Logo Developments

As we were nearly at the editing part, we decided to start thinking about the production name and logo. this involved us doing some intensive research into different possible production names before we could start doing a Logo.
A few names we came up with were:

• Pipedream Productions
• Spooks Productions
• Initive Productions
• conception Productions
• perspective Productions
• prescience Productions
• standpoint Productions

Our favourite idea was Pipedream productions. We started playing around with the idea of having a physical pipe with dreams coming out of it. We were really happy with our progress with it, however we were not sure if it fitted with the negative story line of our film.

 

However, we continued to develop the logo further. However, we still felt that the idea of more happier and inspiring production names were not right for the film.

After going back to the drawing board and thinking of other production names, we thought more about the film. We decided that in the film, we liked the eye scenes a lot. We then began to play with the idea of an eye being the symbol of the production name. Some names suggested were:

• Vision Productions
• Iris Productions
• Pupil Productions
• Sight Productions 
• Forsight Productions

We went on the internet to find copyright free images of eyes and found this one. Although the eye isn't the prettiest, we thought we could play around with it to make it spooky.

 

We then added darkness around the eye to make it more spooky and also so it would blend in with the black background of the film. We found this much more effective because in the eye above, you focus not only on the eye, but the skin around it.We also made the blue more blue by intensifying the colour more.

We then used brushes in photoshop to add subtle eyelashes. these added to the spooky style we were hoping for. They also made the image look more complete rather than just blurred out with black.

After deciding the fonts we thought we wanted to use, we added our final production name with our logo. We are very happy with the logo and production name, and as a whole we think it fits the style of the film well!

Next we will be editing some more of our footage. We have also decided to refilm a selection of our scenes to make them more interesting, so they will be on soon!

Font research

After much research and planning for our Production name, we have decided to call it Foresight Productions. We like this name because its interesting, unique and it fits with our film style.

Once we had decided on a production name, We decided to start looking into different font types and styles we could use for the logo and throughout the titles of our film opening. Here is a selection of possible font types and styles we have considered.

We decided we didn't want a font which would say too much about the type of film we have, for example a scary or sinister style font for a scary movie, but we also wanted an interesting font that could be used to make the titles not boring.

Next we will start making our logo!

First day of production!

Yesterday evening, we had our first day of production. We had planned to complete all the setting up of the cellar (Alices Garage) so when we come to filming it, it will save time so the filming will go smoothly.


This is the garage before starting to clear it!:

This Photo is Alice, and we've nearly finished the clearing!

Finished!

This is when we decided to make drawings which the children could of drawn to place on the wall.

The first day of production started by us arriving at Alice's house to clear a space in her garage. When we got there, we started moving some of the stuff to the other side of the room. When we had cleared a space, we started to think about where we would position the camera so that we could hide the garage door. Then we decided that from looking at pictures of the actual cellar, Elisabeth had put up lots of drawings that her children had made. So we decided to make some drawings to make our scene more realistic. These will be put behind the TV to make it look more like what we wanted. We came across one problem which was that we couldn't get hold of an old style television. We have decided to try and find one by friday, so that it shouldn't affect our filming. at this point, once we had left everything set up, there was little we could do without the TV, and also by this point we were getting tired, we decided to call it a night. I think our first day of filming went really well because we managed to get the majority of our setting up done.


Changes to the Schedule
Originally, Monday was kept aside for setting up the set, Tuesday was filming, Thursday was filming and so was Friday. However, there has been some crutial changes in the schedule due to other arrangements for Georgie and Alice. This affects two of our filming days (Tuesday and Thursday).
Now, we have scheduled Friday 4th as first planned to film, and also Monday 7th and hopefully Friday 11th if we need it. 
This has been a problem because it's put our timings back a week, but if we keep to schedule completely, we should get all our filming done in time.

Our finished Animatic

This week, we completed our Animatic (Below). We didn't want to spend to much time on making it look really good when it isn't necessary, so we stuck with a basic idea of how the film opening will look using our existing storyboard.

We also started considering the other parts of the planning which need to happen before we can start shooting. We finished our shooting schedule which will be massively helpful for us to keep to deadlines in order to complete everything for our final deadline. We have allowed one intensive week for filming. This allows us to hopefully get all the filming done in one week so we can start the editing, which takes the longest.

