FMP - Rough Cut 2

The second Rough cut was a massive step up compared to the original cut. I had spent a few more days editing this and been extremely harsh experimenting by throwing different scenes from the narrative all over the timeline to see how they would play out. 

The first thing I did was change the start to do what people wanted and grab there attention. The most tense and serious scene I have from the footage is the one of Ali and Dom first coming across the Taboo file. Therefore I decided to take a leap of faith and throw that at the beginning. This grabs the attention of the audience as they want to find out what the file is, and then when it is mentions want to find out what the story/film has to do with such a sensitive topic; child porn. This propels them into the trailer and into the next few scenes, allowing me to lay down the foundations of the story. 

Then edited all the scenes to correlate with a song. I removed the MGMT song as I could find a way of including two 'blockbuster' songs in the trailer effectively. I re-matched a lot of the sound so it flows and is all in time with the actors as we were recording sound into an external zoom instead of directly into the C100.

There were still some blanks that were needed to be filled in and some of the centre sequence was out of time to the music. So that needs to be fixed. Overall this received a much better response than the first cut and watching this made me see the potential it could have. 

After talking to tutors and looking at the feedback given, I was told that it is best for me to try to cut down some of the scenes a little further as some drag longer than needed. Some of the scenes need to fade into each other to made the trailer flow better and some of the sound peaks in areas. Main thing I was told to focus on was to fill all the gaps as the cut can no where be looked at properly until it was full. Finally one of the things I spoke with my tutors was the length of the trailer. it was clear that for it to successfully show the narrative the trailer would have to be around 4 minutes which is more like the length of an extended trailer. Therefore I should maybe look into making a shortened quick teaser trailer as well.

FMP - Rough Cut 1

This is the first rough cut produced from the majority of the footage taken over the two day shoot. There are a lot of blanks still because I have thought of shots I want to re-shoot and include. Chronologically it makes sense and flows naturally with the storyline. From all the people that watched it, they understood what the story was about. However it doesn't look like a trailer, it looks more like a short film. 

It criticised for the lack of excitement throughout the trailer, the first two minutes are gripping. If they aren't dragged in at the beginning there is a very high chance they wont make it to the second half of the trailer, which means the trailer has failed as a salesmen to promote the film. 

After the first song was introduced along with the narrative from the main character, it picked up a more positive response. The editing was praised more and when the serious scene of the two characters coming across the dreaded file that shuts there sight down, people wanted to see more. The second song by One republic was enjoyed and said was a good song to make the trailer to and the final sequence was praised at looking very realistic. 

The main points I took from this preliminary cut was to grab the attention of the audience from the beginning and secondly to finish a fully music/sound edited cut. 

FMP - Week 7 Overview

Going into the final week I showed the rough cut to some people get there feedback and any ideas of what they would change. I already had a lot of ideas that had yet to put in place but after showing them it was clear that was a few scenes missing that I need to film to have all the footage for a potential final cut. I carried on creating new cuts each day of the week and gaining feedback.

Mid week I met with the main actors to finish of some final shots. After some conversing with my tutors and watching more trailers I decided to produce to final pieces. One shortened trailer which would be close to two minutes which was very harsh with the cutting of scenes to not lose the audiences attention during the video, as this was one of my main problems. 

The middle part was quite slow but needed to explain the direction of the trailer so I then produced an extended trailer just under four minutes which allowed me to include these vital scenes. 

Although I had spent a lot of time of some scenes and getting actors to practise for some shots, there were a load of footage and parts that I had to cut out from the final pieces. This was purely because they were not directly important enough to warrant the time they were taking out. 

One of the things tom said was not to be protective over your footage, if it unneeded then remove it, as it can provide a distraction to the foundations of the film or lose the audiences interest. Every second is vital.

After much stress, many edits and a lot of opinions being thrown around I am proud with my final piece. There are multiple things that I would improve upon in the future if I find the time/money, and ultimately I would like to take the foundations of the narrative and make an actual full length feature from it. 

