Our idea appeals to a wide audience. There are many age groups that would be interested in the film we are creating a video for.
Our initial plot idea is about a young boy who uses his imagination to escape the boredom of his everyday life. His mum takes him to a playground where she sits on a bench, drinks a flask of tea and just sits on her phone totally ignoring her son and not realizing that he is not having a great time. He sits on a swing which is way to small for him and looks at his mum. There is an old newspaper laying next to him and as he rocks on the swing he kicks it. Looking around his environment he spots a close by river. He makes sure his mum is not paying attention (she is still on her phone), takes the piece of newspaper and runs off to the river. At the river he builds a small paper boat and lets it off very excited. As it slowly sails down the river he imagines a little man on the boat waving at him.
After that he stands on a boat pretending to be a sailor.
In the end we felt that it was not necessary to include the last scene which would've been of Herbie imagining himself in the boat. We did not incorporate this as we felt that we had already revealed enough in the opening two minutes.
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| Mise-en scene |
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| creating a mind map around our task |
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| Looking for inspiration ('Submarine', 'Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children', music video of passenger 'young as the morning') |
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| creating a mood board |
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| rough ideas that came to Paula in the middle of the night / partly german |
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| more ideas that came to Paula which she had to write on a piece of tissue |
The mise-en-scène lighting condition we have been given is artificial lighting. The idea which we have come up with is to use glow sticks on the pathway to where he makes the paper boats to give it a more magical and imaginative feeling and to make it look like he was a direction to follow so it is like he already has a path set out of him.
Unfortunately when we got to our location we realised that we had forgotten to bring the glow sticks and it was not really possible for us to go back to get them so we decided to continue without the prop. In the end we didn't feel it was necessary for them to be used anyway as we didn't want to give too much away about the storyline within the opening two minutes of our film.
The Costume which we have been given is a suit. This is easily achievable for us as Herbie already owns a suit which he can wear for the filming. We've decided that Herbies mum should wear casual clothes that a mother would typically wear on an average day out with her son.
There was a slight issue with the suit that Herbie was supposed to wear as we hadn't realised that he had outgrown it. However we were able to compensate buy him wearing his school trousers, a shirt and Evie's school blazer and some posh shoes. Evie's blazer was slightly too big for him but we thought that this suited the film opening as it looks like he maybe wants to be older than he really is and this is shown by him wearing an oversized jacket. His mum just wore one of her average outfits that she would normally wear.
The prop we were given to use was a mug of tea. However we will change this to a flask of tea instead because the character drinking it will be outside so we feel that a flask is more appropriate. Another prop we will use is a newspaper for Herbie to make a boat out of.
We stuck with these prop ideas and used only a mug of tea and a newspaper. After we had filmed the scenes and put the clips together we realised that the headline on the cover of the news paper is about the Syrian crisis. Herbie takes the newspaper and creates paper boats and sends them away on the water. We are concerned that someone may read into this message and think that there was an underlying racist message that we were trying to convey. However we were not actually aware of these connotations and definitely did not set it up purposefully.
We were given 'a boat on the Norfolk broads' instead of filming the entire 2 minutes on the broads with a real boat we decided to have a small boy putting a paper boat onto the broads and then his imagination takes him onto a real boat. We decided to do this for convenience because it would've cost us to hire a real boat on the broads. Instead we made use of the fact that we know of an abandoned boat on a beach in Weyborne and decided to use this for the imagination scene. We also have a seven at a park before the boy goes and puts the paper boat on the broads and this scene features his mum. We were thinking that we would do this scene at a park.
Due to circumstances out of our control we were unable to film at our given location of the Norfolk Broads or our initial idea of Weyborne beach. Instead we decided to film at a location near to us, called Broome pits and Ditchingham playground. We choose these two locations as they were convenient for us to get to under the circumstances. The locations we used were very effective. The park we chose was completely empty which added impact to the story because it made Herbie seem more abandoned and alone.
