lost in love and war - unedited

rough cut

This is our first rough cut and has defiantly helped us to realise what we need to prepare for our final filming. One thing we have learnt from filming this is that we need to double check that we the camera/equipment is properly charged because around 80% of this we had to film on Bethans camera making it poor quality. We also realised that any hand held camera can make the video shaky, which we don't want because our film isn't a docudrama or a real life film so the shaky camera doesn't fit with our war romance genre. With having the technical fault with the equipment it means that this film opening is shorter than we want in our final thing, its also made us realise that we may need to 'beef it out' with more shots and titles etc e.g we will incorporate a panning shot at the begging.This rough cut also made us realise how important costumes are to signify that its a 1940s war romance, we didn't use costumes for this cut because it was only a rough cut and we wanted to test the equipment out, the actors and actress's, the location and the shot types and camera angles first because we felt these were more important to get right.

Costume Ideas

For our film we have been trying to find clothes for our male and female characters that look 1940s or are actual 1940s clothes. We started are search by looking on google to see if we could rent any 1940s style clothing we found this website: http://www.masqueradeshop.co.uk/index.htm?ac=HUGFD-B

this website has good uniforms for hire but no traditional 1940s outfits that don't look to much like a costume.

We then decided to try looking for clothing at school in the drama department and found these:

We found it hard to find clothes that didn't look to costume like but looked vintage. We eventually found a dress that is modern but has a 1940s vintage look about it, is blue with a flower pattern and it is also very similar to the dress Keria Knightley wears in The Edge Of Love (2008)

Location, location, location

We have been scouting locations around Ilkley and have found the perfect location in Menston. Its my great aunts house which is situated in Menston and was built around the 1850s in the victorian era. It has featured in an episode of heartbeat which the used the oustside and inside of the house.

Its perfect as our location because we are wanting a house, with a large garden which has that 1940s look about it and doesnt have any modern objects in the garden or outside the house. Our  initail idea was to incorporate a 1940s style garden which had a gate which the man from the army with the letter stands at and hands the letter to our main character, this gate signifies that there is still a barrier between males and females in society at the time. 

The location has 3/4 large gardens, this gave us a variety to pick from, we had to make sure the final garden had no modern objects and no shading from trees etc but it had to have the 1940s look about which all of them did. This was the selection:

We finally choose to use the garden with the arch because we could see the gate and the house from it and the arch made it picturesque.

Hair Ideas

Hair Ideas

Keira Knightley in The Edge Of Love

• Long Curly Hair
  
• Loose, natural looking hair.
• Natural hair signifies that the character is in the country and cant afford to have hair styled because of the war.
• 
  

1940s Hair Styles

We found a 1940s hair tutorial on Youtube which shows you how to get 1940s iconic hairstyles in under 5 minutes, this will come in usefull to style are main cahracters hair.

Production Name and Logo

We have decided on our name for our production company, 'Spotlighted'. We initially wanted to use 'Spotlight' but after research on the Internet we found that another production company had the same name. We also thought of other names, "the script' and 'scripted' but preferred 'Spotlighted'.

Our production logo is:

For our logo we have decided to use a modern landscape and city skyline with a spotlight across it.

We realise that our logo is modern and doesn't fit with our genre of our film (war romance) but like Working Title we think that our company will produce a number of different genre films so we didn't want to limit ourselves to one genre, Merchant Ivory is an example of a production company which only produce one genre of film (costume dramas)

Ideas for our film

We have discussed a few possible ideas for our film one of them being our original idea were we just have the women receiving the letter and breaking it up with fading into black with the actors names. With this idea we would have to empize the emotions of the women to make it more interesting.

Another idea we had was to start with an old women, 80s sitting on the bench in front of the house, she's re reading the letter that she recieved years ago which is faded and worn.  then there's a flash back to signify that its now in the past, the women is sat in the same place, but 60 years later, so she's younger. 

Another idea is to instead of having fading to black is to have flashes of modern day. This could include the women older at the same house, maybe the child older. Like she's thinking over her past, her memories. 

Final Group Idea For Film

Genre: Drama

Setting: England during World War II

Target audience: 35+ Women

Rating: 12

Sound: Exaggerated tear drop (diagetic)

Exaggerated swinging of the swing (diagetic)

Music: Throughout shots - sad, slow tempo

Location: In a cottage garden

Casting: Mid thirties woman

Mid thirties man

4-5 year old girl's voice

Mise-en-scene: A swing hanging from a tree

A garden bench

Garden must fit in with 40's setting

 

Starts with black screen with writing 'August 1943'

Fades into a shot of a man in an army uniform at a gate holding his hat in his hand and a letter in the other.

The screen then fades out to black and the title is shown.

The screen then fades into a close up of two hands - a letter being handed from the man in uniform to a woman with a wedding ring on.

The screen then fades out to black and then some of the actors/actresses names are shown. Fades into a mid-shot of a woman sat on a bench holding an envelope staring at it.

Fades out again to black with actor/actresses names.

Close up tracking shot of writing on a letter 'inform you that your husband was killed in action' with a tear dropping onto it - exaggerated diagetic noise then the ink running .

Again the screen will fade to black and more actor/actresses names shown.

The shot will then fade into a close up of the woman's face with tears falling down her face.

The shot will then switch to a long shot of the woman in question sat on the bench and then diagetic noise of a child shouting 'mummy'.

Close up of her wiping her tears the moving to long shot again showing her taking a deep breathe and then her shouting "I'm coming darling" 

Will and Helena - Soulja To Cry On

Prem Task - Overview

Me, Bethan, Lorna, Saskia, Helena and Holly all helped create "A Soulja To Cry On" We started by creating a story board but this was rushed, so this could have been improved by being more detailed and less rushed. We then picked our location which was at school using one of the english rooms, two corridors and a stair well. We used this location because it was near by and easy to access and we wanted to emphasize our main character (Helena) to be searching for Will by running through various corridors. While filming the clips with a handheld camera we had some trouble with the cameras being 'shaky' because we didn't use a tripod.

We then uploaded the clips; which which we did using the iMovie software (this is explained on my software post) we found that we didn't have the match on action were Helena went through the door, we reshoted this shot and included it in our prelim task.

This short film has a target audience of 12+ and is aimed at teenagers, this target audience is signified in the age of the main characters and the themes used.

Three principle terms:

Match-on-action is a continuity cut which ties two units of the same action together at the same moment in the movement making it seem to continue, for example when we have Helena (our main character) walking through the door we have a clip of her walking to the door, opening the door with the door handle and walking through the door.

Shot/reverse shot is were two or more shots edited together between to characters e.g in a conversation

180 degree rule this is were two characters in the same scene have to have the same left right relationship to each other (the same distance.)