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Hey,This is my AS Media blog! I am going to be posting all my work we do on here, and I'm really enjoying the course so far! Thanks for reading! Alex x

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Organising the sequence


Ok, so we now are bursting with ideas of scenes we could include in our opening sequence, but in what order?!


We decided to start actually putting our ideas together, and organising the sequence before we story board. We definitely thought we needed a 'Cellar scene' in the opening somewhere, but we were unsure weather that should come first or second.


We decided that this sequence was the most effective!:



  • The first scene is a black screen, with titles rolling across, but in the background we can here Tv Noises in the distance as well as metal doors and footsteps getting louder. This signifies that danger may be approaching because Fritzl is coming.
  • The scene of Elisabeth fades in, and we see a figure standing in a low lit room (light only from the TV screen) watching a news report about Elisabeth.
  • As the noises gets closer, it builds suspense, and then the camera zooms into Elisabeths Eye to start showing the flashbacks.
  • Memory One. A shadow appears over a little girl holding a doll, and she reaches for her comfort blanket. we then shoot to her father touching her shoulder as she cuddles the blanket in.
  • We then snap back out to reality to see Elisabeth start to panic.
  • Then we go back into the eye for another flashback.
  • Memory Two. An older girl, still with the blanket at a sleepover talking about boys and sex, and the girl being withdrawn from the group conversation.
  • We then flash back to an even more concerned Elisabeth as we go into her third memory.
  • Memory Three. A quick shot of a baby bump

  • We then see the camera pan down from Elisabeth's eye to one of her hands - she is holding a piece of material which is implied to be the scrap of blanket she pulled off when the baby was snatched.
  • The Footsteps get closer and can be heard loudly and then Elisabeth cuddles the blanket in.
  • A man's arm reaches out of the darkness and switches off the television.
  • The screen goes black again like at the start.
Now we have a clear idea of what we want to do scene by scene, we can now start story 
boarding our ideas.

More ideas

We have a clear idea of what we want to achieve now we have chosen Fritzl, but actually choosing the scenes is our next step. We decided we would brainstorm some ideas down.


The 'Cellar' Scene
In this scene we can see Elisabeth in a low key lit room which appears to be dark and dirty with a sihlouette of a girl watching a TV report. Alice in our group made a mock up of the idea in Photoshop which is below.
Made By Alice Clark (One of the members of our group)


The flashbacks
We have quite a few ideas for the 'flashbacks', but each of these could happen as if the film was starting from her young age rather than flashing back from when she's captured to when she's young.


Young girl with a toy, which signifies the innocence of a young girl before the horrific things which would be described in the rest of the film.

A teenage sleepover with Elisabeth very withdrawn from the group when they talk about boys. This event is described by one of her friends in the documentary we watched.

A Pregnant woman which would be Elisabeth who would have to look very young which is based on the true story.






Time Lapse
The time lapse idea was to try and capture the time scale of how long Elisabeth was trapped, for example filming the sky changing?


The architect drawings
We found out in the documentary that Fritzl got planning permission for the extension, but then illegally extended the extension more (the Chamber). Because Fritzl extended, he would of had to plan his extra build, so a pan over some architectural drawings was an idea.


Opening a safe door
This could be a really effective way of symbolising how Elisabeth was kept.


A Man luring the girl into to the cellar
Apparently, according to our research, he lurred her into the trap by asking her to help lift a door, and then trapping her. This could be an interesting film starting point.




Now we have decided our main ideas, we next week need to start deciding the order and camera angles for each idea and start putting them together before we storyboard!

Josef Fritzl Research


As we had decided to make a film on a specific case, we had to research further on what actually happened to know what we could use in our film opening. We did this by all three of us logging onto a computer and researching what he was really like and the actual events which lead to the capture of Elisabeth. We watched documentaries of what happened and read reports which described the poor conditions which Elisabeth was kept for so long.






(This documentary has other parts which carries on)
This is The Documentary which we watched. It explains in detail about how Josef fritzl got away with the hostage for 24 years, it also shows a 3d remake of the eight passages and doors to get to where Elisabeth and her children were kept.


On Wikipedia, we found a timeline which best describes the sequences of events:

