Our Initial idea is for all of our characters to be in school uniform, although they will obviously vary depending on the character personality we are trying to convey.

Lucy Hart: Black High waisted skirt (with braces), white blouse, black long knee high socks, Black heels, school tie

Emma Roberts: Pinafore dress, white shirt, long socks, School tie

Jenny Chandler: Black Trousers, trainers, White shirt, School tie, Baggy Jumper.

We gained inspiration from the film St Trinians (2007). The costumes we want to create are very similar to these ones shown, as the characters mirror our own.

Our main character (Lucy) is going to portray a similar Character as Regina George In Mean Girls.

Location: Outside the school

Make up:

Summer- Glamourous, Smokey eyes, Red Lipstick (Similar to Gemma Arterton In St Trinians)

Mia: Pink tones, Girly, Pale Pink Lipstick

Ella: Similar to Summer.

Olivia: Very Natural, Little make up needed

Props: School Bags, Mobile Phones,

 One of the girls stood on there own (Jenny Chandler)

 Shot of three girls walking towards the camera, camera shot slowly moves upwards to reveal the characters. Camera pauses inbetween each actor, and shows opening titles.

 All fashionably dressed.

 Camera moves onto a shot of Jenny (High angle to show inferior to other girls). Fairly plain clothes.

 Then cotinues to show the three girls walking forward past Jenny, all look over to her. Fades to black and opening titles begin.

 Begining shot of Jenny walking by herself, voiceover of Jenny explaining how she has moved form a smaller town.

 OLIVIA: So things have changed so much over the past year. I used to be Happy. I used to be Popular. Then suddenly my mum decided she wanted to move here, (drops bag) and now everythings different. So it was Goodbye to Beachlife and Hello to the City.

 FADES TO DINING HALL SCENE

 SUMMER: “this is our place.. MOVE!”

 OLIVIA: “Oh sorry I didnt Know…”

 SUMMER: “You will be! Learn the hierarchy new girl!”

 (Olivia moves quickly)

 ELLA: Who is that?!

 SUMMER: some freak from the beach

 MIA: I heard that she doesn’t even know what a pedicure is.

 SUMMER:…Well whatever… Anyway Guess who came round last night Girls??…

 MIA AND ELLA: Who??!

 SUMMER: Ben!!!”

 FADES OUT TO NEXT SCENE.

 Olivia sat by herself reading, Ben walks towards her.

 BEN: “..Err Hey, Do you mind if I sit here for a minute, Im trying to avoid someone” Ben Laughs nervously.

 OLIVIA: Yeah thats fine. I’ll be glad of the company to be honest.”

 BEN: Your new, right?

 OLIVIA: Yeah is it really that obvious?!

 BEN: Well thats just say you don’t exactly fit in with the girls round here…

 OLIVIA: Meaning?

 BEN: Meaning your not fake, your not shallow and you don’t make a point of wearing as little clothes as possible!

 OLIVIA (laughs): Thanks. I suppose I should take that as a compliment…

 BEN: Yeah it was meant as one.

 They both smile at each other as summer approaches. Ben jumps up.

 SUMMER: Where have you been? And what are you talking to her for?!

 Summer points towards Olivia as she walks away.

 BEN: I just needed to get away! I’m sick of you being so rude to everyone. To be honest I think we should break up.

 Ben quickly walks away. Summer shouts after him.

 SUMMER: What?! No one breaks up with me!

 Scene Ends.

 Summer on the phone to Mia.

 SUMMER: Mia, I’m going to get him back if its the last thing I do. You should of seen him talking to that Olive!

 MIA: You mean Olivia.

 SUMMER: Yeah Whatever, she’s still a Bitch!….

 SLAMS DOWN PHONE.

 MIA: Hello?? Summer? Are you still there?

 NEXT SCENE.

 SHOT OF OLIVIA WALKING TO SCHOOL.

 Summer Mia and Ella are walking behind her.

 SUMMER: Hey Slag! Keep away from my boyfriend. (SHOUTS)

 OLIVIA: From what I’ve heard he’s not even your boyfriend any more! And don’t worry I wouldn’t go near him anyway, I don’t know what I might catch.

 SUMMER: What is that suppose to mean? I don’t know who you think you are but at this school I’m in charge.

 MIA AND ELLA: Yeah exactly!

 GIRLS WALK OUT OF THE SHOT.

NEXT SHOT. OLIVIA SAT BY HERSELF. MIA WALKS TOWARDS HER. 

MIA: Err Hi, are you okay? 

OLIVIA: Where’s the rest of the group? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you apart from them. MIA: To be honest I’m getting pretty sick of them. Mind if I sit down?

 OLIVIA: I suppose not.

 MIA: I really am sorry about Summer. She just can’t stand competition.

 OLIVIA: Competition?

 MIA: Yeah its obvious Ben really likes you.

 OLIVIA: I hadn’t noticed. (Smiles)

 MIA: I better go anyway. I’m supposed to be meeting Summer for a pedicure. It was nice talking to you anyway.

