Storyboards

With a location and script in mind we met up again to start work on the storyboards, we decided the best way to do these would be for us to split up into pairs and work on different scenes and then Chris and Kirean to go over them again at a later date and polish them up. During this meeting we also sent a list of equipment to Debbie as she said she would try to get us permission to have equipment over the Easter holiday

More Post-Production

After having our script read by some actors in our seminar I feel even more confident about how this film is going to turn out, they had some minor criticism that sounds like it could really help us especially Chris who had mentioned to me that he was starting to become unsure about what he was meant to be doing as a director and how best to go about it. After the session he did seem to be rejuvenated which I am glad about as we will need a good director if we are going to pull off this idea.

With the criticism still fresh in our minds some of made our way to the library computers to make the changes that the actors had suggested and just neaten up the script a little in general. With a complete script in our minds me, Amy and Chris made our way to ‘Uncle Sam’s Diner’ which Chris had assured us was a perfect location for our bar scene. We had no trouble acquire permission to film there and even arranged to arrive in the morning before the diner opened so that we wouldn’t have to worry about other customers getting in our way. Since we had permission we took a few photos of the location so that we could show the others what sort of area we were working with, I think it really helped us to see this location before we started filming as it gave us an idea as to how much room we had to manoeuvre the actors and equipment at the location.

This is a picture of the Diner we plan to use, Amy is representing where
Rita and her husband will sit and I am representing where Johnny will be sat.

t was after we had organised all of this that we received the devastating news that we wouldn’t be able to get equipment out over Easter and our filming date of the 13^th fell just after the deadline for equipment to be returned. Hearing this new myself, Amy and Chris headed back to the uni to see if we could get hold of someone who could help us solve this problem. Unfortunately at this point we haven’t got a clear solution to the problem.

Writing the Script

Writing the initial script did cause us a little problem as we were all so focused on trying to make it sound like it belonged to the right era that we were making very little progress. Though this did make progress slow I do think it was a blessing in disguise as the effort we went into to make the dialogue fit our era on the first run through saved us having to go back and re-edit the whole thing once it was done. I don’t doubt that we will do some editing in the future but for the moment the first draft is complete and we are going to see what some actors feel about it in the seminar on Tuesday. Even if this is the first draft of our script I can’t help but feeling proud at how some of the dialogue sounds, I do believe that we have nailed the noir feel in a fair a few parts of the script.

 

With the first draft of our script complete we have begun discussing the other elements that we will require for this drama such as the costumes, locations and most importantly actors. Amy is sure she knows just the right actors for the parts and Chris has an idea for where our restaurant scene is going to take place we just need to go and ask permission. So the main problems we are looking at now are finding some sort of office space, which is crucial as this is a main setting for the drama, and sorting out the costumes but we have agreed to see what the actors have costume wise before we begin that search.

                                                

Matt - Johnny

Zoey - Rita

 

 

Back to the actual script writing there has been some questions raised about whether or not we are going for the right ending for our drama, I’m a little worried these questions may divide our group a bit and I hope we can solve this in a later meeting when all members of the group are present.

Character Development

Rita Hayes

Age: 26

Appearance:

Similar height to Johnny, mousy brown hair, thick dark black eye liner, red lipstick.

Expression:
Beautifully uneasy

Clothing:

Fur coat, red evening gown, red heels, possible white dress also.

Hairstyle:

Hollywood curls

What do you know about her that she does not yet know?

Her boyfriend's going to be murdered, she's going to be stalked/followed. She will embody the vision of a femme fatale and overcome the higher power and kill to get there.

What would she never admit?
She doesn't live or have the picture perfect life.

If she could change her identity, who would she be?
Marilyn Monroe- Utopian lifestyle. 

In who does she have the greatest faith?
Her parents, more so her father.

Favourite article of clothing?
Red shoes.

Does this character have a vice?
Naivety in belief of her social class. 

What is her secret wish?
To have stronger female rights.

What is this character's proudest achievement?
Winning Prom Queen at her Senior Prom.

Most embarrassing moment?
She mistakenly married Johnny at a very young age, she realised her mistake too late when he turned up to the wedding drunk.

