First film draft!

This is where we are currently at with our film opening. We obviously have a lot to do!
We are unsure about the background music, as it doesn't fit in some places so we are going to try and make it sound more distorted. We also haven't added our voice over in yet.
We haven't completely worked out the order of our shots, and whether some of them are relevant. We thought adding transitions on iMovie when changing locations would work, however we have come to realize that this looks a bit silly, so we might need to shoot some more for the purpose of continuity, or find a way to make our current shots flow more smoothly into one another.
The titles are not yet added in, and we have not chosen the title font yet so we are also going to change that.
We hope to get our sound done by early next week and we also hope to finish the majority of our editing by the end of next week, giving us enough time to make any last minute changes.

Makeup, costume and props!

Here is our main actress, Hannah C, in costume on our final day of filming. We chose to have our character dressed formally, because this is how you might expect a psychiatrist to dress at work.
The outfit consists of very dark colours, to show that our character is shady. We wanted Hannah to wear a skirt, to highlight her femininity as we are challenging the typical conventions of a psychological thriller in which male actors usually appear as the lead role.

We also chose to keep her hair out because it looks less tidy and it falls in front of her face, which gives the audience the impression that she is keeping her face hidden. This emphasizes not only her introverted personality as perceived by the public eye, but also her paranoia and lack of self confidence.
Hannah wore minimal makeup, as we wanted her to appear sophisticated and professional to her patients.



 
We also used a few props...
The prescription we used, which Hannah C administers to Hannah F in the office scene. We used a real prescription from the surgery to make the scene look more realistic.

The large pill bottle was originally shot so our title could go on the bottle, so we covered it with a plain white sticky label however the titles needed to be bigger, and there was a risk of the title text getting lost as the bottle appears to be quite small on screen.

Another important prop was Hannah's glasses, which we used to film one of our favourite POV shots in the opening. We think the glasses were key in highlighting one of the main side effects - 'blurred vision'.

Final filming day: location 3

Today was our final day of filming for our actual two minute opening! It took just over an hour, but we think we have all the shots that we need. We followed our storyboard and used the underwater camera, so we now have a wide range of interesting shots to use.

We filmed these final scenes in the school toilets, and so we had to put a sign up, to make sure our filming wasn't disturbed. Poor Nicole just wanted to use the toilet...

Here are a few stills from filming:

Rhianne demonstrating the shot

Hannah following, perfectly!

Look who we found! Some of our peers in media came to watch us film!

All in all, we think today was really successful, and we don't think we will need to re-film. We are currently still in the process of editing, and we have yet to add our sound in, though we hope to have this done by mid-next week. We also have to design our production company logo, which we hope to get done by early next week too, so we can really shift our focus into editing!

Title fonts

In editing our title sequence, we decided to search for fonts which related specifically to our title and the theme of our opening. We used fontspace.com - here is our search criteria:

We found several different fonts which we really liked:

We also found these ones on fontzone.net which has fonts that are free to download for commerical use: 

We are yet to decide which fonts will be used for each name title and the actual film title so we've just previewed them using the name of our film opening 'Double Blind', however we hope to decide this tomorrow so we can add them in and get the title sequence done!

Vlog: Title fonts

Here is a quick vlog me and Tayla did about the choice of our title fonts, we will upload the ones which we have selected!

Final filming day: storyboard

Tomorrow is our last day of collecting footage, we are filming the mirror/ bathroom scene which we hope will give a real indication of our characters insanity! We have very roughly storyboarded all of the shots we hope to get so the process is made easier, and we can knuckle down on the editing - our deadline is scarily close!

Here is the (wonky) storyboard: 

Update vlog: voiceover and background music

Here is a vlog we did today whilst editing, giving a brief update on the sound in our opening (my big head is in the way throughout, sorry).
Rhianne put together a track on garageband, looping it so it lasted for two minutes, however we have come to realize that for some parts of the opening, the sound does not fit with the visuals.
We are trying to find a way to make the track fit and distort the sound when our titles appear, much like in the trailer for Se7en (1995) which can be found here.
We are still yet to record our voiceover, but we have found two people who are willing to do it, with voices which we think will work nicely.

Film title ideas

Mac 5 were in our lesson editing, when we realized that we haven't really blogged about ideas for the title of our film! We wanted to incorporate the clinical aspects of the film, and following in this thought chain came the name 'Double Blind' which we were introduced to in GCSE biology.

Here is the Google definition of our title:

Here is some further wiki research:



We have chosen this title because we would like it to reflect our character's duplicate personality. The concept of the researcher and the patient being unaware of the effects of a treatment fits in with both the medical nature of our film, and the idea that our psychiatrist is a qualified woman in a position of power, abusing these drugs, yet her patients are unaware that she is potentially dangerous to them.
We are yet to decide on a creative way to present this title, though we have started exploring 'shutter' effects, to make our title appear in quick flashes, as though a blind has been opened.