 OLIVIA: …What’s a pedicure?

 Scene Fades out.

 OLIVIA WALKING ON HER OWN. BEN FOLLOWS AFTER HER (RUNNING) 

BEN: Olivia! Wait up. OLIVIA TURNS AROUND.

 OLIVIA: Oh Hi Ben. (AWKWARDLY)

 BEN: I haven’t seen you in a while, have you been avoiding me or something?

 OLIVIA: To be honest I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be friends. Summer doesn’t seem too keen on the idea.

 BEN: I don’t care about Summer though. (Pause) I like you.

 OLIVIA (smiles to herself)

FADES TO NEXST SCENE.

AT SCHOOL. SUMMER, MIA AND ELLA CONFRONT OLIVIA.

SUMMER: I thought I warned you to stay away from my boyfriend!

OLIVIA: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

STARTS TO WALK AWAY GIRLS FOLLOW.

SUMMER: Ben told me that the reason he didn’t want to be with me anymore was because of you!

OLIVIA: Maybe he’s finally come to his senses.

SUMMER: Or maybe he’s got seriousd concussion, He’d have to, to find you attractive! Right Girls?

MIA: Don’t get us involved Summer.

MIA AND ELLA WALK AWAY

SUMMER: Every thing started going wrong since you turned up!

OLIVIA: You can’t blame me for your own mistakes Summer.

OLIVIA WALKS AWAY LEAVING SUMMER STOOD BY HERSELF.

 5 years on, Jenny voice over explaining what has happened to the girls

A MONTAGE OF IMAGES.

OLIVIA: In case you’re wondering the group split up, from what I’ve heard summer, is now having her 3rd child, all with different fathers. As for the other girls, Ella is now a top Journalist and ironically my favourite columnist. I still see Mia, in fact she’s one of my closest friends and she was the maid of honour at my Wedding. 

Ben proposed after two years of living together, and I’ve never been happier. So surprisingly the move to Shallow City was the best thing that ever happened to me! And the group split was for the best.

FADES TO BLACK AND END CREDITS.

Prior to any Film production you will have to establish who your main Target audience is so you are able to work this to your advantage; with Horror films they have a large audience so stereotyping one particular group can be difficult. 

The above Photo was procured from Google, and it presents a stereotypical audience member to our film. I chose this particular person as a representative because they are around the age of 17-25 and normally Horror/Thriller Movies are given a rating of 18, I feel our Movie contains criteria of an Interest to an older audience and I would suggest the rating would be 15-18. Another reason I designated this particular image representative of our film is mainly due to his appearance as it portrays an average person who enjoys the horror Genre because they would probably be defined under the social group Emo or Goth on account of his hairstyle and clothes choice. The clothing Brands they would customarily wear would be Vans and Criminal Damage. Although the spectrum of people who fall under this category is substantial I think this person sums them up best. They would enjoy films such as The Saw sequel, the grudge, Halloween and many other popular Horror/Thriller Titles. Also the typical Television programmes they would watch would probably be Skins, CSI, Dead Set, Being Human and Supernatural, as these all feature tension building storylines which are expected and associated with Horror Films. Characteristically they would shop at places such as HMV and GAME because Horror films are popular among film fanatics and predominantly males. Also there Music tastes would conventionally be Metal or Rock music, this type of music occurs in horror films very often as it sets the thriller scene and appeals to the typical audience, Bands such as Metallica and Motorhead.

 The audience would not be focused at girly girls as normally these would not consider Horror as their chosen genre probably due to the amount of Gore, violence and suspense.  Furthermore people under the age of 17 would not be as much of an enthusiast of horror films as they are too young to fully understand some of the complex storylines and will be affected by the disturbing scenes to a greater extent than an older audience. Also audiences may be aficionados of famous Horror film directors for instance Sir Alfred Hitchcock who pioneered the beginning of the Horror Genre creating legendary Titles including Psycho, Birds and Vertigo. Fans of these films are likely to also enjoy more modern Titles that can be compared to these original renowned movies, and observe how the Horror Genre has altered over the years. However contemporary Horror films will probably not be enjoyed by people over the age of 40 as they may not understand or appreciate the modern take on the Horror genre and prefer more romanticised Movies, such as popular Bette Davis films including the celebrated ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane?’.

 This is a Link to the annotated version of our opening sequence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj7JfTqOj9c

When you open it in apture embed it does not show the annotations so adding the link address is the best alternative so you have to now copy and paste the link to access the annotated version. I also included the apture embed of the opening sequence of The Ring as I compared it to the opening of our movie, and the Titles especially show several similarities. It is also aimed at a similar Target audience.

 This Frame is taken from our preliminary exercise and is an example of one of the errors that occurred during the exercise, it shows a jump cut presenting a continuity error. Also we did not have time to add audio on over the top and at the time we were still adjusting ourselves to getting used to using the camera so we did not include any speech. However for our final piece the script was well thought out beforehand and any extra audio we wanted could easily be added over the top using Adobe Premiere which were not confident with doing during the preliminary.

