Risk Assessment Form

Our group had to complete a risk assessment form in order to identify hazards that could occur when shooting our film. It is extremely beneficial to us to know what potential risks there could be, so that we can try to prevent them and keep ourselves and our actors safe.

Filming Schedule

This is our groups schedule for planning out filming hours in January 2015. The day's highlighted in yellow are the days we have booked out the equipment (mentioned in my previous post) to film our thriller opening.

Equipment

A Camera Lens.











A Camera.











A Microphone.











A Boom Mic Pole.











A Tripod.











An SD Card.

Completed Storyboard For Thriller

This is our storyboard for our thriller "The Black Widow". We will use our storyboard to plan our camera shots, mise en scene etc. We don't have to stick to our storyboard but we can use it as a helpful guide.

Our One Page Pitch Q&A

Me, Georgina, Brandon and Amber were asked questions on our one page pitch which we explained in detail to our Media teacher, Mr Welch.

Our One Page Pitch

Film title: The Black Widow

Tag-Line: The female of the species is much deadlier than the male

The what if premise: What if the love of your life, the one you held closest to your heart, the one who you would do anything for, cross mountains and oceans for, betrayed you? What if the man, who promised to love you and to cherish you, no matter what, lied to you?  What if because of his poisonous and vile lies, everything you worked for and everything you’d treasured had come crumbling down?  What would you do? Could you forgive him? Or would you take your revenge?

Age rating: Our age rating is a 12. I looked at the BBFC regulations and have selected an age rating that I think will be appropriate to audiences. A rating of 12 seems suitable as our thriller will glaze over the murder scene so there will not be any graphic violence displayed. There will not be any scenes involving drugs or sex. However the theme will be mature and suitable for ages 12 and over.

Target audience: Our target audience will be between ages 12-25. We are targeting our film at young adults as we think that is a good age to target our thoughts about the issues raised in the media text. Our media text will be used as a form of escapism. It will be used for people to escape from reality and everyday life. The media text is used to provoke an emotion from the audience or can be used as a way of expressing ideas about the topic of the film with friends, family or acquaintances. We do not want audiences to be passive when watching our thriller; we want people to question our ideas and what happens in the film, as it will raise issues regarding gender empowerment and sexism.

Statement of intent: For our story, our theme is envy and jealousy, and how it can drive people mad. We have chosen to tell the story that we have to portray how delusional love can make people, and the drastic ending that one woman had to take when her love for a man was disrupted. For us as a group, we feel passionately about this subject, as although we haven’t personally experienced it, we know how being unfaithful can shatter someone’s heart. The feeling is unimaginable to comprehend, as the love of our main characters life betrayed her trust, as well as using the other woman. The audience, we feel, will care about this subject, as it is very commonly portrayed in the media and women’s feelings and thoughts are never shown.  In the modern day, we feel like the story of a man having an affair leaving a woman heartbroken and deluded, is appropriate to tell. Our aim is to make men think about their actions, as not many women will just forgive and forget. Our main woman character is strong, and although a murderer, her motive was that she either ended his life or hers, because she couldn’t take the news of his affair. We hope that the audience will feel the need for the story to be told, as it is an important aspect in relationships – and the gluttony of men or woman thinking they can have two loves, is sadly mistaken.  We have chosen to make our thriller a film opening, as opposed to a TV drama, as with TV drama characters can develop over time, whereas our characters we want their personalities to be clear throughout.

Plot: For our plot we have chosen to have many characters stood around a coffin, either viewing it in the morgue or crying, or around a grave. We want the characters to show emotion, to know that the loss has made a massive impact, and 2 women we want to stand out immediately, perhaps by cutaways from one to the other. But one noticeably crying, the other one noticeably looking angry ( the girlfriend and the one he is later revealed to have had an affair with ). For the second scene we want a clear flashback, where the main character BOB and his girlfriend MARY are shown in a montage of clips doing things together such as going on dates – the story of how they fell in love. After this we want a clear shot of suspicions, with MARY lurking around where BOB is, later to be looking out of a window and seeing BOB with the girl he’s having an affair with ( JESSICA ). After BOB returns from his affair that night, we see MARY look smiley and happy, however we (THE AUDIENCE) see she has a knife behind her back. We have shown to include the audience in dramatic irony, that she wants to kill him, as then they can infer for themselves what will happen, without actually being shown it.

Testing With Lighting

In lesson our group completed one of the extra tasks in order to prepare ourselves for our main task, the creation of a thriller film opening. For this task we experimented with different types lighting and shadows. We used artificial lighting (by holding up a torch against our models face in a darkened room) which allowed us to keep enough light so that the character could be seen, however still allowing us to use shadows in order to create a sense of darkness and mystery. Above are a couple of shots we were able to take, that we think were successful and could be useful when it comes to filming our project.

Sharing Ideas And Gathering Feedback From Our Target Audience

For our thriller our group decided to put forward some questions to members of our target audience, which is young adults, in order to find out what they thought about our ideas. Amber, one of our group members, asked them a few questions to get their opinions. As the three boys we questioned (Max, Gabriel and Frank) are also are in our school media class, they were able to make some comments on some of the suggestions we had and were also able to suggest how we could improve our ideas. Having another groups opinion will help us develop our ideas further and give us opinions about changes that should be made.

Initial Ideas For Thriller

Practice With Titling

In today's lesson we practised making titles using Adobe After Effects. I learnt how to blur titles in and out of the screen, I found this a very useful skill. I might use this effect in my main task.

Finished Preliminary Task

This is my finished Preliminary Task.

Completed Storyboards

This is the story board for our groups preliminary task, since making the storyboard we have made a few changes to our film from the ideas that we've presented on the storyboard. However we made sure to use the same camera shots as we originally planned, as well as a few others. 

Preliminary Task

Our preliminary is a continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he will then exchange a couple of lines of dialogue. 

The task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.