We only have two characters in our film opening. One of which is Evie's 10 year old brother (Herbie) and then Evie's mum (Sara). We chose them to be our characters because Herbie has a very vivid imagination and therefore is able to play the role of the character very well. We choose Sara because she is in the correct age range and is actually the mother of Herbie and therefore it is realistic.
We went through with these casting ideas as we felt that they were appropriate for our plot in the opening two minutes.
To film a two minute film opening using miss en scène elements that we were given.
The mise en scène elements which we were given were:
- A 5 year old boy
- A boat on the Norfolk Broads
- A mug of tea
- Artificial lighting or neon lights
- A suit
We decided to change the 5 year old boy to a 10 year old boy for convenience because Evie's brother is 10 years old.
Practice Task
Pictures of paper work:
We were given 15 minutes to brainstorm about one of the people in the pictures below. We were told to write down everything that we could think about them. We were given the choice of:
As a group we choose to write about the following:
Person E:
Person E:
Person B:
Person D:
Here are the mind maps that we produced:
This is the mind map for Person D:
Plot:
What is going to happen in your opening 2 minutes?We will have the younger character drinking a hot chocolate in a café. We will have her mum walking past the window of the café and then into the café through the door using the match-on-action technique, meeting the other character (the daughter). She sits down with the younger character and they begin small talking and during this the daughter experiences flashbacks of how the stepdad used to treat her mum. Her mum then explains some good news that she is divorcing the girls stepdad, the mood then lightens.
Casting:
We decided to use Emma sherry, Olivia Phillips, and Max Tofts as our cast. Max played person D, Emma person B and Olivia as person E.Olivia played the character which the film focusses on. She is the daughter of Emma and step-daughter of Max, we chose her to play this character because she is both the right age of the character and a similar look. However a slight fault with our casting was that Olivia doesn't really have the personality of the character we chose her to be, but she is very good at acting so managed to imitate the correct personality of the character she played. Her character has been through a tough time as she has had to deal with a tough home life as her mother married a man who abused both her and her mum. Her character moved out of her house because she couldn't put up with it and the scene we filmed is her meeting back up with her mum again to be told good news about the divorce. Olivia managed to play this role well as she too has experienced difficult situations at home, which added depth and reality to the emotions during the scene.
Emma played the mother of Olivia and ex wife of Max. Her character has also been through a tough time as she has been abused by her ex husband and her daughter fell out with her and left home. Her daughter fell out with her because she failed to notice the abusive situation she was putting both her and her daughter through. Emma was a good cast for this character as she is a very good actor and was able to display the right emotions of her character. The faults with our casting of Emma was that although she does look fairly old, she did not really look old enough to play the role of Olivia's mum and she lacked the appearance of Person B.
Max played the stepdad of the daughter and the husband of the wife. He played the character really well as he can clearly show a strong temper. He was a confident actor and we were glad that we chose him. There were a few mistakes along the way, such as people laughing etc. but altogether the filming went really well.
Props:
We haven't really used any props other than a hot chocolate which Olivia (the younger character) drinks. We decided that Olivia should be drinking this during the café scene because it suits the role of her character. We also used the book 'Death of the Salesman' as it makes the daughter look intellectual which her character is meant to be.Filming Schedule:
We filmed the first part in the leisure centre café on the Wednesday the 28th in our media lesson. Wespent an hour filming then and then another hour during our media lesson on the 30th of September. W chose these periods because our actors were free in those periods.Location
We were given a set of 3 locations to choose from. These were either a café, a restaurant, or a pub. We felt that all of those locations would be suitable for our characters, as they both had characteristics that could apply to the feel of each location – for example, one of our three chosen characters was an alcoholic, and so that would have matched up very well with a pub.
