3 Minute Short Film (New, Jordan's silent world idea)

This was my first meeting with my new group, which consisted of me, Jordan and Becki. The concept we would be working on dealth with a world where speech had vanished as a form of communication, instead people rely on other forms of communication, like technology or paper. We thought this meeting would be best spent by discussing the characters, settings and possible repurcussions or developments that could stem from a world with no speech, this is what we came up with(there's also parts of another idea that we discussed);

 

 

 

 

3 Minute Short Film (Cancelled)

For my three minute short film I decided to work with Alex Brand, we came up with multiple ideas but the concept we decided to go with was one concerning redemption, focusing on two characters who interlink as the narrative progresses, the story plays out like this; a girl is sat in her room, her room is very unusual for a girl's, it's dark and grubby theres ripped paper and broken items scattered around, aswell as strange violent pictures that she's drawn. We'd have her sat in a corner with a pair of scissors or a knife or something to that effect, she's sobbing but also evidently prepping herself up to do something. We then hear commotion downstairs, we don't see it as we just focus on her listening to it, until she gets up to see what it was, we then see a figure a standing over the presumably dead corpse of her dad on the floor, this figure doesn't realise that he's been spotted and just leaves, but not before the girl sees who it is. The idea behind the girl is that she's being abused by her dad, who hits her, she's finally had enough and begins to build up the courage to put an end to it by killing her dad. This is where the second character comes in, the male who breaks in and accidentily kills her dad whilst defending himself, the idea behind this character is that he's only stealing to try and eventually win back a family that he lost due to his choice of lifestyle years ago and irresponsibility. It is implied that he had no choice but to adopt this lifestyle using the things we see in his house, the way he grew up and the things that pictures in his house tell us. She would start to follow him out of a twisted sense of admiration and curiosity, whereas he would begin to follow her out of a twisted sense of guilt, he can't bring himself to apologise and give himself up, but wants to. They would gain redemption through another, through following each other they would learn what one another is about. I thought it should end with the man going to prison, but willingly, he feels like he can finally accept that he's done something to help and accepts his sentence, through this the girl would gain a new life, free of abuse and being held prisoner.

We got as far as location planning and scripting, which you can see a segment of below:

Scene 1

Cut To Scene

EXT – Outside House- Night

Ryan is walking down towards the house smoking a cigarette. He stops outside a house with no light on. He looks around and rushes to the door.

INT – Lisa Bedroom- Night

Lisa is sat on her bed crying, drawing a picture. She suddenly stops and stabs the picture repeatedly then falls back onto her back. She looks to her side and sees a picture of her and her mother; reaches out to grab it.

EXT – Outside House- Night

Ryan pulls up his scarf to cover his mouth. He presses up against the door and takes slow, deep breaths.

INT – Lisa Bedroom- Night

Lisa is no longer crying, she holding the knife and picture. She is standing by the mirror.

Off screen- Ryan breaks into the house.

Lisa hearing noise turns the music off.

Off screen- Ryan and father are grunting.

Lisa drops everything down and leaves the room.

INT – Stairwell – Night

Lisa peeks out and looks down the stairs, Ryan stops grunting and runs out the house. Lisa slowly makes her way down the stairs.

INT – hallway/living room – Night

Lisa looks into the living room revealing her father bleeding on the floor, dead.

Lisa

(Drops to floor, screams)

Ahhhhh!

Unfortunately this is as far as we got with this concept and both decided, after many weeks of development, that we had to drop it. Some of the scenes we wanted to include just weren't feasable and the narrative was going to be a bit too bloated and complex, we also struggled to think of more interesting scenes for the middle of the piece, we had the ending and the beginning figured out but we just couldn't decide on what would need to go in the middle. Because of this I thought it would be best to quickly help another group out whilst trying to come up with my own ideas. I decided to join Jordan's group as I liked his concept and thought it had a lot of potential to be interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

Halloween Freakshow Assignment

Me and three other students were approached by freakshow performer Dominic Ricioppo with an offer to film him during one of his performances at the Krazyhouse in Liverpool, however he made it clear that only one of us would be able to accompany him. Dominic explained that one of us would be granted free access to the venue aswell as having our accomodation paid for (hostel). This immediatly caused problems as we were all very enthusiastic about the chance to film something so unusual, I had definitly never filmed anything even nearly like it so I was very keen to go.



Fortunately we managed to solve this issue when we realised that as one of us drove, we could ask Dominic if we could all go and simply share the roles around. Dominic agreed to this and allowed us all to go, this was helpful to me as we were using cameras that I wasn't familiar with having not used them before, so it was good that there was atleast one student coming along that could explain how to use it. After having a look at the cameras and learning how to operate them on manual settings, aswell as getting acclimatised to the hostel we would be staying in, we set off to the venue with Dominic and his stage partner, known as 'Lurch'.



Upon entering the venue I was immediatly worried about the amount space available to film (it being a crowded nightclub full of intoxicated people) and whether the drunk people around us would become an unavoidable distraction. After we'd had a good look around the nightclub for good locations to shoot from we went and had a meeting with Dominic to figure out our roles and positions, we all decided that the best places to shoot from would be right infront of the stage, for close-ups, in the middle of the crowd, to get the entire stage in all at once and finally one at the back of the crowd so as to capture a wide shot of the whole event. I put myself forward for the role of standing amongst the crowd and filming the entire stage, this was because I'd spotted a platform earlier in the centre of the dancefloor which I could use to get a higher angle and film above the crowd to get more of the stage in shot.

As I had never used these cameras before I found it very challenging during filming as I had to try and adjust the exposure almost constatly as the lights in the nightclub were constantly altering and making it difficult to maintain the correct level of exposure. Also challenging was the amount of drunk people who couldn't seem to keep their hands of the camera or stop asking me film them (usually by pulling the lens towards them), this was got very frustrating as it would usually happen during a major part of their act and would cost me a shot or two that could have been very useful. Overall though I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to film something so strange and unusual and I thought that although the exposure was off quite a lot of the time, the shoot went very well overall and we came away with some usable and very interesting footage. Now that I know how to operate the cameras on manual settings much better there shouldn't be an issue with solving exposure and focus problems when I come to use them next time, so the experience was valuable in that it taught me what not to do with these particular cameras.  



The final video, which Dominic wanted up on his website upon completion, can be found in this link: http://officialsboy.wix.com/johnny-strange#!gallery/c1ko9