Maintaining continuity is considered one of the main priorities with in the production of a film. It is an editing technique that is used to avoid irregularity in scenes. In relation to our film we evidently showed use of continuity editing in our conversation scenes and scenes where the actresses were walking through corridors. We also chose to include jump shots in our film to keep the audience engaged and to avoid our film being labelled as boring; evidence of where we used jump cuts is in the morning sequence when Lucy is getting ready for college. Instead of including every step of her preparing for college by using very long shots we made the shots shorter and so when the film was played it gave the scene a rushed effect which is what we initially wanted the opening scene to feel like.
The genre of our 5 minute film is a psychological thriller as it has a lot of similar qualities to other films with in this genre such as ‘Seven’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4YV2_TcCoE&feature=related) and ‘Hard candy’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-C2H4ipxz0), this film is a disturbing film that keeps you on the edge of your seat all the way until the end, I liked this quality and so I wanted to make our film as captivating as this. The film that we took the most ideas from however was ‘The uninvited’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-C2H4ipxz0) this is a film that has a lot of similarities to ours as it is also about a girl with a mental illness who has an imaginary friend that is her sister much like in our film where Lucy has schizophrenia and has an imaginary friend that is Emily-Jayne. Another positive idea that we liked from the film ‘The uninvited’ was the twist at the end of the film and so we tried our best to incorporate that at the end of our film and in my opinion I think that it worked really well as there was a gradual build up of the story and then it was revealed that Emily-Jayne was in fact a figure of Lucy’s imagination.
As Richard Dyer states in his ‘Theory of Entertainment’ that a person chooses a film that shows or gives them something that they want but don’t have at that time. For instance if a person is lacking money they will watch a film with lots of wealthy people, fancy cars and clothes. In my opinion I feel that many people will watch our film as it is entertaining throughout and keeps the audience guessing what is going to occur next. Educationally I feel that our film provides plenty of information about schizophrenia and how it effect’s a person as we see when Lucy forgets to take her tablets. Also as it gives people an insight into how schizophrenic people are, both sufferers and people who know someone with the mental illness can relate to our film as they are have either had similar experiences themselves or they know someone who has.
When making our film and both our sources of advertisement we were trying to create a confusing yet spooky experience for the audience. For our first source of advertisement which was our poster I feel that we definitely managed to create a sense of spookiness as firstly after collaborating our ideas together for our final poster we decided to incorporate a dark patterned background to try and create an eerie feel, we also chose to make the image of Emily-Jayne stand out even more than it already did by colouring the area surrounding her with
a bright white colour resembling light. I personally got this idea from when I was researching other posters and I came across the poster ‘Ghost’ where the two main characters are embracing each other and surrounding them is a bright white light, this ties in with the storyline of the film as it is about the afterlife and what happens after we die which is much like our own film where Emily-Jayne is a ghost. We also decided to include the names of the two main characters as we were aware from our research that the names of the main characters are almost always included in a films poster in order to inform the audience who the actors are that they are watching on the scene. Another clever aspect of our film I felt was the writing ‘chasing her ghost…’ which was repeatedly written down the left hand side of our poster, I feel that this writing looks really effective and ties in really well with the aspect of someone suffering from a mental illness as it gives the impression that someone has repeatedly scribbled this down in frustration or confusion over something.
The genre of our 5 minute film is a psychological thriller as it has a lot of similar qualities to other films with in this genre such as ‘Seven’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4YV2_TcCoE&feature=related) and ‘Hard candy’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-C2H4ipxz0), this film is a disturbing film that keeps you on the edge of your seat all the way until the end, I liked this quality and so I wanted to make our film as captivating as this. The film that we took the most ideas from however was ‘The uninvited’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-C2H4ipxz0) this is a film that has a lot of similarities to ours as it is also about a girl with a mental illness who has an imaginary friend that is her sister much like in our film where Lucy has schizophrenia and has an imaginary friend that is Emily-Jayne. Another positive idea that we liked from the film ‘The uninvited’ was the twist at the end of the film and so we tried our best to incorporate that at the end of our film and in my opinion I think that it worked really well as there was a gradual build up of the story and then it was revealed that Emily-Jayne was in fact a figure of Lucy’s imagination.
As Richard Dyer states in his ‘Theory of Entertainment’ that a person chooses a film that shows or gives them something that they want but don’t have at that time. For instance if a person is lacking money they will watch a film with lots of wealthy people, fancy cars and clothes. In my opinion I feel that many people will watch our film as it is entertaining throughout and keeps the audience guessing what is going to occur next. Educationally I feel that our film provides plenty of information about schizophrenia and how it effect’s a person as we see when Lucy forgets to take her tablets. Also as it gives people an insight into how schizophrenic people are, both sufferers and people who know someone with the mental illness can relate to our film as they are have either had similar experiences themselves or they know someone who has.