  This shot shows how bad the quality was of our preliminary, you can see the image is very blurred and there is far too much head room above Jack, when there should be little or no space here.

Now I feel I am much more confident  then I was during the production of the Preliminary exercise, I have learnt to use a wider use of shots and vary which shots we choose instead of using the same or similar ones, particularly the use of over the shoulder shots to tell the story to make economical use of the frame. Also during the editing process to begin with I knew little about this process and lacked the skills needed; now I know much more about the proceeds and different techniques to improve our film such as the different transitions you can add in. The preliminary exercise shows a much more basic film then our most recent one which includes several uses of a range of shots and transitions. In our film we knew we had to take into considerations several issues such as the 180 degree rule. Unlike the preliminary exercise we also included the use of a shot reverse shot which i think really improved our final film. Another major improvement we encountered was with the editing process; we were much more competent at understanding the process and quickly picked up new techniques we were able to incorporate into our final film such as dissolves to make transitions smoother. Also our group were much more organised this time and we all put in a greater effort then during the preliminary exercise when our attitude was far more relaxed and our lack of organisation resulted in us not having enough footage to make a flowing film. For our final piece we certified that we had more then enough footage by repeating each shot several times untill we were happy. The work load was evenly shared between the three of us, I think it was an advantage that we had worked together on the preliminary though as it gave us the experience of working well as a group. We also put much more time and effort into deciding what location would be most suitable, whereas last time we merely chose a location with easy access. Overall we were all able to learn from the mistakes we made during the Preliminary exercise, and we put all our effort into acchieving a film that showed our new skills and it allowed us to be creative and become essentially more confident in this field of Media studies.

Evaluation Activity 3 Directors Commentary

Our film company was Named JJF, after the three producers, Joanna Byrom, Jack Young and Flora Simpson. The Logo is a fairly simple but classic design. JJF are a fairly small company who mainly specialize in Horror Films.

They work in connection with the company ‘Young Films’, the distributor is the corporation that works with the film company and they distribute the film to Cinemas and then onto DVD, ‘Young Films’ mainly only works with in the UK but occasionally films will be distributed worldwide, depending on their initial success. They also have to assess the likely market and potential financial success of the film. Hollywood distributors adopt a hard-headed business approach and consider factors such as the film genre, the target audience, the historical success of similar films, the actors who might appear in the film, and potential directors.  Their main aim is to make a profit, and Horror films are widely popular with audiences everywhere. For example the Exorcist that accumulated a gross profit of $440,000,000 worldwide, making it one of the most profitable horror films. ‘Tracker’ was unlike many Movies today, filmed at one main location In the UK. This was Elstree Studios situated in the heart of London, which has produced some of the most famous films around such as, ‘The shining’ and ’Indiana Jones’. Apart from the cost of hiring the studio and the money spent on advertising the film was produced on a fairly low budget, due to the ‘new to film’ cast.  The Gross profit the film accumulated during the first week came to £300,000 at the Box offices, which is a fairly respectable amount although in comparison to The Ring which made $8.3 million during the first two weeks, it seems almost insignificant. Considering films such as Halloween and Friday the 13^th made extremely high profits we are hopeful ours as a classic Horror film storyline will have the same reception from people.

The Titles we included consisted of the Writers name, the names of the two actors’ and finally the film title itself.  Normally in films there are many more titles then this but we decided to keep ours to a minimal amount.  We worked with the Writer Peter Stones who was very competent and thorough when it came to producing the script the most common and important Titles you will see are:

• The Director who is primarily responsible for the storytelling, creative decisions and acting of the film.
• The assistant director (AD) manages the shooting schedule and logistics of the production, among other tasks.
• The casting director finds actors to fill the parts in the script. This normally requires that actors audition. Lead actors are carefully chosen, often based on the actor’s reputation or “star power.”
• The location manager finds and manages film locations. Most pictures are shot in the controllable environment of a studio sound stage but occasionally, outdoor sequences call for filming on location.
• The production manager manages the production budget and production schedule. They also report, on behalf of the production office, to the studio executives or financiers of the film.

• The composer creates new music for the film. (usually not until post-production)
• The production designer creates the visual conception of the film, working with the art director.
• The costume designer creates the clothing for the characters in the film working closely with the actors, as well as other departments.
• The make up and hair designer works closely with the costume designer in addition to create a certain look for a character.
• The storyboard artist creates visual images to help the director and production designer communicate their ideas to the production team.

Bibliography:

- Wikipedia

 This is the original script I wrote out but when It came to recording the Commentary I realised that I could have to cut out a considerable amount as It was far to long to match up with our Film. If I had of kept this script I would of ended up with a substantial amount of time at the end that was merely black screen with the commentary over the top. The process of editing the script was fairly easy though and I manage to shorten it to the essential parts I needed in the commentary.