13 Going On 30 (Gary Winick, 2004)

Although I’m not really one for chick-flicks, I actually quite enjoyed 13 Going On 30; possibly because I properly laughed in some places; possibly because I could relate to wanting to go both forwards and backwards in time; or possibly because the characters were just so loveable I actually wanted them to get together for once and didn’t mind the predictable ending.

I first watched it when I was a bit younger, around thirteen, but when I found it on a list of the most underrated films of the ‘noughties’ (2000s), I decided to watch it again. Just like a romantic comedy type film should do, it cheered me up and left in a good mood, so full marks and ticks in all the boxes for conforming to a genre. It usually bugs me when a film isn’t ‘different’ or exciting, but to be fair, it wasn’t promising anything except a chick-flick style storyline. Having said that, the storyline itself wasn’t too bad – the idea of being a 13-year-old wishing to be a 30-year-old is something most people can relate to, and despite having never been 30 myself, I’m sure there are many people out there wishing for the simplicity of a 13-year-old existence again!

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

I know it’s breaking all the rules… but I really wanted to do a blog post on Fight Club…

Despite its popularity, Fight Club is a film which has never appealed to me. The only reason I decided to watch it at all is because I’ve only ever heard positive things about it, and because it’s my friend’s favourite film – she’s always pushing me to watch it, and I’m so glad she did!

Even though it’s quite famous, I managed to avoid finding out too much about it, luckily. Knowing the twist in the storyline would have totally ruined it, because I didn’t see it coming at all. It’s left me thinking all week, and it keeps coming back to me; it’s so brilliantly written and wonderfully filmed.

The film begins with a depressed young man (who is credited only as Narrator, played by Edward Norton), who hates his work, feels alone and alienated, and suffers from insomnia. He starts going to support groups for patients with terminal diseases in order to have people to talk to, and to feel slightly better about his own situation, while at the same time attempting to cheer himself up by creating the perfect apartment (and to be fair, he does have some pretty cool furniture).

Yet when he meets Tyler Durden one day (played by the rather wonderful Brad Pitt), his apartment is also coincidentally destroyed.Tyler believes ‘Narrator’ could learn a lot through pain, misfortune, and chaos, and challenges him to a fight, before allowing him to move in with him. As more men join in, a ‘fight club’ is created, quickly becoming an underground sensation. Tyler establishes some rules, with the famous lines: ‘First rule: Don’t talk about fight club. Second rule: Don’t talk about fight club’.

However, Tyler soon stops treating ‘Narrator’ as an equal, or as a partner within Fight Club, creating Project Mayhem and becoming involved with Marla, who ‘Narrator’ met at the support groups. After this, everything spirals out of control, but I don’t want to write any more – I know that if someone had ruined Fight Club for me, I would have been so irritated, so I refuse to give away the ending. Just take it from me; it’s an amazing film.

Tyler Durden is undoubtedly one of my favourite characters of all time. He’s the kind of addictive personality you don’t want to like, but do, purely because of his charisma and influence. Brad Pitt was also the perfect person to play this part, just as Edward Norton portrays ‘Narrator’ brilliantly.

“We decided early on that I would start to starve myself as the film went on, while [Brad Pitt] would lift and go to tanning beds; he would become more and more idealized as I wasted away.”

– Edward Norton

The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J Mackye Gruber, 2004)

The title ‘The Butterfly Effect’ refers to an example of chaos theory, and the idea that every single little thing we do can shape our future drastically – for example, does the small flap of a butterfly’s wings create a tidal wave somewhere in the world, eventually? What would happen if we could go back and do things differently? How different would the outcome be? Personally, I love the idea that every tiny decision that we make, without even thinking, can have such an impact on us; I often pass a lot of time thinking ‘what if?’, and for this reason, the film had a big effect on me, leaving me unable to sleep because I was so wrapped up in these hypothetical situations!