When making our film and both our sources of advertisement we were trying to create a confusing yet spooky experience for the audience. For our first source of advertisement which was our poster I feel that we definitely managed to create a sense of spookiness as firstly after collaborating our ideas together for our final poster we decided to incorporate a dark patterned background to try and create an eerie feel, we also chose to make the image of Emily-Jayne stand out even more than it already did by colouring the area surrounding her with
a bright white colour resembling light. I personally got this idea from when I was researching other posters and I came across the poster ‘Ghost’ where the two main characters are embracing each other and surrounding them is a bright white light, this ties in with the storyline of the film as it is about the afterlife and what happens after we die which is much like our own film where Emily-Jayne is a ghost. We also decided to include the names of the two main characters as we were aware from our research that the names of the main characters are almost always included in a films poster in order to inform the audience who the actors are that they are watching on the scene. Another clever aspect of our film I felt was the writing ‘chasing her ghost…’ which was repeatedly written down the left hand side of our poster, I feel that this writing looks really effective and ties in really well with the aspect of someone suffering from a mental illness as it gives the impression that someone has repeatedly scribbled this down in frustration or confusion over something. For our second source of advertisement which was our radio trailer we wanted to keep tied in with the theme of confusion and mystery like our poster did and so we decided upon a piano playing for our background music. This piece of music was repeated throughout our 30 second radio trailer which created a ghostly effect. Lucy and Shelley simultaneously spoke in our trailer which gave the feeling that they were chanting and made what they were saying a lot more powerful to the audience; we also used clips from the film when Lilly is saying “No I don’t know what’s happening” and she also says “Emily-Jayne Hart’ several times and on the final one an echo effect is used to create even more of an eerie feel to the film.
Here is our radio trailer: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oifK738zsF0&feature=player_embedded)
Here is our radio trailer: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oifK738zsF0&feature=player_embedded)
In order to gain a real insight into what the audience thought of our film we made sure that we gathered feedback from our audience. We did this by firstly producing a number of questions, after this we set up our camera and recorded five people from our audience give their answers. By doing this we were able to look at their opinions of our film and the criticism that we got we could then use constructively in order to improve our film. For instance we were told that our film lacked music and so in order to better our film we incorporated more music into our film which included a song from our college’s band ‘Our Friends In Vegas’. As well as this we also added music from Garageband which helped make scenes more effective and also build up tension in some cases.
The majority of our audience members said that they didn’t know that the twist was coming at the end of our film and so this is really good positive feedback for our film as we wanted to make the twist unpredictable to the audience and we succeeded so no changes needed to be made in the final editing stages of our film. We chose to interview people around the same age group as us as these were the target audience for our film and also the main characters were of a similar age group too and so in most cases the audience will be able to relate to Lucy and Emily- Jayne in many ways.
Overall we were very pleased with the audience feedback that we gathered because as well as positive things being said about our film that enabled me and my fellow group members to be proud of our work, we were given criticism that we could then use in a positive way in order to make our film even better and work on satisfying our audience even more. After been given reviews such as 3, 4 and 4.5 out of 5 stars I myself am very pleased with how the public has reacted to our film and am now sure that all of our hard work has paid off.
The vital piece of technology that helped us during the course of planning and researching for our film was the internet, without this our group would have struggled gathering any information. The internet also enabled us to access http://www.blogger.com/ where we each had an account and after every piece of work we did we could then upload it onto blogger, this made things easier for our group as we could see what work had been done and what work needed to be done. As well as blogger playing a huge role in the planning and research of our film so did http://www.youtube.com/ as we used this site to look for radio trailers to gather research for our own work and to also upload our work such as our audience feedback, radio trailer and our final film.
The majority of our audience members said that they didn’t know that the twist was coming at the end of our film and so this is really good positive feedback for our film as we wanted to make the twist unpredictable to the audience and we succeeded so no changes needed to be made in the final editing stages of our film. We chose to interview people around the same age group as us as these were the target audience for our film and also the main characters were of a similar age group too and so in most cases the audience will be able to relate to Lucy and Emily- Jayne in many ways.
Overall we were very pleased with the audience feedback that we gathered because as well as positive things being said about our film that enabled me and my fellow group members to be proud of our work, we were given criticism that we could then use in a positive way in order to make our film even better and work on satisfying our audience even more. After been given reviews such as 3, 4 and 4.5 out of 5 stars I myself am very pleased with how the public has reacted to our film and am now sure that all of our hard work has paid off.
The vital piece of technology that helped us during the course of planning and researching for our film was the internet, without this our group would have struggled gathering any information. The internet also enabled us to access http://www.blogger.com/ where we each had an account and after every piece of work we did we could then upload it onto blogger, this made things easier for our group as we could see what work had been done and what work needed to be done. As well as blogger playing a huge role in the planning and research of our film so did http://www.youtube.com/ as we used this site to look for radio trailers to gather research for our own work and to also upload our work such as our audience feedback, radio trailer and our final film.
In order to create our posters we used the computer programme ‘Photoshop’ which I found very difficult to use at first but after a few lessons with my teacher explaining how to use the basic tools on the programme I felt that I excelled in this part of our work especially as I was the one that made our final poster.
For our radio trailer we used a zoom H4 recorder to record our voices, we then placed our audio onto Garageband which we then used to create our final radio trailer. For all of our filming we used a Sony HVD 1000 video recorder along with a tripod that made sure that the shots we recorded weren’t jerky or uneven in any way. Finally in order to edit our film we used the software ‘Final Cut Express’