Update vlog

Here is a quick vlog which we did whilst editing, briefly explaining our progress on creating sound for our two minute opening, and how we might film the final scene.

American Psycho: voice over inspiration

Mac 5 have decided to use a voice over in our two minute opening, as we feel that it is an uncommon feature in our genre, which we aim to challenge.
However, we chose to use this technique because psychological thrillers are often told in a first person narrative, leaving the audience in the dark to create suspension and we think this is particularly important if we want to keep our audience engaged.
We also think that this technique creates more intimacy between the film and the audience, which is something we would like to explore using both sound and visuals, to add to the uncomfortable atmosphere felt by the audience.

The introduction of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000), near the very beginning of the film, is one of the few psychological thrillers which uses a voice over to present a character to the audience. Here is the clip:


We are currently on the search for the perfect voice, and we are using this clip to demonstrate what tone of voice to use, to create a similar feeling of oddity - we think that this ties in nicely with the disorientated character which is revealed to the audience, making the opening all the more sinister and perhaps more intriguing for the audience.

Testament of Youth: cinema trip

Today, Miss Foster and the English department took us to a screening of James Kent's 'Testament of Youth'. It is the film adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir detailing her war experience and losses during the first world war, as originally published in 1933. Here is the trailer:



The lead role was played by the wonderful Alicia Vikander, a flourishing Swedish actress with 8 upcoming films this year which I am thoroughly looking forward to.

The film was useful not only as an English Literature student, studying the literature of World War 1, but also as a Media Studies student. Me and Tayla were pinching each other throughout because of how beautifully it was shot!

We really liked the use of selective focus, especially in close ups of single characters as we thought it really emphasized the emotion and individual suffering of each character; this also made us consider the subject of war as a whole and that the idea that each member of an entire generation was impacted in some way or another.






We also liked the use of match cutting in the film - one in particular which stood out to us was the scene where Vera's tears fell, which followed into the raindrops in the trenches where her loved ones were, as it was particularly poignant.






 Here is a critical response to the film:

Testament of Youth: critics review

Although the critic argues that 'there seems no real thunderstorm', after watching the film through wet eyes, I disagree as the film did little to romanticize the war and still made the audience emotional - perhaps it was more appropriate to leave out the horrors on the Front line as it was central to Vera Brittain who did not fight in the trenches.

Here are some of the scenes which stuck out to us, in exposing the brutality of war:



Overall, Testament of Youth was a brilliant film which I'd definitely recommend.
Although it does not fall under the same genre as our two minute opening, we took inspiration from how it was shot especially in terms of framing, composition and sound which made each scene all the more effective.

Mirror shot research

Mac 5 have one last scene to film, which features Hannah standing in front of a mirror, in a bathroom.
 We have found some examples of how we want this scene to look, and we have carefully selected the framing and composition of each shot to make the scene effective. 

We have been given this really cool underwater camera, which we are going to use to get a close up shot of Hannah scooping up the water.




Here (30s-50s) is an example of what we mean from We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011):


We also like the idea of using a close up of the tap, as we already have a shot of Hannah by a sink in our previous location. This is somewhat similar to how Kevin Spacey's bathroom monologue begins in Casino Jack (2010):



We think a POV shot would work quite nicely here - Enter The Void (2009) shows us how this could be achieved:


Here is a compilation of movies which feature a few more bathroom/ mirror scenes:



We don't want the scene to be scary, as we are aware that scenes like these are quite cliché as it is.

We do however, want the scene to show our character's unfamiliarity with herself, and we think that using a mirror is probably the easiest way to show some of the side effects our character is experiencing, as we previously identified in our drug research.

Group vlog: editing and ideas for sound

Here is a group vlog which we did in our lesson - we have been considering possible changes to the sound in our opening, and we have discussed the possibility of replacing our dialogue with a voice over.

First editing day vlog!

We have just started editing the footage for our two minute opening, and while we were up in the media room we decided to do a quick vlog:


So far, we're finding editing pretty hard and we have realized that it is an extremely slow process. Nevertheless, we're still having a laugh looking at a few of the clips!
We have almost finished sorting out which shots we would like to use, and we are following our storyboard very closely to establish the order of our shots.
We are still unsure whether we need to re-film anything, and we still have one more location to film in - so far, it is going quite well...

