Costume Research

Now that we have confirmed our script and treatment, we have to look at things like the costume and prop choices.

Our film will take place mainly in an office, during work hours. This means that the protagonist and the character of the 'boss' will need to be dressed in smart uniform, for example, a suit and tie.

We can look at other films for inspiration on the costume. In particular, Shaun of the Dead and Fight Club. The protagonists in these films both dress in 'workwear' but they aren't smart in their appearance as you can see below. How they both dress seems to reflect the attitude to their jobs, as they are both overworked and bored - much like our protagonist. Therefore it would be suitable for the 'office worker' in our film to wear a shirt, tie, and work trousers in a slightly dishevelled manner like the photos below, whereas the 'boss' dresses in a suit and tie in a smart way. This will represent in quite an obvious way to the audience each character's attitude to their job and how they are part of the corporate world. Because they are in classic work attire, it voids them of personality and just makes them part of the working world.

These are photos are from Fight Club and Shaun of The Dead. Both of the characters are bored with their jobs and even though they are dressed relatively smart, aren't as smart as the could be. Our protagonist has a similar outlook to their job, so they would be dressed in a similar manner.

We will probably go for a plain black tie and white shirt combination, as the plain colours make him seem like any other working person, and don't give him a chance to express much personality. It will represent that he is just like any other person in a boring office job, and it will make it easier for us to rid of personality, so that he can be a figurehead for all of the people out there who hate their jobs.

Now that we have considered all the options for costume, we will look at the options for props.

Risk Assessment

The last post brings me on to this. We need to think of the health & safety risks whilst recording. Whilst we are recording we are going to have to think about the wires that will be trailing from the camera to the external monitoring kit. To do this we are going to tape the wires down to the floor.

Other risks would be spills from the coffee that were going to use to make the title for the film, so were going to have to keep the electrical equipment away from the coffee.

Some scenes will be shot on a busy road, to prevent any accidents we will be staying on the path and being being very aware of traffic flow.

During the bus shots we will be using heavy equipment on a moving vehicle therefore could cause injures to passengers on the bus, to prevent this from happening we are going to be sensible with the equipment placement and be aware of the bus braking and accelerating and situations on the road.

Incase of an emergency Connor is a trained life guard, and I have passed basic first aid so we will have an understanding of how to resolve a problem, we will also carry phones with us to call emergency services if necessary.

Below is a formal list of risks and preventions, we will take this out with us when we film, and show it to our actor beforehand to ensure he is aware of the potential risks and responsibilities for filming.

Formal Risk Assessment 2

Now that we are fully aware and have considered the risks, we can look at finer details like the costume.

Location Research

For the short film that we need to have around three different locations - a house, a bus, and an office.

Each one of the locations needs to have enough room to set equipment up, enough room to get different shot angles, and it needs to be somewhere that we can be there for a long period of time ( a whole day ) because if we filmed on different days, things could have been moved around in the room, which would affect our continuity.

The inspiration for the locations that we want come from films similar to ours, like 'Fight Club' and the short film 'The Black Hole'.

The Black Hole & Fight Club both feature the similar theme of a man bored of his mundane job. The dark tones used in the office and the dishevelled appearance help to visually illustrate the boredom felt by the two men. This lonely, depressing office enviroment is what we would like to recreate with our own film.


The problems we could face are: distance to travel; how we are going to get there; the light outside changing from day to night, affecting continuity; office availability; and space for camera.

We asked a local office space owner if we could use his office for making a short film. We told him the film idea and all of the requirements and he said that we are allowed to use the office from 4 till 10 on any day that we like.

There is a underground office with no windows that would be most suitable for filming because the weather wouldn't change if we were filming on different days. Also the underground room has more room to get lots of different shots. Because it's underground it would represent how he feels like he isn't part of the rest of the world and is quite isolated from everyone else in the world.

This is the room that we are looking at using because its a boring looking office which is perfect for our short film because its meant to look boring to fit with the style of the film.

We are going to take down the stuff on the wall so its just a plain and doesn't have any personality which will exaggerate how bored the person working there is, and how corporate and void of personality he is.