Here is our plan:

Monday 28^th February

Set up all the scenes, especially the Cellar (Alice’s garage) to make filming for the rest of the week smoother.

Tuesday 1^st March

All Cellar Scenes- the TV scenes and the eye scenes.

Wednesday 2^nd March

(Nothing to happen on Wednesday due to other arrangements for two of the film crew)

Thursday 3^rd March

Little girl scenes + any other scenes

Friday 4^th March

Sleepover Scene

(Monday 7^th March & Tuesday 8^th March As spares if we do not complete everything)

We believe if we keep to this schedule, we should be able to make our filming work all in one week which would be fantastic!

An inspiring video we found

When we were searching for different videos and sound track ideas for our film opening, we came across this video which somebody has created. We not only liked the beginning of the sound track (which was the reason for finding the video) but also the imagery was also very relevant. What appears to be the child and a fathers relationship is showing with a spooky noises in German. The filters on the whole video in a sepia style was also very effective.

This week, we have also completed more of the animatics which we have nearly finished,and i will blog them this week!

Storyboarding our ideas

We have finally finished our storyboard of our ideas of settings and sequence. We have also decided the name. We have chosen Amstetten, This is the name of the town where the event took place.Storyboard of Amstetten

The next step now we have completed our storyboard is animatic.

What Exactly is an art house film?

Seeing as we have chosen a brief which we know little about, we thought it would be useful if we did some background research on not only about the event, but what defines an arthouse film.

Basic Definition?

An arthouse film is typically a serious, independently made film aimed at a niche audience rather than a mass audience. 

What conventions does an arthouse film include?

An arthouse film usually  includes, a social realism style, a very distint style or emplasis of the director, and a focus on the thoughts and dreams of characters, rather than presenting a clear, goal-driven story.

Art films are aimed at small niche market audiences, which means they can rarely get the financial backing which will permit large production budgets, expensive special effects, costly celebrity actors, or huge advertising campaigns, as are used in widely-released mainstream films. this is a convention of an arthouse film because it shows how little money they have to produce a film, and they have to rely on talented producers.

From the research i did on Art house films, i have summarised the main points that in my opinion are the main points we must consider. Here are the conventions that makes an art house film an art house film:

1. Art house films rarely have a feel good quality.
2. They may make us feel smarter or more wise about the world.
3. They tell the truth about the world or an event.
4. They have no famous actors/actresses, just unheard of talent.
5. Very low budget films, but heavily relies on talented directors.
6. It doesn't have a general frame because there is no rules.
7. It faces topics that conventional films don't consider, E.g. Prostitution, drugs.
8. It includes different formats and ideas (unusual)
9. The director can be as imaginative as they like.
10. The film usually would have a message which makes you think out of the box.

After reading and exploring about the art house themes conventions, i'm confident that our film opening will follow the aspects of an art house film so the brief will be fulfilled. 

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:

1977	Fritzl begins sexually abusing his 11-year-old daughter, Elisabeth.
1981 to 1982	Fritzl begins to turn the hidden cellar into a prison cell.
August 29, 1984	Fritzl lures Elisabeth, now 18 years old, into the basement and imprisons her.
November 1986	Elisabeth has a miscarriage in the 10th week of pregnancy.
1989	The first child, Kerstin, is born, and lives in the cellar until 2008.
1990	Stefan is born. He, too, stays in the cellar until 2008.
1992	Lisa 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 1994	The fourth child, Monika, is born.
1994	Fritzl enlarges the prison for Elisabeth and her children from 35 m² (380 sq ft) to 55 m² (600 sq ft).
December 1994	Ten-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 1996	Elisabeth 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 2002	Felix 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, 2008	Fritzl arranges for the critically ill 19-year-old Kerstin to be taken to a local hospital.
April 26, 2008	During 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, 2009	After 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!

I Am Legend analysis

Our task was to analyse a film opening of our choice and think about the way that the director has achieved different atmospheres. We tried a few film analysis' in class together, then we were set our own one to do. I thought about what film that I thought had a good and interesting opening to analyse and decided 'I Am Legend' had an interesting chase scene but without choosing something obvious to analyse such as romances and horrors because a lot of them are very similar. It took me about 20 watches and pauses of the video before i knew what i could write, and then I print-screened all the interesting scenes and began to analyse them.

Heres the final Analysis! :