The film follows Evan (played predominantly by Ashton Kutcher, but also played by Logan Lerman and John Amedori as his younger self). As a child, he has black outs whenever he’s put in a stressful or uncomfortable situation, which include being forced to take part in child pornography by the abusive father (Eric Stolz) of his childhood sweetheart, Kayleigh (Amy Smart); being strangled by his institutionalised father who is then killed in front him; seeing his dog burned alive by Tommy (Kayleigh’s brother); and killing a woman and her baby while playing with dynamite with his friends. He is advised by his psychologist to keep journals, and when he rediscovers these, years later, he also uncovers the ability to travel back in time and is able to relive these traumatic parts of his past.

However, every time he goes back in time to change something (always with good intentions), he comes back to the present day a changed man – at one point, he finds himself crying over Kayleigh’s grave, after she kills herself; one time, he is an amputee; another, he’s an inmate, imprisoned for murdering Tommy. The people around him are also affected; Kayleigh ranges from being the most popular girl in a sorority to being a prostitute. All he really wants is for him and Kayleigh to be happy and together, but something always seems to go wrong. On top of this, years’ worth of new memories causes him severe brain damage, and eventually he realises that everyone’s suffering, in every scenario, is ultimately caused by him in some way.

There are four potential endings to this film; one is a rather cliched ending where he walks past Kayleigh on the street, she stops and looks at him for a while as though she knows him, then shrugs it off and walks on.
The generic ‘happy’ ending is where they cross paths on the street, and Evan introduces himself to Kayleigh, asking her out for coffee.
A more open-ended alternative is similar to the one where Evan and Kayleigh pass each other on the sidewalk and keep walking, except this time Evan, after hesitating, turns and follows Kayleigh, leaving it ambiguous.
The last possible ending is where he travels back to his own birth and strangles himself with his own umbilical cord so he was never born. Considering how wonderfully complicated the film is, I prefer this ending, as the others seem a bit of a let down.

The acting in this film is incredible; Ashton Kutcher portrays pretty much every ‘side’ to a personality possible; and I love the way the film is shot, because each new scenario seems to represent a different genre, showing how versatile the actors are. The different genres means there’s definitely something for everyone in this film, yet it’s still quite easy to follow despite how complicated it is; I would quite happily recommend it to everyone, with hesitation.

This is a song by one of my favourite bands, set to clips from The Butterfly Effect; this is actually one of the reasons I watched it in the first place.

Planning: Final Location

With our filming days only two days away, we still didn’t have a definite location until today… We had a back up, but the one we really wanted still hadn’t got back to us. Luckily, we received a letter today allowing us to use the location we wanted, which was nice of them. This means we can go ahead with filming without as much stress, as it’ll be just how we planned it!

Planning: Storyboards and Shooting Script

In order to help us film, we created storyboards, which show what should be seen in each shot. We decided the best way to display these would be to upload the storyboards into Final Cut and turn it into a video, which meant we could even add in zoom effects and other transitions to represent when the camera was going to zoom etc., along with text to help illustrate our ideas better where our drawings failed us!

(Insert video)

We also created a shooting script, which was not just the shots we wanted to use, but in the right order for filming – this makes the process a lot easier and reduces the risk of continuity errors, particularly with weather and lighting. If you wanted to film a shot outside, and shot inside, then another outside, the lighting would’ve changed and made it inconsistent. A shooting script stops this from happening.

We used a typewriter font in ours to stick with our slightly older 1970s theme!

Planning: Finished Ident

This is, at the moment, our finished ident; however, although we’re both happy with the picture and the name ‘DreamCatcher Productions’, I don’t think it looks right, and all of the people I’ve asked agree with me. The fact the picture doesn’t move but the light around it does looks odd and disjointed, so hopefully, if I have time, I’d like to change this to make it move. We decided not to include any sound in our ident.

The writing, ‘A DreamCatcher Production’ and ‘A Film By Lauren Key and Jess Marshall’ is fine, though, as we thought simple would probably be the best way to go. These will be shown in between shots of clothes being thrown into a suitcase and the patient closing the suitcase.

Planning: Making Our Prop List

Jess and I wanted to find an exciting way of presenting our prop list, and after a bit of thought, we decided on plasticine!

