Potential Music

Amanda and Ade: We were searching through YouTube for potential music to have featured in our film. We thought a piano would be a good instrument because it is a solo instrument. Anna is alone and feels isolated through most of the film, linking with the idea of a lonely person playing the piano. We found a slow piano song for the parts of the trailer when Anna is alone: 

The song for when Anna is happy (the beginning of the trailer) we found a gospel song's piano instrumental. Although it has a fast, harsh pace, it is still soft and happy.

Clare: At the beginning of the trailer, we want to use something a lot lighter and happier than the sadder, duller piano, to show the contrast of Anna's life change. We hope to use something that plays alongside her old, good life. Then the music can come to a sudden stop as soon as we hear Anna say "perfect everything" and we witness her sitting in the psychiatrist room. From here onwards the trailer loses that happier sense. Although we don't want to use anything too happy here since we can hear her voice over continued from the psychiatrist room which is a much sadder point, so the tone still needs to be fairly serious, however we want it to be light in other ways so it must have a faster pace than the music that follows.





After the black out, we want the music to create a much more disheartening mood, at a much lower pace. A good example of this is a song I discovered  called 'Point of Disgust - Low'.

The overall theme of this song is dreary and slow, representing Anna's isolated life style. The lyrics also speak:

'Once, I was lost,
to the point of disgust.
I had in my sight
lack of vision,
lack of light.
I fell hard,
I fell fast,
mercy me,
It'll never last'

Since the lyrics are also quite harsh and meaningful, it is relevant and fits in to our theme.

Here are some other songs that are a lot slower in pace and create that dreary, emotional effect.

Clare: All of the above are quite sorrowful and have an emotional impact which will help the audience to connect with Anna's character a lot. Especially "Comptine d'un Autre Été" which was featured in the trailer for the 'Dustbin Baby' and caught my attention because it was such a beautiful piece, and it has also been used in the film Amélie. It has the perfect amount of emotion that we would like to use.

Clare: This is a simple piano piece that is used in a very popular British TV series called 'Skins.' The song is called Zero and is composed by Segal whose music features a lot throughout this series. This piece is based in an episode with a troubled teen called Effy Stoneham, and I knew that something in this style would fit perfectly for our trailer because it is able to represent the feelings that our protagonist encounters. It is slow, but very deep and thoughtful.


Although these songs are useful in depicting a sad mood, it would be even more beneficial for us to discover one song that starts slow and ends a lot faster, to demonstrate both sadness and aggression in tune with the clips we have and to represent the frustration caused in Anna's life. That way, we can easily edit the one song to fit the scenes, by using the sadder, slower parts up until the point where we see Anna being pushed around, and her becoming progressively violent, in which we will use the much more powerful parts that have an increased pace.

Film Shot Influences

Clare:

In 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' trailer, we see a high angle shot of all the students walking into the school building, with the mise-en-scene clearly demonstrating to us the location. This is the clip that inspired us to create a time lapse, displaying the school setting with the teenagers walking in and out of the building. The time lapse is useful in showing time moving by at a fast pace.

The image isn't clear, but this is a screen grab from the 'Odd Girl Out' trailer. At this point in the trailer, the clips are at a fast pace, and we see a short take shot of Vanessa throwing objects off of her desk in anger. Because her on screen actions are also quite fast and aggressive, it fits in with the pace of the clip. We want to use this idea in our trailer.

A close up shot from the 'Trust' trailer which we believed to be particularly effective showed the psychiatrist and Annie sharing a caring moment. This demonstrated the relationship between these two particular individuals and therefore was important to us because of the height of emotion involved in our teen drama.

In the 'Dustbin Baby' trailer we see a long shot of the protagonist curled up against a wall. We like this effect because the long shot demonstrates the character being alone and isolated, suggesting they are a troubled character.

Production Logo: Editing

Even though our production company logo is simple, we want to add subtle effects to make it more interesting. We added the fade option. The fade motion is gentle and tranquil, yet disappears. This is similar to Anna's life; her life is gentle and enjoyable yet it disappears over time, leaving her in depression. 

Amanda: This is our logo, we used the colour orange because is is multi-gender. Also, our logo influences all used multi-gender colours like blue, orange and red. The lettering 'ACA' are the first letters in our names; Amanda, Clare and Adeola. We used the word 'productions' because most companies are multimedia. For example, BBC has radio stations and television. NBC has the same concept. Also, most TV companies nowadays have websites for catch up TV and interactive news and games.

