Final Film Opening

This is our final film opening 'Hostage'

Evaluation Question 7 - Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Evaluation Question 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Evaluation Question 3 - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 4 - Who would be the audience for your media product?

Before we started to film our opening we conducted some interviews for what we perceived to be our target audience of adolescent men and women, after further research we decided to narrow down our target audience to mainly men between the ages of 15 and 40. Above are our most recent interviews into our target audience. 

Our ideal audience member would be Will Holland (below) aged 16 who seemed to be most interested in psychological thrillers and fitted our criteria. 

Our previous target audience research

Evaluation Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When conducting research for our opening we created other blog posts exploring and discussing the typical features of a psychological thriller and a normal film opening, linked below.

Typical features of a psychological thriller

Typical features of a film opening

Production Title

This is our production company's opening title we cut it down and added sound effects, we sped up the film just as a brief recognition of our company which is seen in most film openings.

Final Storyboard

This is the final draft of our storyboard after completely updating our storyline.

Update

Actor Scouting

After shooting our initial film opening, as a group we decided that it would be much more engaging for the audience and almost more realistic in order to have a younger role play the hostage. Currently, our hostage actress is a middle- aged woman and we felt that was not appropriate for the genre as the usual target are young girls as they are vulnerable. Therefore, we attended a year 12 drama lesson during school hours so that we could scout for new actresses to play the role whilst they rehearsed.

Sound

 

This screenshot shows our build up of sound in the film opening. We hope to add more after re-filming, we used our own foley sounds (such as the plate smash) as well as the inbuilt sounds from iMovie with no copyright issues.

First Draft With Directors Commentary

This is the first draft of our film opening. We have included a directors commentary in which we discuss the things we need to change about the opening and the feedback we got from our first screening.

Questionnaire Results

4 people said they like our use of sound, and the build up of it, the other two like the storyline.

Some things people thought we should add are more context.

In response to this feedback we have received, we are going to re film some of our shots to make them flow better we are also planning to add some more context in order to increase the length and make the opening make more sense.

Opening Questionnaire

3 Point Productions film opening questionnaire

1)      What did you think of this opening?

GOOD                                   AVERAGE                                            BAD

2)      Did the opening make sense?

YES                                         NO                                         SORT OF

3)      In terms of continuity how good was the film on a scale of 1 to 10

1              2              3              4              5              6              7              8              9              10

4)      In your opinion what was the biggest problem with the opening/what would you change?

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5)      What did you like about the opening?

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6)      Is there anything you think we should add?

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7)      We are planning on a new name for our opening. Any suggestions on what we could call it?

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Health and Safety

Location:

With a new location of the derelict barn, potential precautions needed to be addressed. Any rocks or sharp materials were swept out of the way of filming so no one got injured. There were sheets of metal to one side so these needed to be carefully avoided. The barn also needed to be kept secure once all the filming was complete so after we had finished, we locked up the barn. 

Props:

As a hammer is a key object in our film opening it creates health and safety issues. Our actor was very familiar with using such an object so held it in the correct manner and used it sensibly. It was placed inside the toolbox when not in use, and the toolbox was then zipped up securely out of reach.

Weather:

As we were filming outside it was cold and wet as it was raining during the time. Therefore, our actors and ourselves needed to be equipped with coats, umbrellas and welling-ton boots as it was muddy in the field in which we filmed. Our equipment also needed to be kept dry so we had bags to carry it and keep it out of the rain. 

Foley Sound:

As we are using foley sound in our film opening, this requires us to smash plates in order to get the sound effects we need. We made sure that we were outside when smashing plates and did it on a hard surface as well as being a considerably far distance from the contact zone so we did not get hit by the remains of plates.. Once finished, we swept up all the remains of the plates and put them in the bin so that it would not cause any injury. 

Location Update

On the day of filming one scene for our opening (the grown man and his hostage) we had a change of location. Our location changed to this isolated and derelict barn situated in the middle of a field. The barn was a perfect location because from the outside it looks shabby and run down. From the inside the barn was well lit, so we had no problem with lighting, it also had hay and dirt all around which helped add to the atmosphere and build a more psychopathic look.

 The barn also had an extra cove which was where we filmed our hostage. Inside, the cove was full of hay and dirt which helped make the setting more realistic to the genre, we also managed to light the corner of the cove using a torch, held by the psychopath, which gave us some interesting shots and helped heighten the mood of the film.

We changed our location because on the day of filming, it began to rain therefore we were unable to film outside for many reasons (for example the actors makeup would smudge and the film equipment would be ruined). We overcame this obstacle by finding this barn very close to our original one, this location was easily accessible as it belonged to a family member of the group and overall worked better than our original location would have. 

Preparation

This is the preparation for our film opening initial filming. Here we are applying make up to the actors on their wrists, neck and eyes. We prepared the actors costumes of basic attire. We also applied water to our actresses hair to make it seem wet due to the rain.

Justification

Our film opening included some aggressive language and props, therefore we needed to justify why we included them to make them appropriate. We included aggressive shouting in our opening, which may have been offensive to our youngest actor of age eight. Therefore, we recorded the shouting afterwards and overlaid the sound in editing, so he didn't have to hear it.
We use violent props, such as a hammer, which we used to suit our genre of psychological thriller better. Extra care was taken when we were using these objects, and we have created a separate health and safety post to explain these.
We consulted our teacher before using these features to see if they were allowed on the syllabus and it said that we could use violent language and objects to an extent. The parents of the youngest actor and all other actors gave full consent to this.