What is this character's deepest regret?
Marrying too early and being stuck in a loveless marriage.  

Johnny Ritchie 

 

Age: 27

Johnny struggles with alcohol, he needs it to escape his dystopian lifestyle. Johnny has control issues, sometimes he lashes out in an attempt to gain immediate control of a situation.

What do you know about this character now that s/he doesn’t yet know?

Johnny’s drastic actions are going to get him killed.

What is this character’s greatest flaw?

Johnny has an uncontrollable desire for purity and utopia. The desire causes him to have an obscure perception of the consequences of his actions.

What do you know about this character that s/he would never admit?

Johnny would never admit that he couldn’t see situations clearly.

What is this character’s greatest asset?

His loyalty to someone or something he cares for, whether it is a cause, person or object

If this character could choose a different identity, who would s/he be?

If Johnny had the opportunity to change his identity he would become the poster boy for the US Army, instead of fighting on the frontlines away from home, he could have been caring for his mother who passed away whilst he fought overseas. Furthermore, he could have been enjoying the glitz and glamour of being a well-decorated and well-respected military spokesperson.

What music does this character sing to when no one else is around?

Love Letters – Perry Como, My Heart Is Taking lessons – Bing Crosby, Mona Lisa – Nat King Cole, Cry –Johnny Ray, A Woman In Love – Frankie Laine, Song of Songs – Perry Como, Night and Day – Dick Haymes, You Made Me Love You – Al Jolson, Unforgettable – Nat King Cole, On A Slow Boat To China – Dean Martin, T’ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do – Fats Waller, Jeepers Creepers – Louis Armstrong, Broadway – Count Basie, I’m Confessin’ – Perry Como, Jealousy – Frankie Lane, My Old Flame – Charlie Parker.

In what or whom does this character have the greatest faith?

Johnny has set his faith in one woman now, a woman he believes will be his true love and he is searching for her because he believes she will set him free of all his guilt.

What is this character’s favourite movie?

The Red Shoes (1948)

Does this character have a favourite article of clothing? Favourite shoes?

His trouser braces.

Does this character have a vice? Name it.

Johnny’s vice is his heavy drinking. He drinks to escape his dystopian life.

Name this character’s favourite person (living or dead).

Johnny’s favourite person is his mother, Angela Ritchie. She died whilst Johnny was fighting in the war and this broke his heart.

What is this character’s secret wish?

To be loved, loved unconditionally and appreciated. 

What is this character’s proudest achievement?

Johnny performed a heroic action whilst fighting the Japanese that result in him saving his squad and earning a medal of the highest honour.

Describe this character’s most embarrassing moment.

Johnny had a crush as an adolescent who broke his heart. She led him on and invited him to a party but then kissed another boy in front of him and all his friends. He felt exposed and embarrassed and had issues trusting girls for a long time.

What is this character’s deepest regret?

Johnny’s deepest regret is fixing his trust issues with girls. If he had done he may have been able to avoid the lifestyle he has now.

What is this character’s greatest fear?

Johnny’s greatest fear is dying without having the pleasure of loving another person the way he loved his mother.

Describe this character’s most devastating moment.

The day he received mail telling him his mother had died.

What is this character’s greatest hope?

Johnny’s greatest hope is to escape his dystopian life by finding the woman of his dreams and running away with her.

Does this character have an obsession? Name it.

Johnny has an obsession with the colour red.

What is this character’s greatest disappointment?

Not finding the right road in life.

What is this character’s worst nightmare?

He is living it.

Whom does this character most wish to please? Why?

He wishes to please the memory of his mother.

Describe this character’s mother.

Angela Ritchie was a kind and loving woman.

Describe this character’s father.

Felix left his mother when he was born and he never knew him.

If s/he had to choose, with whom would this character prefer to live?

The woman of his dreams.

Where does this character fall in birth order? What effect does this have?

Only child.

Describe this character’s siblings or other close relatives.

His mother was the closest person to him. He had no other siblings; his Aunt Marie would visit every now and then. Aunt Marie was Angela’s older sister.

