We have finally received confirmation to use the church yard. At first we were told there were no objections but we failed to receive another email from the vicar confirming this. We had our hearts set on using this location so we needed to persevere and email again in an attempt to use the church. After a long and anxious wait we finally had the confirmation email from the vicar.
We are very happy with the fact we can use the church and look forward to filming there soon. Stay active around my blog for more quick updates like this one!

Hello Luke,

Just heard from the Vicar that he has no objection. Let me know when you would like to film and we will be there to let you in. The stairs are quite narrow. Difficult to get large bits of kit to the top of the tower.

Sorry for the delay,

Pam Elliston

From: 11DaviesSchruyersL [mailto:11DaviesSchruyersL@piggottschool.org]
Sent: 23 November 2016 09:26
To: 'Andrew Elliston'
Subject: RE: Bell Tower usage for A-Level media production.

 

Hello,

I’m following up on my request from earlier this month to film in the bell tower with my A-level media group. I was wondering if the Vicar had any objections to using the church and bell tower as we have not heard back from you in some time.

Hope to hear back soon

 

Once again thank you very much for your time.

Yours sincerely,

Luke Schruyers

From: Andrew Elliston [mailto:andrew.elliston@sky.com]
Sent: 10 November 2016 17:29
To: 11DaviesSchruyersL <11DaviesSchruyersL@piggottschool.org>
Subject: RE: Bell Tower usage for A-Level media production.

 

Hello Luke,

Have forwarded this to the Vicar and if he has no objection to you filming then the ringers will arrange a convenient time with you. We are mostly retired so day time would be ok for us.

Will let you know.

In the mean time we practice ringing on Thursday evenings 7.15 to 8. 45pm and you are welcome to come and have a look any Thursday.

Best wishes,

Pam Elliston

 

From: 11DaviesSchruyersL [mailto:11DaviesSchruyersL@piggottschool.org]
Sent: 10 November 2016 14:57
To: 'sonning@sdb.odg.org.uk'
Subject: Bell Tower usage for A-Level media production.

 

Hello,

I am emailing on behalf of four year 12 students from The Piggott School in Wargrave.

 

For our coursework and exam we have been tasked with creating the opening sequence to a film and we believe the church may be an ideal setting.

We were wondering if we would be able to have access to the church and bell tower in order to get the clips  we need. This would be very helpful for us to work at the best of our ability.

I was wondering if there were any times we could use the bell tower in the coming months?

All we need is some short shots looking outside from the bell tower and any help would be greatly appreciated. This process will only take roughly an hour.

Are there any processes we need to go through to be able to use the church and its tower?

 

 

Thank you very much for your time.

 

Yours sincerely,

Luke Schruyers.

Hey! just a quick update. We have begun work on our animatic where we'll be able to see if we have a good range of shots in order to make the best possible film intro.
We have also begun work on our production company- Lemiskate.
Stay active because there will be more frequent uploads in the days to come!

Quick update, 50% of the storyboards have been completed. Just waiting on the other half to be finished. Our two other members are being a tad slow at the moment.
Finished ones shown bellow.

Finally! the first of the storyboards have been completed! shot list has nearly been completed and work on our eye dent animation has began!
We have also had a reply from the church and they have allowed us to film there meaning we can now confirm our location.
 We have chosen this location for a number of reasons, one of which being it fits well with the era we are basing our opening in. It looks like it came straight out of the second world war, in a good way of course! The graveyard is also attached to the church meaning the viewer will assume the protagonist son is buried there.


Add caption

Hey guys double upload today! Finalized our ideas and now have a refined idea of what is going to take place.

The opening will be taking place in the 1950's. Calm down I know what you're thinking don't worry we have taken mise-en-scene into consideration and have thought of some creative ways in which we can immerse you. One of which will include a young boy opening a gift wrapped in brown paper and tied with string similar to how it would have been in the 1950's to make the movie opening seem as realistic as possible.

We have also decided on a sound track. We'll be using a song named Fantasy by XIV which fits perfectly for what we need. The whole idea of the film is going to be a man who lost his son presumably in the war and is now visiting the church to reminisce about his son. The film will function similar to the 2013 hit movie "the railway man" where we'll be telling a story though flashbacks.

We're looking forward to filming and as always stay active for more updates!

 

Hey guys just a quickie! we've found a potential filming location. Spoilers?
Stay tuned for more updates soon guys as we begin to finish our story board and finalize the plot ideas!

-Luke
 

Just a quick update to let you know the planning of our movie has just began! Lots of time and effort will spent in order to make this perfect. I'd like to thank you all for the crazy support you've been giving us and stay tuned for some teaser trailers and pictures!

As for actual planning we have finalised a soundtrack and oh boy its a good one! we've also started our story board so stay tuned for a sneak peak at that too!


see you in the next one gang!

