Possible review pictures

These are two possible picture ideas for the review

Film review - Draft (not finished)

Imagine if you had the chance to save someone you despise - would you?

 A new trio of directors give a new perspective on life and death from a concept that has been explored in the cinema before. The directors: Ella Blunden, Alea Holland and Rebekah Smith who also star in this short film created an idea of focusing on a girl who gains abnormal abilities to see how long people have left to live, represented by timers that rest above their heads. The fact that these timers exist in the eyes of the protagonist, played by Ella Blunden, seems to be the main focus of the film as it is presented as a silent movie with no dialogue to be heard so the visuals are what draws the audience in. However the main focus is the plot point towards the end of the narrative. The protagonist is presented with a situation to save the bully from their impending fate but an open ending doesn’t confirm if their fate has actually been sealed or not. This concept is one of the stronger features of this short film as it is visually interesting and the idea of playing around with time does put a lot towards the overall appeal of the film as the rest of the components consist of a slow character driven narrative and the camera work used is quite simple but nevertheless effective.

One of the main criticisms that stand against this film, apart from a slightly incoherent narrative, is the suicide scene. The problem does not lie in the whole idea of seeing a person take their own life as people may suspect, merely that the effects used are felt not to be realistic but with a low budget film with limited equipment, jumping from a multi-storey car park without causing any harm to your actors in a realistic way is something that is very difficult to achieve. Nevertheless it still provides a shocking moment in the narrative and the effects provided for the timers in the majority of shots are done extremely well.

The film at first watch without any background knowledge can prove confusing to the audience so it is something that may need to be watched again on a separate occasion, it needs more contextualisation to be understandable. It is clear that the subject of the film is inspired by other media such as Nickleback's 'Savin' Me' and does possess some similar themes to another short film that was released on Virgin Media shorts a little while before this but its execution is done in a more different and though provoking manner. In short it is a solid a concept that grabs you from minute one and never lets you go, even if one of the main reasons for staying focused is having to rack your brains to figure out the overall plot, however it does still provide a level of enjoyment.

FINAL version of our film

This is the final edit of our film with the sudden cut to black at the end and credits

Our final film

here is the final version of our film complete with sound. Below is the version without sound effects and music for comparison.

Film Poster draft - Ella

These are the some of the basic ideas for our film poster, we all came up with the same basic idea for waht we thought the poster would look like so went with that idea. For the background we have used a picture we have taken on location in Croydon town center. There are still some things to add onto the poster but all of us have decided that the first and fourth poster designs are the ones we like the most so either one of them is the one that will we use for our final design. So far what features on the poster is: our finalised title, production logo, production block, age certificate, website, sound format and funding. We have used the UK film council for funding, we originaly thought that the film council had already been disbanded but we discovered that they are ceasing in April of this year so we can still use it as a source of funding.

Editing Completion - Alea

We have finally finished putting together our short film today but we have enountered a few problems along the way. The main one being that we actually missed the final deadline for the film to be complete by one working day. Animating the timers onto the characters and the members of the public in the background took up a lot of the time during editing as it is a time consuming process making the timers follow the people by animating them frame by frame which took up over 60 video timelines on Final Cut and then waiting for it all to render and I did spend all my free time working on them to try and get them done on time as the other group members didn't have as much free time. The second signifcant problem that occured was trying to find appropriate music for our piece and this is what pushed us passed the deadline and we had so little time to attempt to find good music and edit it along with sound effects that were necessary to replace the ambient sound that we had to remove as while filming on location there was a lot of sound we couldnt use. eg. a busking violinist in the town center that came across quite loudly in our clips. Looking at the music that was available in garageband e decided that there was nothing that we thought really fitted with our so we looked at the Incompetech website to see if there were any tracks there that ew could use. It took a long time to locate the music that we eventually used in our final piece as again we could'nt find anything we really liked and suited ther mod of our piece. Eventually I came across the pieces 'Awkward Meeting', 'Lightless Dawn', 'On the Passing of Time' and 'Long Note 3' whilst searching at home and we decided that that was as close as we could get to the kind of music we wanted so used them in our final film.

Editing - January 17th - Alea

We are now working on placing the timers on people's heads. We have had some difficulties doing this, for example when people pass behind objects or other people, but have been able to work through these problems as we are getting used to working with different effects on Final Cut Pro. The tasks we still face with editing are finishing the timers as there are some scenes we eel that look a bit bare in the background so timers will be added onto the members of the public who appear in shot, finalising the transitions and adding the music and sound by Friday.

Working our way through editing the timers in the scene where the main character walks through the town center. There are a lot of people that appear in the frame and we have to do timers for most of them to make the scene look how we want it and not that only selected people have the timers.

Here you can see how we animate the actual movement of the timers. The movement of the characters and the camera determines how many keyframes we need so the timers follow the characters smoothly. In this shot the camera pans from right to left and moves forward so we essentially have to animate if frame by frame as the people move alot from one frame to the next. All the green squares you can see shows the keyframes where we have to animate the timers movement, the clip itself isnt very long but there is still alot to do. Also for those people whos timer numbers are clearly visible, we have to make the mumbers count down. On Final Cut there is no way to do that automaticaly so we have to manualy change it so we animate the entire duration the timer is on screen, copy the text, paste it above the original text so it is in line, go forward 25 frames which is one second in real time, cut it, change the last number of the timer and repeat the process untill the end of the scene.