Describe this character’s bedroom. Include three cherished items.

Medals – Honour, Value, Respect. Notepad – Contains deepest thoughts. Camera – Producing images of people and places that interest him whether it be for a case or for personal reasons.

What is this character’s birth date? How does this character manifest traits of his/her astrological sign?

He was born in the winter, the coldest and toughest season to endure in Chicago.

If this character had to live in seclusion for six months, what six items would s/he bring?

Pen, Paper, Baseball,

Why is this character angry?

The person he loved the most died when he was fighting for his country and when he returned from the war, his country gave him nothing in return. He trusts no one and has no contact with his comrades

What calms this character?

Alcohol, but the effects don’t last long.

Describe a recurring dream or nightmare this character might have.

Dark memories from the war.

List the choices (not circumstances) that led this character to his/her current predicament.

His mother was living in fear during the war, Jewish? Why did he go to war?

List the circumstances over which this character has no control.

His desire for the perfect woman.

What wakes this character in the middle of the night?

Nightmares of the war.

How would a stranger describe this character?

Reserved, strange, mysterious, anti-social, boring, alcoholic.

What does this character resolve to do differently every morning?

Wakes up with the small hope today will be better than the day before, another day another chance to find the perfect candidate to run away with.

If this character knew s/he had exactly one month to live, what would s/he do?

Commit suicide, make a final statement.

How would a dear friend or relative describe this character?

A comrade from the war would describe him as brave, intelligent, deeply troubled. Before his mother dyed his was true to the cause an outstanding soldier. After her death he lost his grip on things and began taking risks and killed to feel something.

 

Developing the Story

With a rough story idea in place we met up again in order to further develop our ideas so we would have a rough plot line to work from when we got to writing our script. We decided that to best fit within the genre we had chosen our main character would be a troubled private investigator. From there we worked as a group and managed to create the plot line you can see to the left.

I’m pretty happy with how the story development is going so far and after doing some more work on the character development I feel really strongly that this idea was the right one to go for. One idea that has been thrown around the group that I particularly like is the idea that our film will almost act like a prequel to another noir film, with our story showing how Rita becomes the cold hearted woman that is often portrayed in noir style films, our film still portrays her as having the traits of a femme fatale that she requires to become that woman.

With a rough outline of our story planned out we can now move on to writing the script.

Audio Tour

Audio tour is a highly narrative driven film about a woman that takes an audio tour around a museum only to find that the headphones gives her a visual description of everything she sees even if it isn’t part of the museum, this only escalates when she flees the museum and forgets to return the headphones. The film concludes with the girl looking at her reflection and having the headphones comment on how she hasn’t fulfilled any of her dreams and is “Quite forgettable really”. The film is quite bittersweet in the delivery of its ending, although most people I spoke to after seeing this film wrote it off as a rather sad and somewhat harsh ending, I believe that’s because many of them were so moved by how sad the character looked as the description went on few of them heard the headphones final words moments before the film ended which were ‘It’s a shame really’ which suggests that her character is actually quite special and memorable it’s just her attitude and outlook that is preventing people from seeing that.

Technically the film was rather simple with no really difficult camera techniques or sound design, there were a few handheld shots designed to look like a first person POV which worked really well and fitted her somewhat erratic behaviour at that point in time. The majority of the sound comes from a voice over narrative, which was interesting to see how it worked as we are thinking of doing a similar thing in our film and it will be my job to record the voice over. Unlike our idea though there is next to no other sounds in the film, which I think works against it as there is something a little off with not being able to hear things that the audience can see going on around the characters at the same time this could also be done to simulate the idea of the headphones blocking out the sound, which would fit how the voiceover gets quieter at the end when she takes them off.

Overall I liked Audio tour it was a simple and effective film that had a rather interesting idea and created a surprising amount of care for the character although she never really does or says anything in the film. It conveys a sweet idea at the end of harsh realities being caused by people’s outlooks and how they really are special if they change their outlook and gain more self confidence in their abilities.

Drama Project - First Meeting

We’ve recently received the brief for the Drama project, following which my group has been formed and we have already come up with a few ideas.