It's good that we're allowed to use this office from 4 till 10 because we can get all the filming done in one night and then the office wont change, which would affect the continuity.

We also need to use a kitchen for some of our scenes, conveniently there's a kitchen in the office. Again there's no windows, so continuity of the sky outside won't be a problem for us as we won't have to rely on natural light.

We also need to use a house for a location, mainly the bedroom and the hallway. This should be easy for us as we could film in any of our houses. We need to make sure that when we film in this location we do it in daylight, as the scene is meant to take place in the morning.

The other location is on a bus. Even though it may be a little bit awkward filming on a bus if there's people around and carrying heavy equipment, the scene on the bus is only based of one or two shots so shouldn't be too time consuming. Again this would have to be filmed in daylight to make it look like it's the morning.

However in all of this, we must consider the health and risks, and plan accordingly should we have to face any.

Script

This is our script/screenplay for our film, Dave. The movement, actions, expressions and dialogue of the character is narrated. We have experience of writing scripts from when we wrote them last year for our AS project, so using celtx wasn't too hard and we didn't need to do too much research in to how to write a script.

REC Script by wildamadeus

We will now move on to location research, in order to get a much clearer picture of what our film will look like.

Final Treatment

As a group we have decided that the treatment is accurate so no amendments need to be made, and we will show it to peers to gather feedback for improvements and highlights.

From talking to peers we gathered a few crucial points to consider:

• "It feels like there should be some more explanation of who "Dave" is, maybe something at the start to show him at home or something." - Jack.
• "Needs more detail as to what happens when he is happy." - Kennedy.
• "The ending is really hard-hitting, it has a good impact." - Hinks.
• "I like the idea of bird-poo and missing the bus, comedy-gold!" - Matt.

From this we have decided that we should add a section at the start that exposes Dave at his home, we had the idea of taking the montage shots of him getting ready, so that it is concise and informative, like this scene in the style of "Shaun of the Dead":

REC Treatment Updated by gwpahsmedia

Now that we have a solid film treatment, we can now focus on writing the script.

Draft of Film Treatment

Conventions Of A Film Treatment

Before writing the treatment, Ryan researched how a treatment is formed and what goes in it.

A treatment is designed to be the first rough test of how your creative idea will fare out, by writing it into a brief and concise way that explains everything that needs to be explained, you are saving writing the full script and then realising it has no potential, and so if it isn't great at the treatment stage you can move on without too much time lost.

Movieoutline.com states that the treatment should contain the 3 sections of the film, in simple terms the beginning, middle and end, though they describe it as Setup, Conflict and Resolution – which is more true to media products than a typical story. In the majority of films, this staging will work, though horrors tend to subvert these conventions.

We have all had experience of writing a treatment last year for our 2 minutes opening of a film, so Ryan is already fairly confident in how to write a treatment.

 Below is the first draft of our treatment:

Treatment - Short Film REC

The next step is to gather feedback on what to improve/change and what amendments will be made. Afterwards we will then show it to a wider audience to gather feedback for improvement, and see how people react to it, as well as analysing the costume research and location research.

Target Audience

For our film we need to consider our target audience. The target audience is the group of people that we have in mind when we make the film, and who we expect to watch our film (for example if we were making a romantic film, we would expect women in their twenties to watch).
We must consider things like the genre of our film, whether it has swearing, nudity, or violence, so it would also be a good idea to look at what the classification of our film would be.

Using the British Board of Classification (BBFC) site (http://www.bbfc.co.uk/), we can determine what rating we should give to our film. We have come to a conclusion that our film should be rated U. This is because our film doesn't include any bad language, violence, or sexual/drug references. The BBFC states "A U Film can explore most themes, as long as the treatment is appropriate a young audience." Our film would be fine for a young child to watch, as there is no bad behaviour that can be imitated, as it is so far-fetched (Dave prints off money from a work printer thanks to a pop-up, which obviously couldn't happen in real life). BBFC also states that U films should be suitable for an audience that is over 4 years old. I don't think any parent would have a problem with their children watching our film, as there is nothing that would be harmful for their child to watch. 

