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!
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!
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.
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:
Prop List For Titles (Desk):
TeabagJess 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!
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…
So far, Jess and I haven’t really encountered any major problems with our film opening…
Of course, nothing is ever that easy.
I decided to look ahead to the weather during half term next week, when we plan to film. Due to Jess having to work, we are only able to film on Monday, Thursday and Friday – two of those days are forecast rain. Fortunately, it’s only light rain, and the visibility is good for every day. Sadly, this could cause problems with continuity, and it may interrupt our filming for a while. In terms of pathetic fallacy, and trying to set a mood, a cloudy, rainy day wouldn’t be such a terrible thing, it’s just the continuity we’re worried about. We actually do really want a dark and gloomy day to reflect the mood, but hopefully no rain… Nearer the time, we’ll check the weather forecast again to get a more detailed idea of when it’s likely to rain, so we can try and avoid any problems.
Later
I checked the weather forecast before we went filming today (21/02/14), and it was no longer forecast rain, luckily! Our only worry was that with it being cloudy during the time we were planning on filming, the lighting in our shots might have varied. Luckily, we think we managed to control the lighting in our shots quite well, at one point even resorting to using our storyboards to create shade where we needed it!
Last week, we did a trial run of Claudia’s make up. We wanted her to look pale and ill, so when she looked in the mirror and exclaimed ‘I look like a crazy person!’, we weren’t offended; if anything, we were pleased.
Since I know nothing about make up, I set up the camera and left Jess and Claudia to it.
Claudia wore the dress we plan on using for filming, and Jess used the make up she bought specially from eBay to whiten Claudia’s face and add darker make up around her eyes to make her look gaunt, tired and kind of ill. We felt this was an unnerving look, which is what we’re aiming for.
We then took the footage and sped it up to show the process, and I added before and after pictures of Claudia to show the transformation from being ‘normal Claudia’ to being Patient 439! We added some music to the video to make it less dull to watch, but since we can only use copyright free music, we were limited to what we could choose from… This particular piece of music is called ‘The Voyage’, and isn’t quite what we were looking for…
So far during this process, Jess and I have…
However, we still need to…
Find a suitable voiceoverHopefully (probably), we should be ready to film by half term, so we can be ready to begin editing when we get back.
Jess and I have a very specific idea of how we want our voice actor to sound; none of our friends have deep enough voices, as the voiceover should sound much older than seventeen or eighteen…
We therefore decided to look up voice actors, and found a website called http://www.voice123.com which has thousands of voice actor’s demo tapes and contact email addresses. Although we thought it might be an outside shot, we decided to contact a few voice actors we thought would be suitable and explain our situation to them.
Below is a copy of the letter we intend to send to our favourite voice actors.
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