Ade: Furthermore, we acknowledged that we could easily add effects and different movements and sounds for into the logo, before we embarked on editing the logo.








As we can see here, we have many layers. The fact that we couldn't produce our shape or text on this software was a challenge. We made all of the parts of our logo into individual pictures so we could layer them on top of the background. This way, we kept our colour scheme, text and shape that we wanted.










As mentioned before, we can see the letters individually made (using photoshop) into individual letters and then saved as a JPEG.

We have made our letters come in a different times. Both of the letter A's come in at the same time for continuity purposes. The C comes in after and is closely followed by the 'PRODUCTIONS'. 






Clare: We were influenced to make the tiger part of our production company logo, because other elite and professional company logos such as 'NBC' have used animals. However, unlike 'NBC' production logo which consists of a 'peacock', we on the other hand have used a tiger because cats can be known as either neutral or dramatic. Domestic cats are neutral and loving, but wild cats have that element of tension and majesty to them. We think this symbolises our films. They have neutral characters, but with dramatic events.

Ade: We felt as if the full  logo was empty and needed an objet to make it more vibrant and enhance the whole image and give a deep detailed meaning of our production company. As a result of this, we thought that a useful object to put in place is an animal, and that was the tiger. Undoubtedly, we wanted to keep the colour of white and orange and we found it difficult to decide how the tiger would merge suitably into the logo; consequently, we decided we would use 'Photopshop' to make the tiger orange and place it at the top of our logo. The tiger isn't too big to distract the audience from the other aspects of the logo but
is a suitable size so that its still important. We were pleased with the outcome.  








Clare: We used Photoshop to edit a silhouette of a tiger taken from Google images. We used the eyedropper tool to transfer the colour we used on our font. This was in aid of keeping a strict, professional theme.

Ade: We thought we should continue with out colour theme, throughout our logo, so that it doesn't look off or contrast with the 'ACA' triangular shapes.







Clare: Since we had used quite simplistic transition edits, we wanted to also add some interesting sound effects to play alongside our logo. So, we searched on YouTube for sound effects to fit the transition entrances of each font and then to complete the theme of the logo we wanted to add a tiger roar at the end, as it fitted in with the imagery. 

Clare: Once we had finished editing our production logo on Motion, we had difficulty exporting it to YouTube without the fading out transition. We only wanted the fade in element because when the different parts faded out they wouldn't do it at the same time and it didn't look professional or balanced. I then discovered an option on export where you could adjust the duration time of the clip. This resolved the problem, however when I viewed it on Quicktime player, the font itself was quite small, so this is an issue we still need to work on.


Ade: Despite our initial struggle with the 'Motion' software, overall, we are pleased with our final production logo. Although, the colours are bright and colourful, it still looks professional. Aspects such as the sound were correspondent with the movement and effect of the finished title. We also incorporated all our names onto the logo, and that fundamentally illustrated that we are all equal participants in the making of the logo and film trailer.  The overall size of the full logo looked great once it was enlarged. We can compare our production company logo alongside other real ones such as 'BBC' and 'NBC' as we incorporated aspects of their logo that we were influenced by into our final logo. We hope to put our logo onto our film trailer and other necessary parts of our work.  

Film Title

Ade and Amanda: After insightful research, we decided that this font will be appropriate for our film title. Compared with the others it appears very unisex; attracting both male and female audience. Although our primary audience is female due to our storyline and the fact that the protagonist is female, however the 'bullying' theme is one that both males and females are both affected by. The letters seem like a school hand-written type, this means it inevitably attracts a young audience of teens. Furthermore, with this font, using photoshop, we can alter and manipulate the writing to be suitable for our film trailer, or maybe in the future, also our film poster and magazine cover to allow continuity to remain adamant in our work. Also, with this font, we can easily add an effect into it to allow it to appear in the way that we want it to when we incorporate it into our film trailer. We wanted, like our production company logo, it to be simple yet dramatic. The use of capital letters makes it look stronger and thicker. Also, the text isn't particularly girly, like our protagonist, Anna. 

Title Ideas

Clare:

By looking at our blog theme, you can tell we like the handwriting, school style, as it represents the theme of our teen drama. We can tell that the protagonist is a teenage girl because we have looked at fairly feminine fonts, however, we want to keep the title simplistic to an extent so that it is recognisable enough but also appealing to a unisex. We also think that using a school like font shows that the main setting for our film is in a school. It also shows the youthfulness and naivety of a typical schoolgirl. 