These are the official certificates for  films in the UK.

Now that we've established the classification of our film, we can now further determine the target audience. We can do this with using the Pearl & Dean website (www.pearlanddean.com) which gives us statistical information on the audiences for different films. We looked at the film Fight Club, which is a similar film to ours in the storyline and the dark vibe we're going for. The audience viewing statistics showed that it was mainly males aged 25-45 who watched it, with females aged 25-45 coming in second. This has helped us to decide our own target audience, and we have decided to aim our film at males 24-45. We also looked at the viewing statistics for Shaun of the Dead, which had a similar viewing statistic. We're taking inspiration from how Shaun of the Dead is shot, so the film is a bit similar to ours therefore we'll take there viewing figures in to consideration. 

This is Hank, a 31 year old man who will watch our film. 

We have to get a specific idea of who we want to watch our film so we have chosen this 29 year old sales assistant at the Apple store. 

• His favourite genres of film are comedy and horror. His favourite films are Shaun of the Dead, Fight Club and Saw. He loves films and goes to the cinema regularly, and reads Empire magazine.
• His favourite music is of the 'alternative' genre, bands like Two Door Cinema Club and Arctic Monkeys. He gets NME every week.
• He lives with his two roomates in a house in Walsall. He has a long-term girlfriend.

Now that we have determined our target audience, we must ask members of the target audience to give use feedback on our film treatment.

Production Progress Review

After we had a production team meeting, we then had to talk to the whole class about what we are planning to do next, and how we will go about delegating tasks in the research and planning stage.

As a regrouping exercise, we displayed our R&P journey through saying what we have done - and what we will be doing up until Christmas.

The elements we were flawed on:

• Quality assurance: How can we be sure that everyone has had an equal portion of work and effort into the work? - To which we explained that all of our work is peer-assessed and constructively criticised to match the level of the highest grade between us. 
• How did Ryan make sure that his treatment matched Connor's vision? - Connor is brilliant with communicating, and I was with him when I wrote the treatment, so I made sure that if I was unsure of anything I asked him to clarify.

We gave ourselves, green for progress and quality of work, but orange for time management, as we need to finish the storyboard in order to get the animatic done before Christmas.

Next we need to finish the storyboard and scan it in, finish the script and risk assessment upload it to the blog, and finally to begin making the animatic. We also need to establish a target audience for our film.

Production Workflow

This is my groups production workflow, which we have put together to help us organise our workflow. This gives us an idea of what we should be doing to work effectively, and in what order we should be doing the work. As you can see, we have already crossed off the tasks that we have completed, and we can clearly see what we need to do next.

Next, we will talk to the class and Mr Hood about our plan of action, to be given any feedback if needed.

Production Team Meeting

Now that we've had time to think of the pros and cons of each pitch, and the practicality of each film idea, it's essential for our group to discuss what storyline we're going to choose and how we're going to about preparing for it and producing it. We had a private meeting spanning over an hour to help us come to the decision.

I think that the meeting went quite successfully and we spent quite a lot of time deciding on which story to go with. We came to a unanimous decision to go with Connor's story after we listed the pros and cons of each film idea, and decided to go with the one with most pros. We also delegated the first tasks out (costume research, location research, and film treatment) for everyone to do in their spare time. I did costume research, Ryan did treatment, and Connor did the location research because he has access to the location.

To keep things organised, the next step will be to produce a workflow document for us to follow, so that we can trace our steps of the work we need to do/have done.

Evaluation of Film Ideas

Now that we have confirmed which production teams that we are in, we know need to start thinking about short film storylines. As I mentioned briefly in the last post, we were all told to come up with an idea for a short film that we could practically make to a high standard, and present the idea to the class, with feedback from Mr Hood and the other students. Here are mine and my group's ideas:

My idea: a 'mockumentary' style short about a boy that thinks/is a vampire. He moves to a new school, and though initially met with curiosity, and befriended by the other students, is soon ridiculed and alienated. Eventually, he feels as though enough is enough and tries to take his life in the sunrise, nut fails as he's not a vampire. The film would include interviews with himself, family members and his school 'friends'. It's supposed to be slightly humorous in tone, as it's a ridiculous situation, but slightly dark as you're supposed to feel slightly sorry for the boy at some points.

