The Opening and Closing Speeches

Girls opening speech: I was normal once, or at least I think I was. When I was younger when my mother was alive everything was fine and everyone was happy. But then my mother died and everything else changed. My grandparents abandoned us, they blamed us for her death. Blamed us...well blamed me. And my father did also. My grandparents approach didn’t affect me as much, not speaking to me was a much better reaction than my fathers. At times it was like he wasn’t there, that everything he was doing to me wasn’t him or that it didn’t register in his mind. Stupid I know. After all this time I’m still making excuses for him. The burns, the scratches, the scars and worst of all, Oh god worst of all...when the lights went off and everything was quiet I’d hear the squeaks of the floorboards and my door opening. He would be stood there in the landing, breathing heavily, staring at me, I could feel his eyes on me. But feeling his eyes on me would be the last of my problems. First his eyes.. then his hands...


Closing speech: I’m 16 years old now, I’m a women. But by law I’m still a child. By law I still have to be here with him, I’ve left school and could hack college, everyday it gets worst...I want this to end..completely...its him or me...

First day of shooting begins...

After planning, changin the idea, talking through shots and taking the camera out on parks, around town and in sixth form. Our first day of shooting for the final piece will be the 18th February 2010.

The inside shots will take place at charlottes house and a number of the outside flashbacks will be taken from the practice shot that was filmed over the last few weeks.

Digital Storyboard! (Still Images)

Our opening shot for our presentation will be like so. Mid close up shot so that the head, shoulders and some of the clothing is in shot. The background will be completely black and the actor will look straight on at the camera.


In the middle of the sequence there will be a series of flash shots showing inside a traditional home, a father, shots of the family to show signifiance in these characters.

Storyboarding!

Our ideas have changed and developed after looking at different films and directors, as well as watching previous attempts by media students working with different genres. After watching all these we decided that we were making things harder for ourselves so we have re-grouped our ideas and tried to make it simpler, without taking away any quality.

So the main shots we're going to use is...

* Establishing shots
* Mid close ups
* Panning shots

Using Girl Interrupted as inspiration we decided to use simple shots to show a simple storyline.

Storyline:

Young girl who has been abused starts off the opening with a close up of her face with a voice over saying her thoughts. Shots then shoot back to shots of her family and her father to suggest that her father holds significance to the story without giving away what role he plays in this. The voice over will be very dull and plain, won't give much insight to the audience and will confuse the audience so that it appears that she may have some sort of mental illness. Her facial expression will be completely blank, and nothing about her seems very interesting.

Shoots in the middles of the sequence will be quick, 5-10 seconds long at the most showing a simple but significant picture, before the camera reverts back to her where she saying a simple one line to express her feelings and intentions...

Shot Practice

For our first shot practices we decided to shot all around the sixth form centre to get familiar with the cameras. These are some of our location points through sixth form:

All different shots were shot throughout the space of 30 minutes as a practice.

possible settings and locations

We have been looking at not only the shots that need to be used but also the setting and location to add to the mise-en-scene of our opening. We had considered using shots from the woods, countryside, local town, cities, graveyards, farms and our houses.

We decided that since we have not shot any of our final work that we would take pictures using my digital camera and decide between us which location fits best with our parts of our filming.



Local town of Burnley:
Using the idea of filming within the centre is one of the easier options because it is accessable to us at all times. However with the centre being quite crowded its not that suitable to shoot as people can and will often walk infront of your shots.



The woods:
The woods again is an easy option as it is assessable to us easily and won't have the problem of being over crowded or populated. However in dense woods the lighting may not work to our advantage and carrying equipment through the woods carrys the risk of breaking it.

Our Own Houses:
Permission from parents and family members of course, using our own houses doesn't limit is with risks of breaking equipment or having people walking in on shots, however it does limit the amount we can do as their is only so much that can happen within a house for an opening without giving the whole story away.

The countryside and farms:

The countryside is less assessable as we would need transport up there on more than one occasion to film more than once, and to film on farms we would need permission from the owners land, all these factors we will be thinking about when we decide on our final location for shooting.



Graveyards:

Graveyards work very well for the horror genre films however it will be hard to work around graves without being disrespectful and trying not to make it look too cheesy.




Cities:
Nearby cities are blackburn, preston and manchester, all of which are not as assessable to us apart from on weekends which restricts how much we can film. If we decided to film in a city the filming would have to be done in one or two days which doesnt give us much flexibility.

This week...

This week we had our first chance at taking the cameras out around sixth form, giving us plenty of space to run around and practice shots. During which we were given a hand out sheet showing us each shot that would be expected to appear within our first few practice openings.


We did establishing shots, tracking shots and mid shots of people talking. We added credits to which included mine and charlottes names as the director and included Michaels name as we used him as an extra for our practice. He will also be appearing in our short film.

We cut out most of the shots taken as they didnt fit in any way with the rest of the production and found it difficult to make the material fit. In conclusion to this I decided that it would be easier to shoot each scene we do 3 times and take bits of each take out and see which fits better allowing us more variety in the shots we have.