This font is sweet and feminine, in the style of a girl's handwriting at school, sticking to the theme strongly as we are focusing on a teenage girl. However, it only really attracts a female audience and excludes the male audience because of the strict feminine style. Amanda: It looks too playful and doesn't reflect the seriousness involved in the storyline. We want it to flow yet be minimalistic. We think that having as much simple ideas yet effective ones is professional and business like.

This font is too plain and is less creative than the others. Although it's in the style of someone's handwriting, it is too boring to catch the audiences attention. It isn't memorable enough to be our main title in this case. For example, the Harry Potter franchise uses the same, unique font which everyone can recognise and therefore know. Amanda:  The bubbly nature/feel of this font also presents an almost playful element to our title. However, it looks like a females writing but isn't quite dramatic enough.

 

We like this title font because compared with the others it appears very unisex. We expect more females to be interested in the theme of our film because it focuses heavily on girls and the protagonist is also female, however we want our drama to appeal to both genders because the 'Cyberbully' analytics proved that some younger males watched a teenage drama.

Amanda: It also sticks to the school/student life theme because the font is in a hand-written style. The fact that the letters aren't joined together, which also means we could add effects to the individual letters, giving us more freedom.

This font is too fancy and feminine. The swirly handwriting may be confusing and unclear to some viewers which is why we want to use something a bit more simplified. The films which have influenced our trailer all use simple and less elaborate writing. For example, 'Trust' uses font in a similar style to Verdana with no extra swirly lines or playfulness, demonstrating the true seriousness of the drama. 

Amanda: This font almost suggests it is a romantic classic, like 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Jane Eyre'. It isn't modern enough, and seeing as our film involves technology, we think this is a bad idea.

This font is not readable for our audience as it is quite roughly drawn out and also very small. It doesn't accurately reflect our genre, but more of a horror/romance. Although it is identifiable and memorable for the audience, it is also feminine and therefore only attracts a niche audience.  

Amanda: Again, this font is written in quite a classic style, not modern enough for our film. Also the letters are too closely joined to add any effects to the individual letters.

Time Lapse Finally Worked!

Clare:
The first time we filmed our time lapse we found that we couldn't see as many people as we'd hoped walking past and the effect wasn't made up as well when playing it sped up. This meant we had to re-film. After thinking over what went wrong last time, we decided to set the tripod and camera up in a separate location to last time, but still in our school courtyard because it was the busiest area between lessons. This time around, we put the camera right by the entrance into our main building block where the majority of people were heading to or coming out of. We then left the camera to film from the start of a new period until the last person had walked past. We found that a lot of people kept looking into the camera and asking us what we were filming for, but we told them to just carry on as usual otherwise the effect would have been ruined. After speeding up the video on Windows Movie Maker Live, I found that this video was a lot more successful than a first attempt. Despite our worry of a few people looking into the camera when we shot it, that goes completely unnoticed because the video is so fast. This time lapse worked in comparison to the other because students were in closer contact with the camera so you could associate who they were a lot better. The speedy affect of students walking along and showing time passing was finally achieved in this video and we hope to use it when it comes to our post-production stage. Here is our time-lapse!


Ade: We were more prepared when we began filming, we were more prepared this time. When we did our first attempt we realised that there were some minor flaws in our attempt preparation. Predominantly, the area of space in the courtyard was too wide and consequently, we didn't have the desired effect of the time lapse. However, this time we found an area more suitable for the scene. The entrance into our school's main block. As people rush to their different places, they are less likely to pay attention to the camera, but will be in hurry for their lessons, therefore, this time we didn't have a problem with people paying too much attention to the camera. We were also pleased with the lighting and there were sufficient amount of students to maker the time lapse work and create a busy lifestyle effect that we wanted. Clare, later went into Windows Movie Maker Live, and sped up the filming, making our time lapse successful. 

 

First Day of Proper Filming! DONE!

Today we had our first day of filming where we shot the majority of our trailer content at Amanda's house. We managed to complete all the filming that we had planned to do today and stuck to our schedule really well! We are overall very pleased with the outcome of today's shooting and we made sure we had extra footage just in case we changed our ideas when it came to editing. We also made sure to shoot each clip from different angles and perspectives, just so we had a lot of options when it came to selecting the best footage. We made our fake wine using beer and diluting it until it looked like white wine. This took several attempts but we were successful eventually.