FMP - Week 6 Overview

Through out the last five weeks I was roughly gathering actors and willing friends to be in my film trailer which was helpful going into this week. This week I was planning on filming the whole sequence to allow for editing. 

This meant I had to plan actors, script, locations, equipment, shot list's time-schedule and a hand ful of other things like props etc. The shot list was already finished as I wrote it at the same time of drawing the timeline. This allowed me to draw up a second shot list quickly splitting it into different locations, so when I was filming at that location I could film all the necessary films.

From this I found I needed a house, three individual unique bedrooms, a school, a field, a flat, a work place and some streets. I stuck to what I knew and contacted friends who had access to each to try and secure the places. 

Luckily after a handful of phone calls I managed to secure all of the places from my old secondary school, on a teacher training day meaning it would be empty, to a chemist who was closing for cleaning one day for an hour. 

Then I moved on to actors. There were a handful of significant characters I wanted to get to increase the believability of the trailer. If the trailer was filled with actors my age it doesn't look realistic so a comfortable age range was key. 

All the main characters were my age and then I used family like my mum, dad, little brother and his friends to play insignificant roles to the film but there inclusion just made more engaging. In total I managed to get 19 people to act for the film, all out of good will and a non existent budget (minus food and some expenses here and there). 

The trailer was filmed over the space of two very long days, towards the end of the week to allow plenty of time for editing and any reshoots that was needed. From all the footage at the end of the week, I honestly thought I had made a big mistake as the raw rushes just didnt seem to click. But after I chronologically cut all the scenes to fit the length of the movie, producing an extremely rough cut, I began to believe that the piece could be pulled off. 

FMP - Week 5 Overview

So starting Week 5 I decided to interview my friends and family on there view points on the values of friendship. I asked them a number of questions;


- What do you define as friendship?
- What do you think is the difference between a friend and a best friend?
- Has anything in your past broken up a very close friendship, if so what?
- What do you think is breaking the line of friendship, personally what wouldn't you want a friend to do?
- Can you name any films that show the roller-coaster and friendship can go through?


Each of the questions was aimed so that I can base the actions of my characters to relatable to the audience. The major themes that came across as taboo areas of friendship is lying, cheating with partners and drugs. Which is good because cheating was something I wanted to include in my story and this can easily include lying and deception. Drugs is a good platform to look at because it is something stereotypically linked to the "high life" so maybe one of the friends becoming addicted. 

Next I went and spoke to my tutors about the basics of writing a narrative and they pointed me in the direction of a few books I should look into. The first was called 'Story' by Robert McKee and the second 'The Writers Journey' by Chris Vogler. These were brilliant books as they taught to how to construct not a story, but a journey of a protagonist(s). They broke the ideas of 'story' up and showed me that I have move a character from A to B but to establish this process of getting to B I really have to understand what B is and why someone would want go through so much to really get there. There was a number of different concepts and themes that I discovered, like the three levels of conflict a character can go through, depending which state he is conflicting, or how to naturally show the exposition without shoving it in the audiences faces. 













After this I came up with a basic storyline which matched the aims of my original proposal. In my eyes I thought it worked but first I needed to run this by others, to give an unbiased view on my ideas. 

Over the last few weeks I has made it my mission to watch as many films as possible to grab and propel ideas into my FMP. I have kept an review book that after watching every film I wrote a review and talked about the things I disliked and liked. After talking to my tutors and confiding in friends about my idea, and looking through this book, I realised that there needed to be a bigger bombshell in the story to make it more exciting. Something that would completely throw the audience and protagonist off guard and turn his world upside down. After looking into different things my research ahs shown me in the past about splitting relationships apart I wanted something that was extremely taboo to social norms and society, in which I came up with the idea of child porn. 

I then began to rewrite the storyline around this bombshell and produced a final narrative that not only I was happy with but interested everyone that I spoke to about it.