1977Fritzl begins sexually abusing his 11-year-old daughter, Elisabeth.
1981 to 1982Fritzl begins to turn the hidden cellar into a prison cell.
August 29, 1984Fritzl lures Elisabeth, now 18 years old, into the basement and imprisons her.
November 1986Elisabeth has a miscarriage in the 10th week of pregnancy.
1989The first child, Kerstin, is born, and lives in the cellar until 2008.
1990Stefan is born. He, too, stays in the cellar until 2008.
1992Lisa is born. In May 1993, when she is nine months old, she is discovered outside the family home in a cardboard box, allegedly left there by Elisabeth, along with a note asking for the child to be looked after.
February 1994The fourth child, Monika, is born.
1994Fritzl enlarges the prison for Elisabeth and her children from 35 m² (380 sq ft) to 55 m² (600 sq ft).
December 1994Ten-month-old Monika is found in a stroller outside the entrance of the house. Shortly afterwards, a phone call is made to Rosemarie, apparently, from Elisabeth. The caller asks Rosemarie to take care of the child. However, it is assumed that Fritzl was able to use a recording of Elisabeth's voice to make the call. Rosemarie reported the incident to the police, expressing her astonishment that Elisabeth knew their new and unlisted phone number.
May 1996Elisabeth gives birth to twin boys. One dies after three days; Fritzl removes his body from the cellar and cremates it. The surviving twin, Alexander, is taken upstairs when he is 15 months old. He is "discovered" in circumstances similar to those of his two sisters.
December 2002Felix is born. According to a statement by Fritzl, he kept Felix in the cellar, together with Elisabeth and her two eldest children, because his wife was not able to look after another child.
April 19, 2008Fritzl arranges for the critically ill 19-year-old Kerstin to be taken to a local hospital.
April 26, 2008During the evening, Fritzl releases Elisabeth from the cellar along with her sons Stefan and Felix, bringing them upstairs, informing his wife that Elisabeth had decided to come home after a 24-year absence. Later that evening, after an anonymous tipoff during a visit to the hospital, Fritzl and Elisabeth are taken into police custody where she reveals her decades-long imprisonment during questioning.
March 14, 2009After a 4 day trial in the town of St. Pölten, Fritzl pleads guilty to the charges of the murder by negligence of his infant son/grandson, Michael, as well as the enslavement,incest, rape, coercion and false imprisonment of his daughter, Elisabeth, and is sentenced to life imprisonment.

From all the research we did, we decided that Josef Fritzl was definitely the case we would like to base our film opening on. Once we had carried out the research, we felt much more confident about getting it right, and choosing the right themes throughout the opening!

Initial thoughts and feelings about The Opening Sequence


In this post, i'm going to describe our thoughts and feelings about each brief and explain why we picked the brief we did, and our first inspirations about carrying out the brief. 

We recently found out the choices of briefs we have to choose from. The 4 briefs have all been to challenge us and to take us out of our comfort zone. The Briefs are:

Film Brief 1
'A mainstream action film that will appeal to 15-25yr old males Your film should appear to be based on a "fictional" comic book.'

Our thoughts on this brief:
The initial reaction to reading this brief is that it would be quite fun to produce, and would challenge our skills, however it is a film appealing to 15-25yr old males, which we agreed that none of our group have much interest in.
Film Brief 2'A supernatural thriller that will appeal to female audiences Your film should appear to be an international co-production.'

Our thoughts on this brief:
Initially, this is the brief that stood out to us the most seeing as all of our group were into horror films. This was a good option for us to do, and we were considering this one as our chosen brief.

Film Brief 3'An independent movie featuring a young protagonist Your film should appear to be financed through regional funding.'

Our thoughts on this brief:
At first, this brief also sounded quite  interesting, and we definitely had a lot of choice of actors/actresses with us being at a school, but we weren't too sure about many ideas for this one, so we left it as a possibility.

Film Brief 4
'An art house feature to appeal to adult audiences Your film should appear to be based on an actual event in the last 2 years.'
  
Our thoughts on this brief:
Our thoughts for this brief were overlooked at first for this brief as its not an obvious choice. Although, when we started researching the brief, we found that it could be a really effective opening sequence because there has been so many interesting events within the last two years.

The Decision
After some considering and research into each brief, we decided we would expand upon film brief 4. Our reasons for choosing this one is because we all seem to have good ideas about how we could carry out the film opening and also what event to do. 

The first thing we decided to do was to brainstorm events from the last two years. We had some ideas straight away, and we also searched on the internet some events. This is the list of events we came up with:

·         Swine flu
·         Haiti
·         Deaths in fordingbridge
·         Raoul Moat case
·         Josef Fritzl

When we had thought of Josef Fritzl case, we decided that this would be a really interesting film to make. We decided to research more into the case and what happened. When we started reading about the case, we were really interested in it because it was such a terrible thing.

As we researched more into Josef Fritzl and what happened, we started to think of Film names. if we thought of a name, we would write it down on a list. This is the list so far!


The Names for the film ideas:
Beneath
The unknown
Secure
Seven
Below
Under the house
Chained
Host
Lock and key
7 (there were seven children)
7+1 (seven children + Elisabeth)
Father
Amstetten (the town name of the house)
The Tyrant of Amstetten (His nickname)

when we started to think of names and look at the information, we also had some inspiration about how we could go about making the opening scene. This is also some initial ideas about what we could do in the opening:

Initial thoughts of opening scene:

Architech drawings- When Fritzl extended the house, he also illigally extended the house more than was given permission. This is where he kept Elisabeth.

A child playing- This could be Elisabeth as a child?

Lullaby song tune/spooky- By having spooky music, it would keep the creepy feel to the movie.

Time lapse- We could do a time lapse of the outside world with day and night flashing to give an illusion of days passing.

A teddy- Having a teddy bear as a key character of the opening symbolising how young the children were and all the years that Elisabeth missed out on through childhood.

Opening a safe like door- This could be like the enterance to the chamber.

 Thats all thats been happening in the early stages of pre production, i'l keep posting every week to record whats happening!

Our Group!

Recently, we were told we had to pick our group in which we will be doing ALL of our media project which is to create a film opening to a certain brief of our choice. In my group, is Georgina Barker, and Alice Clark who are also in my media studies class who are just as enthusiastic as me. I think we're going to get on well, and hopefully produce a good piece of work!
 
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