Advantages     - could be done with a small cast
                       - 'mockumentaries' (fake documentaries) is not a widely used genre in short films. It would, I feel be more interesting for an audience to watch than a drama or romance film, which can become tiresome if there isn't an interesting story to back it up
                       - would fit in the short time period of 5 minutes.

Disadvantages - would need quite capable actors in order to portray the 'dark humour' (also, comedy is a very subjective thing. Even though this isn't necessarily meant to be a comedy, it's also got silly and humorous elements which may get overlooked depending on the audience).
                      - permission would be needed for a school setting.


Connor's idea: A man is stuck in the same daily routine with an office job that bores him. Everyday is a groundhog day, with him growing increasingly more depressed and deflated with the amount of mind-numbing work he receives. However, his life seemingly changes for the better, when a pop up appears on his computer asking him if he's bored of his job. He clicks it and the office printer starts to print out money. He grabs it all and runs out of the office, with a new start. But then his boss drops off more work, and he wakes up realising it was all a dream.

Advantages    - Simple yet very effective. would be easy to shoot as the shots are quite repetitive.
                      - Very small cast.
                      - Plot twist which works great with the conventions of short films.

Disadvantages - I can imagine the pop-up on the computer and the printer that prints out money to be challenging to create effectively.
                       - An office setting may be difficult for us to find.


Ryan's idea: There is a university, and it is going to be closed down by the government because of it's lack of “student satisfaction” ratings/ falling numbers. The university fund the students to make a short film that promotes student satisfaction. The money is given to a group of 3 high achieving media students, to make a short film that expresses “student satisfaction”. In their shared apartment, the students discuss how they could make a good short film. One of them recommends they just blow the money on a party, and they do. They have this party, and it's awesome. The news of it gets leaked back to the university. They return to the office with the teacher, and he knows what's going on, but he pretends he doesn't, he asks where the film is. The students say they have the perfect short film to show student satisfaction – and points to the STATIC camera filming the action. 

Advantages    - Clever plot twist
                      - No need for special effects
                      - Students as cast would be easy to find.

Disadvantages - Plot would be hard to fit into 5 minutes.
                       - Possibility that it would only appeal to a younger audience.

Now that we have all listened to the pitches and given feedback, we will all consider the ideas individually and come back next lesson for a group meeting to decide which ideas we can go with or incorporate in to the film.

My Production Team

After planning our film ideas, we were then put into the teams that we were going to work with based on our pitches of the ideas, and also depending on who we all voted that we would most like to work with.
This was done through pitching our film ideas to the rest of the group and Mr Hood, so that the rest of the group could get an idea of who they wanted to work with and Mr hood could get an idea of which people would work best together. We then each privately put in order who we would most like to work with, 1 being most want to work with, 5 being least. Mr Hood was the only person who saw these votes, and it helped him to decide the groups for the rest of the year.
After taking the pitches and the votes in to consideration, I found out that I was in a group with Connor Smith and Ryan Bickley.
Connor's blog:
Ryan's blog:

I'm happy with the group I'm in. I feel we all have different strengths, which can contribute to a good film and to good coursework  I feel that my strengths lie in written coursework, but I also feel I can handle the filming side of things well, and can operate camera equipment effectively. Ryan has a brilliant work ethic, and can handle the coursework, filming, and editing equally well, and he takes time in making sure that work is to a high standard. Connor is very creative, and is also good at working in a team. We all have very different but useful skills to bring to our group, which should reflect upon our finished product.

The name of production team is 'REC'. We unanimously decided on this as the first letters of our names spell out REC, and it also doubles a shortened term for 'record', a word that features heavily in media, especially in media production.

This could be an example of our production team logo:

The next logical step would be to consider which film idea we are using for our final product.