FMP - Week 4 Overview

With week 4 I now started to look at how to put together a film trailer, in terms of editing the sequence and the basics for writing the story for a film. I read a few articles that covered lots of fundamentals that apply to certain genres and styles of trailers. These all taught the rights and wrongs behind a different trailers and showed the actual importance of a movie trailer. One quote I especially liked from an article I found was relating editors to cooks; "Editors, particularly trailer editors, are like cooks. They take their footage (their materials) and boil them down, condense them and extract their essence in order to flavour the overall meal" They in theory extract the key points of a story to allow the audience to build up an idea of the film.

I also learnt about the different stages of a trailer, the three Acts to a trailer. Act 1 is introducing the characters and the world the story is set in. Act 2 is complicating the characters world with obstacles for the protagonist to overcome and then Act 3 is intensifying this conflict and ratcheting up the tension to increase the excitement and risk drawing the audience in. 

There were so many small points that I personally had picked up upon from watching trailers that these different articles reinforced, showing me that I was heading in the right direction (which was very comforting). 

I then decided to look at the continuity of trailers in relation to the chronological order of film. I found an article that dissected a handful of trailers from films that were all nominated for 'Best Picture' in the 2013 Oscars. 

These were; Silver Linings Playbook, Argo, Beasts of the southern wild, Lincoln and Amour. Originally I thought they would follow a very similar pattern, even though I did not know what this pattern would be, if they were all to be nominated for the my prestigious award at Oscars (in my eyes). However I was completely wrong and quite polar to each other. 

The two most films I enjoyed the most; Silver Linings Playbook (SLP) and Argo were briefly similar in shape. SLP followed the generic start to finish route in the trailer with the end of the trailer falling into a bit of madness which is what I expected, however Argo jumped between end scenes and early scenes constantly. This is obviously to grab the attention to the audience as the all the visually stimulating scenes are at the end of the film. This is something I may want to expand upon myself to grab the attention of the audience. 

I then decided to visit a couple of exhibitions, to any last inspiration before fully developing my storyline. I went to see Richard Hamilton at The Tate Modern and Martin Creed at the Hayward Gallery, I also went to the British Film Institute (BFI) to have a look around the library and their archives. Although I did come across some very interesting topics and ideas especially in the Martin Creed Exhibition, I didn't find anything that made me think "Wow, I should do something like that". Nothing directly correlated to my subjects which was a little annoying. If there was anything that I honestly took away influenced from the exhibitions is too look into more of the substance of what stands in front of you. 

In Richard Hamilton there were pieces of art which give different pictures when look at from different angles, so may be allow the audience to be able to reason with actions from different characters? In which case what sort of events would make people think of taking sides. These are all things I can take into writing my narrative. 

FMP - Week 3 Overview

During this week we were set a new task as part of an experimental stage, this was supposed to trigger new ideas from other students that we could expand expand upon and maybe relate to ourselves. We would put in groups with students from other platforms for example fashion, graphics or 3D so that we were forced to mix with other students we wouldn't normally cross. This meant we were cross ideas across different platforms of medium

At first I was really rebellious to this, because it took a week out of our original project which for the project I am currently working on, time is very important. But after time I kinda came round to it and saw the reasoning for the week so there was no point in just spending a week wasting time. I was paired with two girls that were constructing an animation, and two girls that were working in graphics. There subjects were extremely diverse and there was no way we could directly produce a piece of work that related to all of our subjects. 

In that case we just started to list ideas and concepts for pieces of work that we found exciting rather than stuff were already working within. In which we came across playing with light and fireworks. With past experience in photographing fireworks I brought up the idea of steel wool and we looked into different shapes and pictures we could construct from taking long exposure photographies of sparks from lit steel wool. I went out and took some photos with two of the girls creating a number of shapes and then the graphics girls played around with the images in photoshop.

Eventually we came up with a final image of the rough shape/outline of man made from the buning sparks. Although this doesn't relate to my project it can be a physical representation of a persons inner strength and power. The main thing I took away from this week was to look at the project with a more open mind rather than fixating about guidelines and rules. Sometimes the best things come from breaking the rules and going against what you'd naturally think.