We then spent the rest of the lesson having everyone asking why we were playing with plasticine. We gave up on trying to make everything to scale when the suitcase ended up being bigger than the bed. The biggest challenge was making a pair of scissors, but I got there in the end…

Prop List:

• Scissors
• Medical ID tag
• Suitcase (and contents)
• Pill bottle (and pills)
• Bed and pillow

Prop List For Titles (Desk):

• Teabag
• Cup
• Papers
• Lamp
• Stationery/books etc

Planning: Test Shot – Teabag

Jess got the idea of having a shot of a diffusing teabag after watching an advert one day; she liked how it looked, and thought it could fit well into our titles.

Our practise shot of a diffusing teabag uses herbal tea, which looks quite effective because the red is incredibly striking. It connotes blood without just having an obvious shot of blood. We plan on having a shot of a teabag going into water at the beginning of our titles, and then the teabag coming out as our last shot.

We did a test shot using Jess’s camera (although the quality is not as good as the school cameras), which we thought looked quite good. We plan to redo it using a higher quality camera as we think it should be quite effective!

Line Of Duty – Vicky McClure on ‘This Morning’

Having missed the school bus the other day, I had to wait an hour for the public bus to take me into school. Despite being frustrating and stressful, it did give me time to watch This Morning, which featured Vicky McClure as one of the guests for that day. Vicky McClure played the part of Lol in This Is England, which we watched in media to practise some textual analysis. Since I recognised the actress (and personally I think she’s amazing), I decided to watch her interview before going to school. It was about series two of Line Of Duty, in which she plays the part of Detective Constable Kate Fleming. Line Of Duty also stars Keeley Hawes, who I recognised from Ashes to Ashes, which I absolutely loved.

Although I didn’t seeing series one, I do intend on watching series two, although I might have to catch up on what I missed first. Vicky McClure could find no negative things to say about the series; she said she loves the actors and the plot, adding that the scripts are ‘really intelligent’. She said, ‘I really enjoy TV that really keeps you on your toes.’

She also mentioned that at one point, they had to do an eighteen page scene… ‘We were all rather nervous about it, but for me, it was my most enjoyable scene – mainly because learning 18 pages of dialogue was such a massive challenge.’ She also stressed a lot how complicated the script was, and said that everyone had to read through it several times to really get to grips with it.

From what she’s said, the programme sounds gripping and really interesting, which sounds right up my street. I really want to watch it!

Planning: Voiceover Responses!

Since our film opening features a voiceover, Jess and I felt this was a very important thing to focus on; done properly, it could be effective, but if we were to produce a half-hearted, unprofessional sounding voiceover, it could just seem incredibly childish and amateur. Clearly, this is not what we want, so we put a lot of thought into our voiceover. We thought about every person we knew with a deep, serious voice, and I even asked a few people to read it through, but no one seemed to have the right voice!

In the end, we decided the best idea would be to use a professional voice actor, but we quickly shot this idea down because it seemed ridiculous. However, after despairing over STILL not being able to find a suitable voice, we thought, what did we have to lose by asking someone?

Therefore, we found a website called www.voice123.com, which has around 38,000 voice talents to browse through. We chose a few which we thought sounded perfect, and sent out some emails outlining our position, and of course pointing out that we couldn’t afford to pay them. Although we weren’t expecting any responses at all, we had four lovely emails waiting for us after school – all of which were agreeing to record our voiceover for us!

In all honesty, I nearly cried; I thought this was so nice of everyone, because they could easily have ignored our emails, and they had no reason to say yes. However, we now have the opposite problem to the one we had to begin with; at first, we had no voice actors. As it stands now, we have four!

One person has already recorded our script and sent it to us – it sounds amazing, and it’s so exciting! It’s brilliant to be able to hear something we’ve created being turned into a real voice recording. It’s also a big weight off our shoulders, because a few days ago we had no voiceover and no idea what to do about it, which was incredibly stressful.

Below are the pictures of the emails which Jess sent me over Facebook. The replies go straight to her email account, so she sent me a text saying ‘LAUREN LAUREN LAUREN OH MY GOD SOMEONE SAID YES TO OUR VOICEOVER THING’, so I immediately went on Facebook and demanded that she told me exactly what they said…