Production company research

Last lesson, our group began to think about the name of our production logo, and how it should look. Here is a picture of us in the lesson, comparing all of the possible choices in the thesaurus: 

We have also done some online research into production companies which produce films possibly associated with our genre; we focused on UK production companies as we are producing a British film, after all. Here are the links to some of our useful sources:

BFI Vision Awards 2013-15 list

UK film production companies wiki list

 We gave it a lot of thought and we have come up our own list. We picked names out of a hat, resulting in 'wildfire' as the name of our company and we have a rough idea of how it might look, though we haven't completely decided this yet.

Breaking Bad: match cut example

Mac 5 really likes the idea of using match cutting to create a smoother transition between our scenes, because it creates only a slight confusion when the setting changes. We think that this reflects our main characters behaviour at work, and supports the idea of our patient not being aware of her doctor's state, as we do not want to give too much away in the opening.

'Trouble concentrating/ confusion' was one of the side effects of valium that we highlighted for our character to exhibit. We think the match cut is a nice way of subtly underlining the idea that our main character's mind is constantly elsewhere.

Black Swan: editing and sound inspiration

Mac 5 have now almost finished filming (we hope) and we are about to begin editing! We have been researching movies with effective editing techniques. Black Swan (2010) is a perfect example of a psychological thriller in which shots have been manipulated to create a strange atmosphere. Here are a few I could find which are really effective in emphasizing the disturbance of the character:



I really like the fast-paced turn of the camera from 0:05-0:07 as it reflects the characters twisted thoughts, and I also really love Winona Ryder.



This is one of my favourite scenes because it is quite shocking for the viewer, and the use of the mirror to show more than one of Nina represents her multiple personalities. We really like the idea of creating layers showing more than one figure of our character to create a similar effect. We have already tried a similar technique out and we love the way it looks! It can be found under the 'editing practice' label on my blog.



The turning of the camera, and unsteady shot in this scene is really effective. We have filmed a shot in which the camera orbits around our actress and we would like to manipulate it in order to change settings - this clip helps us visualize how this would could be achieved.

This is a really inspirational movie in terms of editing, but also it terms of sound. Throughout the movie, we can frequently hear Nina's breathing over all the other sounds in the background. This is something we could think about when it comes to sound in our own opening.

Here is the full official trailer:

Donnie Darko: shot and sound inspiration

Donnie Darko (2001) is one of the weirdest, yet most captivating movies I've ever seen. Here is the rather bizarre opening, it is sort of split into two parts - a bit like on our storyboard:

This close up of Donnie's pupils dilating is one of my favourites because it is super trippy, and Mac 5 really like the emphasis on eyes - when we were searching for our actress, one of the main deciding factors was the colour of her eyes and our actress, Hannah C, has fantastic blue eyes which fit the role perfectly!




Donnie is also seeing a therapist, who prescribes him pills (that end up being placebo's). Donnie's behaviour is strange nonetheless, and the possibility of him having a mental illness isn't lost in the many alternative explanations of the movie.





Here are a few more cool stills which I could find:

This scene, in which the mirror ripples, is pretty peculiar (though important when explaining the film). It is also very inspiring in terms of sound - Frank sounds almost like a microwave, and the low bass drone in the background makes the viewer feel as if they are inside a television which is really effective in emphasizing the idea of Frank influencing the thoughts inside Donnie's head.



Though our character doesn't cross over and enter a tangent universe, she does have controlling thoughts which we would like to emphasize in our opening, and we would like Frank's tone and the mood these sounds create to have a similar effect in our opening.

Here are two more scenes which I really like:


 

Third filming day: location 2

Today, our group filmed the scenes inside the psychiatrists room and we have now finished filming in 2/3 locations. The wonderful doctor gave us permission to use a proper room! Here is our desk, where most of the scene takes place:

 Here is the rest of the room - we love the vertebrae!

We have one more location in mind which is in school, so we have easy access to it however we are yet to watch our footage back on the Mac so we are unsure if we will need to re-film anything as of yet. 

Here are some other pictures of today's filming:

Girl, Interrupted: character and editing examples

Girl, Interrupted (1999) is possibly my favourite movie ever, and it heavily relates to our two minute opening. I wont dissect it too much, but I think that the editing techniques used throughout the film are particularly effective.

It entails the account of Susanna Kaysen's stay at a mental hospital for 18 months. Susanna, played by the incredible Winona Ryder, is 18 when she is admitted to Claymoore and she is diagnosed with BPD.

Here is one of the sessions she has with her psychiatrist:



I really like how the scenes blend into one another through a match cut - it would be really interesting to try this out when we are editing to make our change of setting more visually exciting.

The character which probably relates to ours the most (due to her drug misuse) is Daisy, played by Brittany Murphy, who was one of my favourite actresses.


One of the best known lines in the movie is said by Daisy, here it is:

Here is the full scene - our character's behaviour is similar to Daisy's: