford the extra time of camera equipment rentals and actors wages.

Budget:
We are working with a relatively low budget of £300,000 due to the fact we are a small production company but also because the style of movie we are using is relatively inexpensive to make as it is done mainly with handheld cameras in urban environments to give the narrative a sense of gritty realism like you are right there with the main actor Veronica throughout her journey. We will apply to Film4 commissioning department to look for funding as they tend to try and support upcoming British directors and production companies.

Genre: 
The genre of our film is a gritty drama which encompasses characteristics and narrative conventions of other films and genres. The text of our film will fulfil some generic expectations of the genre, for example life or death situations, urban scenery, portrayal of a journey of a character development and the dramatic storyline that is supposed to move the audience emotionally.

Target Audience:
We are aiming to target young adults, as there will be aspects of the youth subculture, but the narrative of the film makes it accessible to people of all ages and social classes.
Our film will most likely be rated and 18 by the British Board of Film Classification. This is due to the fact our film contains a lot of sensitive topic, themes and graphic scenes. Our film contains: discriminatory language and behaviour, very strong violence, frequent strong language, strong portrayal of sexual activity, discriminatory and offensive themes.