Location 1The first location we thought of was a small café called ‘The Garden Tea Rooms’. We chose this location primarily because of its layout – it has a very big glass window at the front of the café, with a table for 2 people right in front of it, meaning there is a lot of natural light so the quality and look of the finished product would be excellent. The big window would also allow for lots of different angles, as we could shoot some from the outside looking in, and others from the inside with a nice background. Since it’s a fairly small place, it would be easy to film there without much background noise from people, however, since it’s next to a road we will need to be careful with noise pollution from cars. We also have to be careful of cars being in the shot, as if there are too many, they could distract from the main focus of our film opening. People being in the background may also be an issue, as it’s a public place, so we will have to be cautious with that, and patient if we have to repeat a few shots due to this. The interior look of this location is also very good for our proposed plot – since the interaction will be between a mother and daughter, and it’s of a quite sensitive nature, we wanted a place that is quite small and cosy – a commercialised café we felt wouldn’t be suited to the nature of our film opening. I think gaining permission from the owners will be fairly easy, as if we plan it very well we won’t need to be there for long at all, and since we won’t be taking up much space we won’t be an inconvenience to many of their other customers. This was our favourite location out of the three, as we felt it had the right look to it, and it was out of the way enough to film (hopefully) successfully without having too many distractions in the background.
Location 2
The second location we thought of was the Green Dragon pub. We thought this location would work well with the character planned to be an alcoholic, although several problems did arise. One big problem is the fact that it's a very popular pub, and so the inside wouldn't be suitable as it'd be too noisy. There is a beer garden, but it would be very noisy to film outside (wind, trees moving etc.) so we'd have to find a way to work around that. The other issue is that if we have an alcoholic character visibly drinking alcohol, we would have to cast someone over the age of 18, which is potentially more difficult as we know more people suited to the roles in our year. However, this is a good backup location in case our favourite one isn't available for us to use. I think it'd be fairly easy to secure at short notice if it isn't the inside section, especially as members of our group know people who run the pub.
The second location we thought of was the Green Dragon pub. We thought this location would work well with the character planned to be an alcoholic, although several problems did arise. One big problem is the fact that it's a very popular pub, and so the inside wouldn't be suitable as it'd be too noisy. There is a beer garden, but it would be very noisy to film outside (wind, trees moving etc.) so we'd have to find a way to work around that. The other issue is that if we have an alcoholic character visibly drinking alcohol, we would have to cast someone over the age of 18, which is potentially more difficult as we know more people suited to the roles in our year. However, this is a good backup location in case our favourite one isn't available for us to use. I think it'd be fairly easy to secure at short notice if it isn't the inside section, especially as members of our group know people who run the pub.
Location 3
Our third location is the Mad Hatters Tea Shop in the centre of Wymondham. Originally, we liked the idea of this location as it also has a large window at the front, which would allow for good lighting, but on second consideration we decided not to use this location as it's very, very small. Since it's in the centre of town, we didn't want to use it as it would also be very busy, and along with its size (Location 1 is small, but it's also spacious inside) this means if there do happen to be lots of people inside it'll be very noisy, with a lot of people in the background. The noise from outside will be very loud too, as buses and cars pass right outside. I think it'd be quite difficult to get permission to use this, as it's popular and quite small, so they may not be willing to let us use a table for free since we probably won't need to buy anything to be used in our opening.
Our third location is the Mad Hatters Tea Shop in the centre of Wymondham. Originally, we liked the idea of this location as it also has a large window at the front, which would allow for good lighting, but on second consideration we decided not to use this location as it's very, very small. Since it's in the centre of town, we didn't want to use it as it would also be very busy, and along with its size (Location 1 is small, but it's also spacious inside) this means if there do happen to be lots of people inside it'll be very noisy, with a lot of people in the background. The noise from outside will be very loud too, as buses and cars pass right outside. I think it'd be quite difficult to get permission to use this, as it's popular and quite small, so they may not be willing to let us use a table for free since we probably won't need to buy anything to be used in our opening.