The hobbit film opening

The start of this trailer is completely black and we hear what we assume is the protagonist begin talking. This creates a sense of tension as the viewer is eager to find out who it is speaking. This is followed by a hand with a match lighting a candle to make the darkness fade. This is an effective shot because it makes the viewer thing we’re about to see the protagonist. This has importance as The Hobbit is in the same universe as Lord Of the Rings which has a lot of hard-core fans who will be excited to see if the original hobbit will be playing the protagonist in this too as they’re based on the same person.  This tension makes the opening scene very good as for a lot of people this could be the make or break on whether they’re going to watch the film or not. The next shot is a very quick one of the protagonist walking down the hallway, this mid shot shows us the height of the protagonist letting us know he is indeed a hobbit but we’re yet to see the actors face. The following scene is black followed by the opening of a box (the camera was inside the box) to see an older looking hobbit showing us this movie is going to be based around a flashback. The hobbit gets a very big book out of the chest giving the impression this is a kind of diary and the flash back is going to be told through this book. There is non-diegetic music in the background to make a more effective atmosphere, from the music we understand this is a very calm scene with no action involved in it showing us that the hobbit has changed from what he used to be which further backs up the idea of this movie being a flashback. The next shot is a close up of a feather going into ink and then writing “ a long time ago” whilst writing this the protagonist is reading aloud showing us this movie is going to be based purely around a flashback. During the flashback there is a shot of a town which is being described as nice, there is a long shot of a group of people all wearing white clothes. The colour white connotes freedom, peace and purity giving the impression the town also follows those morals. They’re also cuddling which shows they’re friendly. The mise-en-scene in the opening is very good, looking around the room the props are very well made and it allows the viewer to be immersed in the film as everything looks as it should. As for the actor his facial expressions are normally quite bland and not very telling setting the idea of the film being quite serious rather than a parody or a comedy etc. His clothing is very old and fits well with the rest of the mise-en-scene.

Space balls movie opening

 

The opening to the movie “space balls” not a lot happens which is interesting from a viewer’s standpoint, the expectation being the empty time would have been filled with titles but instead they just do a very long establishing shot of the spaceship in which the antagonists live on. I feel the opening has been made boring on purpose to give the viewer a sense of the type of comedy that will be in this movie as well as giving them time to settle down almost and get ready and what not. It ends with a slow image showing the back of the spaceship reading “we stop for no one” the ship is shown moving extremely slow meaning this could be placed there for satirical reasons. The effect of this shot being so long is it builds up tension and for someone that doesn’t know a lot about the movie wouldn’t be sure if it was a comedy or a straight rip off of star wars which means the viewer wants to stay and watch the remainder of the film in order to answer this question. I have chosen this intro as it can be seen as particular bad and I feel it’s good to take notes and not to take notes from it showing not every opening is a good opening. There is no character development nor is the scene and genre of the movie set in the first two minutes which is the main focus of our task.

The clip uses minimal sound, only the sound of the non-diegetic music can be heard for the first thirty seconds or so, this builds up tension making the viewer want to see more but by they are unable to as the scene purposely takes ages to develop. From this we can understand this film will be mostly sarcastic and not serious as opposed to actual star wars where the majority of the film is serious this one will clearly be satirical. There is nothing in the background other than open space, I think this is done on purpose so the focus of the shot is to capture the ships size, there is a joke shortly after this scene asking if Darth Vadar is compensating for something showing they perfectly set up jokes and further shows this film is purely satirical and not to be taken seriously. There isn’t much editing in this opening other than at the very end where it begins to tell us actors names. This is to let the viewer know this is a parody movie and not much money has gone into the creation of it. We don’t see actors in the opening scene therefore we don’t get a great view of the mise-en-scene but from what we have seen we can tell it’s not going to be Oscar winning as it is indeed a parody movie

Preliminary task number two. For the majority of this I was not present therefore I missed out on the planning and the filming but was back just in time to help my group edit what they had filmed. We started by placing all of the clips in chronological order which was easier said than done, they didn't record in chronological order therefore we had to place and move small clips around which wasn't too bad. Next we needed to add fades etc. in order to make the clips flow. There was a slight error with this when the protagonist is running away he covers an immense amount of space in a exceedingly short amount of time which left a few viewers confused as to how he ran so far in so little time. This was due to the chaser catching up to the protagonist during the filming, or so I was told. They couldn't quite pinpoint where he needed to run from so they took a wild guess. In the tasks final stage it looked far better than I first thought.

Sorry its a short one this week! I was ill and missed a lot of time. Stay active as I will be discussing the main  task in a few days!

Hello everyone! this is the first post on my blog.
The filming for the preliminary task went pretty well. The idea was to make mistakes in it to show what mistakes we made and learn from them in the final task.
The task itself was to record someone walking into a room, having small dialog before walking out of the room. This may seem like a very easy and bland task but it offers a lot of freedom on what we want to base the storyline on as well as giving us loads of freedom for camera angles. Our very first shot is a worms eye view looking up then some feet step over it before quickly cutting to the feet walking from just behind, a tracking shot. We did this to try and create tension. We wanted to use a wide range of camera angles so in the next shot we continued tracking but did it over the protagonist's shoulder to try and make him look bigger and more important. We then fade into a close up of his hand opening the door handle, this took quite a while to sync to make it look good!
More on editing, it was rather easy as it was a very linear task and not much editing was needed and we didn't want to over edit it and make it look bad.
The final outcome wasn't the best as there is a few continuity errors in it which one member of the group tried to cover with a green screen image which took the seriousness of the short film away. As far as acting and that small bit of editing are concerned I thought it went very well and we managed to do everything in just a few shots even though we're very picky!

This has been my first post and I hope you all stick around for more!