Questionnaires

In todays lesson, I gave out some of the questionnaires that I had put together as apart of my research into the target audience of my groups film opening. First, I got onto the computer and checked the questionnaire to see if it was good enough to give out to people. Once I had done that I printed off five copies and distributed them to members of my class. I then thought, that in order to get a good variation of results, we will need more people to do the questionnaire, so I decided to print off another five copies. Out of the ten copies that I had printed off, 6 were completed by members of my class. I will give the last four out to people outside of my media class so my results can vary more. Once all the questionnaires have been done, I will use the findings in order to determine what our target audience want from our film and how we can try are best to put these things in.

Character and Location preparation

In this lesson our group began to look at the things we need to orgainse in order to start filming our film opening. Firstly we decided to develop on the plot and talk about the characters that we will have in our film opening. We felt that it would look more proffesional and realistic to incorporate adults into our opening, rather than just have people of our age. This because we felt that our film would look more proffessional and realistic than if we just used younger people in the opening. Then some members of the group went and phoned up some people they knew that they felt would be suitable to be included in our opening. We then decided to prepare for the location that we would film our opening. As I said in my previous posts, our group had originally decided that St Giles Church would be a good location to film some of the scenes in the opening so we decided to phone St Giles church to see if it would be possible to first perform a risk assesment of the grounds in order to identify the risks involved in filming that area. Because no one was there to answer the phone, we left a message with the church leaving my details in case they phoned back.

Devolping Ideas

In todays lesson, we began to develop the plot ideas of our film project and also started thinking about the technical aspects of our film e.g. where we are going to film scenes, actors and props etc. Which we would then present to the class. Firstly, our group started on developing the plot outline of our film.

We decided that our film would be about a group of people who are filming a documentary, and unexpectedly discover a creature of some sort while filming the documentary, from there we began thinking about scene locations. We felt that the locations we would use would have to set the atmosphere and tone of our film, we felt that some sort of open grass area with a lot of trees etc. would be a good type of location for the scenes where we are trying to create a documentary environment. We then developed on this idea and came up with concept that some sort of graveyard area (such as the one at St Jiles Church which is only down the the road from the school), would be an even better area for our film because it would link in with the idea of a ghosts and monsters, we could portray the graveyard as the cause or the explanation behind why the ghost or monster is there. We then came up with the idea of combining the school with our film opening and using a part of the school as a scene for our film opening e.g. one of our ideas was that the person filming the documentary could run from the graveyard to the school for refuge. As a whole, we felt that the two locations that we suggested, would be good because they are very local and would be easily accesed. The only problem we would have is asking the owner of St Jiles church for access to the graveyard.

After talking about these ideas, we then presented them to the class, our teacher (Mr. Deen) said we had good ideas, but we had to think more indepthly about our choice of location and how we actually intend on filming our opening. We were then set homework in which we had to discuss with our groups three things we need to do during this week, my three tasks were to update my blog (which I have now completed), come up with ideas for questionaire questions and go on the Hertwood House Media channel on youtube, to look at the film openings they have as a part of our research into similar media texts. Mr Deen also told us that it would be beneficial to look at some of Hertwood Houses work as we could use it as a guideline to see what we needed to do in order to gain the top grades for this project.

Mood Boards

The lesson after we began forming groups and devising our film project ideas, we started work on our mood boards, based on the ideas that we had began developing on the lesson before. On these mood boards we were to put a mixiture images and text that were relevant to what our fim was to be about. Our film, as I stated in my last entry was to be a horror documentary film so three memebers of our group went on the internet in search of images and text, while two of us (me and another group member) sat down and decided how we were going to set out the mood board. Because our film was going to be a horror/documentary film, we put togther images of ghosts, zombies and monsters, some of which were from other films such as the excorsist and the Michael Jackson Thriller video, this showed relevance to the horror aspect of our film. We also put togther images to do with documentaries such as video cameras, sound recording equipment and excert of text explaining the defintion of a documentary, therefore showing relevance to the documentary aspect of our film.

Ideas for film project

At the start of last week, our class decided what groups we would be going into to start our filming project. From there we began deciding what our film, is going to be about. After thinking about it for a while, we came up with the idea of a documentary, but we then realised that our film had to be fiction based. We asked Mr. Deen (our media teacher) who told us we could do a documentary film as long as we incorporated some sort of fiction into it. Using that information as a foundation, we then came up with the idea of doing a horror documetary type of film, where the format of the film would start off as someone filming a documentary, but would unfold to become a horror e.g. the character filming the documentary may see a ghost or a monster etc. We felt that this would be a good idea becuase it was something unique and innovative that other groups in our class are less likely to do, becasue of how unique and different it was. We then presented our idea to the class, and as we thought no one had an idea that was similar to ours.