Poster ideas - Ella

Film Poster Analysis

The composition of the people in relation to their surroundings creates a sort of line up which is used in mugshots when at a police station, which suggests they could be involved in a gang or crime in the film.

The title "This Is England" is all written in grainy, bold capitals and in the colours of the union jack, which suggests strength and unity with the characters. This is emphasised by the tagline "Summer 1983. A time to stand out from the crowd," which although they seem to form a 'gang' sort of pose, they still each have their own identities and each "stand out from the crowd" - which is also shown by their 'alternative' choice of costume. For example, the character dressed in a white suit (different from the rest) could have a more dominant and leadership role in the gang as he stands out from the rest.

At the top of the poster, there are reviews from well known, high class newspapers and magazines which could attract viewers and draws in their target audience. It also shows awards the film has won, which again attracts the target audience to watch the film because a reliable source is telling them it is a 'good' film to go and watch.

The background of the poster, already suggests to the audience where the film is set - an urban location in England, shown by the tall block of flats behind the corrugated iron fence which the characters are standing in front.

Short Film Poster Idea

This is my first draft sketch of my poster idea. The female protagonist is shown central of the poster in a street, with people in shallow depth of field walking past (with timers above their heads). I thought a possible title for the film could be ZE:R0 which could be in a style similar to the timers which other characters have surrounding her.

This is the same idea, just scanned into Photoshop and I made the outline clearer and darker.

Poster Analysis and Plans - Alea

Analysis for 'Submarine'

Genre of this film would appear to be social realism from the fact that the poster mainly consists of the protagonist of the film in the center of the poster so one would asume it is a character driven film. Gender representation doesn't seem to be a main feature of this poster. With a slight art syle on this poster its possible the film itself my have some innovative media techniques with the filming. 

Analysis for 'Fish Tank'

This poster clearly shows the genre of social realism from the background as it is set in a realistic urban environment which is a convention of social realist films. This films audeince appears to be a teen audience as they would be able to relate to the character becuase the character is around that age group.

Idea for short film poster

This is my initial idea for a possible poster we could make. The main character is to the lower left of the frame and takes up a large amount of white space, abover her is the title for our film in the style of the timers that appear above peoples heads and will be just above the center of the poster. The background is of one of the settings that appears in the film - high street in Croydon - but is not a still from the film and would be in shallow depth of focus so the background is still recogniseable but the main focus of the poster image is the main character as the story centers around her. People are seen in the background with blurred timers over theier head. Cast list is at the top of the frame and goes with the conventional form of most important actor on the left and least on the right. The production block along with information of film funding is in the bottom right corner of the poster and is alligned to the right, same as the reviews/ awards from papers above it to best fit the background. At this moment in time im not sure if there should be a directors title on the poster as we all have had an element of direction in our film.

Poster Idea - Rebekah

This is a draft of a poster idea that I have, when we went into Croydon yesterday we took some pictures that we could use for our poster some of them that we took was similar to this, we wanted to take different shots because then we could have a bigger idead of what one we liked the most and use that for the poster.

As our film is about a girl who can see numbers on top of people's head that is where my idea for the poster came from, a similar idea that I had was where the main character is in the middle of the poster and people are all around her with the title at the top.

 

The King's Speech Poster. The Ttitle is bigger then the other wring and in gold to show royality the dot on the i is a crown to also show royality. The two main character are at the side of the screen show different that there maybe two different sides to the story or what's happening. Comments and ratings from The Daily Mail to show what audience this is for as well as the main characters name going from the left to right above the title and then underneath the title. 

Anugs, Thongs and Perfect Snogging poster. The main focus of the poster is Georgia and the thoughts and feeling thats above her a long with the white background. The white background can represent purity or change. Georgia is wearing dull clothes however her pose is not one a lot of people can do,this could be to show that she is different from the rest not simple. The thoughts and feeling that seem to be coming out of her head are bright and stand out a lot as she has a lot of different things in there, her friends her love and her hates as well as where she lives and what she wants to forget and what she wants her life to be like. The title is not in capital and they used a dark blue font that match with her trousers this could be to represent a teenage life. The kiss at the end of the title is to represent the themes of the film which show in the title, it was a book before it became a film which was called Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, they could have changed it because they thought that it would be less of a long title and it would fit to the audience more.

Filming and Editing - Rebekah

Yesterday we went back to Croydon to do the last bits of our film it went really well and we managed to get everything we needed. Today we put everything we filmed yesterday on the Mac and we went through it to see which ones were the best ones to use and then we went onto editing it.

We didn't get to do a lot of editing today but we are going to do more tomorrow and the rest of the week up until next Friday. The bits that we did edit was where the main character was getting on a train after she has witnessed, throughout the week we have to add all the numbers on top of peoples head to show how long they have left to live as well as to add the music.

Problems with filming:
We did go to Haywards Heath more urban areas before as we thought we would be able to film and people would think it would be Croydon because we thought if we went back to Croydon it would take longer however it didn't work out and didn't look good with our other clips we also needed to find a time to film as all three of us were busy.

Editing and filming

^ Showing the basic structure for the scenes to be edited together


Yesterday we did some more filming in Croydon as there were some shots the required re-filming and also we felt we needed to film some additional 'traveling' shots  so the cahracter doesnt just jump from one scene to another. We used our time in the lesson to edit together most of our film, however it was only a basci edit as at this time we are not entirely sure on how much of a shot we want to use as we feel that we are going to struggle with getting it up to 5 minutes and also we have ot consider how many people are int he shot as we are anticipating that edintg the timers onto people is going to take up a lot of our time.