My group is as follows:

Amy Parker - Producer

Chris Lowe - Director

Kirean Boughan - Camera Operator

Ellie Marsland - Sound Editor

Beth Elston - Editor

Me - Sound Recordist

I’m incredibly happy with this group as although we only have a few rough ideas at the moment we are all passionate about this project and are willing to contribute equally to it.

As I’ve mentioned we have already formed a few ideas, these came about from the group meeting we had today. As it stands we have formed three rough ideas that we would be willing to pursue, for the most part these ideas are little more than approaches but once we’ve settled on one we can begin developing it further. The idea we settled on was to do a film noir style drama, we also discussed the possibility of combining this idea with another we had in which we basically had an untrustworthy narrator as the protagonist to create a contrast between the films audio story and its visual story.

We thought up a rough plot for our film noir drama and Amy believes she knows the perfect actor for the protagonist, so she is going to see if he is available to star in our project. She also mentioned that she might know an actress that could fit our other lead role but that isn’t as certain at the moment. We’ve discussed some films that we’d like to take inspiration from and the main one that kept coming up is Sin City, from this we have decided to recreate the red dress effect that is used in this film.

Liverpool Post-Production

Rough Editing Structure

It was at this phase in the project where I really contributed to my group, I spent many hours with the group’s director Sebastian Wray sorting through the footage, arguing over what to put in and what not and the overall structure of the documentary.  By the time the crit for the project came round we had a three minute video to show for it, the comments we received in this session were incredibly helpful. We were told that the idea and footage we had were both really good but when questioned about what we desired the end result of the documentary to be, we were unsure and each had different answer, our tutor explained that this uncertainty showed in our film and what we had was more of an assembly than a rough cut. With these comments in mind we all sat down and discussed what we wanted to achieve in the documentary and what footage fitted that end best, by the end of the session I had a rough editing structure to follow.



The rough cut of my documentary

A few days after the crit I went into the editing suit on my own and worked throughout the day until I had created a rough edit for our documentary. This wasn’t a particular impressive edit although the structure and cuts were done to a good quality I hadn’t done any colour correcting and our original sound editor Tyrese Thomas had taken a leave due to personal reasons which we had all been aware would happen, as I wasn’t aware of anyone else confident in sound editing in our group I took the liberty of syncing all the audio clips with the footage in the rough edit to help out the new sound editor. This initial edit and the more final edit after took a lot longer than they should have due to a problem with our footage which neither I nor the technicians were able to sort which meant all our footage had to be manually rendered when placed into Final Cut Pro, this was a nuisance rather than a hindrance although I estimate that it probably double the editing time for this project.

After my group had been shown the rough cut and had some time to think over it, we met up to begin the final edit. The first part of this consisted of me listening to peoples suggestions and ideas and then implementing them based on the discussions that followed and whether or not I agreed that it was the best change to make to the edit, for the most part there wasn’t any real problems with doing this but there were some dispute between me and the director on what was best for the documentary which often ended in me being overruled when we couldn’t come to a reasonable compromise.

An in process Colour correction,
you can also see the vivid hue problem I mention

I also set about colour correcting our footage, this was a fairly difficult process as firstly I had never done this on Final Cut and secondly when I re-rendered the clip post colour correction it then became darker than it originally had been and hues became more vivid, this often resulted in slightly red looking grass, because of this strange result of the rendering problem  we had I was forced to over colour correct with this error in mind so that when I rendered the footage it didn’t become too dark or vivid unfortunately this was unavoidable in some footage. Once the footage was all ordered, colour corrected and approved by the rest of the group I passed the edit over to Marcus Owramenko to work on the sound editor. In all fairness to him although he didn’t seem incredibly confident in fulfilling the role he did a great job with the sound design and even went a step further and showed an alternative way to edit the end of the film which we ended up going with. I then set about adding name and titles to the interviewees as well as a title and some fade in/outs closer to the end, the final addition to the documentary were the credit unfortunately by this point I was the only remaining member of my group in the edit suit and I was unable to contact Marcus for his student number so it does not appear in the credits besides his name like everyone else's.