Planning for own film

- The first thing my partner and I did when planning for our own short film was to think of the storyline we wanted. Once we had decided, we then thought of who could act in our film and what props we would need to use, the location we would film at etc..

- We also had to decide on a target audience for our short film. We decided to choose ages 16-25 because the actors we are using at 18, and we feel that the storyline has quite a mature theme that would appeal to the older end of the audence, 25 year olds, but may be not be suitable for people under 16. Also, although we are using a femme fatale in our film and following the typical conventions of film noir and neo noir, our male actor is black which challanges the typical cast of a film noir.

- In order to reach a broad audience, we decided to use a black boy as our main character to try and appeal to other ethnicities other than white. Our other character, Lia, is currently doing Alevel drama and so was a good choice for our film.

- We decided to shoot our outside scenes at dusk, in alley ways, because it will add to the tense atmosphere we will be trying to create and the streetlights in the alley way and on the road will be harsh lighting, a typical trait of noir/neo noir films.

- We then made a questionnaire for our target audience to fill out to help us get a better idea of how much people know about film noir/neo noir and whether they would be interested in watching a film based on either of these genres.

- We then constructed a storyboard to help plan our short film. We broke down each scene of our story and decided on the type of shot it would be, who would be in it, and for how long it would be filmed for, to help us fit the whole film to five minutes. For example :

Narrative

Barthes' enigma and action codes
At the very beginning of the film there is an enigma in that the audience dont know who Tosin is or anything about his character- is he a villan or not? What is he doing? etc...

There is also an enigma about the character of Adriana as we only see her very briefly at the beginning of the film. Again, the audience know nothing about her character, whether she will be a helpless female or whether she will be the femme fatale which is later revealed at the end of the film.

Other features in the film contribute to the enigma codes in the film such as the fact that there is no sound track when Tosin is walking to the house, just the pace of his feet which gives the scene an eeary feeling.

Also the very beginning when there is a black screen and just Tosin talking, the audience do not know what is going to happen next.

Propp
Tosin is expected to be the villain at first due to his clothing (hoddie commonly associated with thugs) but is then revealed to be the hero/helpless male

Lia is at first perceived to be the helpless female who will be the victim to Tosin however as the film develops she is shown to be the femme fatale (villian)



Institution
'Siren' is a low-budget, independent short film, and therefore, details as funding, advertising, showing and distribution would differ considerablly compared to blockbusters with money being put into them.

Funding:
-UK Film Council e.g. the 'Short Films Completion Fund 2009/10' OR 'Digital Shorts' fund.

Advertising:
- Review and poster in a film magazine, like 'Empire' or 'Total Film', would give the film good advertising amongst film enthusiasts.


- Publicity by entering in film festivals, e.g. The London Short Film Festival, Leeds International Film Festival




PLANNING FOR FILMING

When we started filming, we created call sheets to help us organise everything. An example of one is:

October
Thursday 14th
filming cancelled. Instead of filming we practiced shooting some of the shots and how we would shoot them, realising some of them needed altering- e.g. we shortened the POV shot going into the living room

Thursday 21st
- all of the alleyway shots
- Tosin walking along street
- Tosin entering house and short conversation with Lia
- Close up of Tosin

Friday 22nd
- put footage from camera onto imovie
- started to order clips but found that alley way shots/street shots did not have good lighting

January Monday 17th
- Had Lydia recorded an orginal composition directly into garageband using a keyboard
- Added the recorded sound to the flashback part of the film
- Having been told that the voiceover was too long, we recorded an edited version
- Trimmed the clip in which Tosin looks through the objects after being told it was too long
- Recorded Rachel peeling an apple to match Lia’s movements

February
Tuesday 15th
- Uploaded the final version of the film to Youtube

NovemberFriday 5th
- had to re shoot Lias scene due to costume change- different shirt- continuity error

- reshoot of Tosin entering house and talking with Lia
- reshoot of alleyway shots
- reshoot of Tosin walking along street
- Tosin looking at objects

Monday 8th
- ordered clips and created titles


Sunday 14th
- shot of shelf and Tosin picking up book
- flicking through book
- close ups of Tosin
- Tosin’s fall to the chair
- Tosin during flashbacks- low angles
- Tosin sitting up after flashbacks

Monday 15th
- when watching footage collected so far, we noticed that tosin’s hood was visible in the shot in which he sits up

Sunday 21st
- reshoot of Tosin sitting up
- Tosin standing up and going to fireplace
- Tosin looking through fireplace and the reveal of Lia behind him

DecemberFriday 3rd
- the flashback shots (book, Lia on stairs and tracking up lia’s arm to her face)
- Lia peeling the apple for after the credits

Monday 6th
- creating the flashes of colour between flashbacks (image on photoshop turned into clip in imovie) and the black clip the voiceover would go over
- finalised the order of clips
- changed the contrast levels for the shot of tosin looking through the fireplace and finding the knife (we used a different camera which had better picture quality so the clip was much brighter than everything else)

- created credits
- added fade to black at end of film

Friday 10th
- showed work so far to class
- added dissolves to scenes that didn’t flow very well

- recorded Tosin’s side of the phonecall for the voiceover at the start
- recorded Tosin and Lia’s lines for their conversation

Monday 13th
- realised that there was talking in the background of one of the shots in which Tosin is flicking through pages so recorded flicking through the book to match the clip
- realised that Tosin is standing on the wrong side of the shot when dropping the book, since he was unavailable for a reshoot, we cropped the shot (unfortunately reducing the quality of it)

- fixed some missing background sound by duplicating sound from unused clips

Friday 17th
- Added sound effects from imovie for most of our soundtrack, mostly droans to add an eerie effect
- Realised that the POV shot of the living room blurred at points so reshot


Sound
- When we had finished all the editing that needed to be done, we began to work on sound

- The first thing we did was fix background noise in some of our shots- e.g. the scene of Tosin walking over to the fireplace had background noise from other rooms in the house in it.

- We copied the sound from scenes that had similar noise and attached it to the clip

- A more difficult issue we had was talking in the background of the shot when Tosin was flicking the book so Kiera recorded flicking the pages the same way Tosin did and we attached that over the shot

For the flashback scene we also had someone record some music using garageband on the iMac for some original music in 'Siren'



THE FILM

ANCILLARY TASKS