Directions - The Director Prep Project

Actor: James McAvoy - Due to McAvoy's northern heritage (born in Scotland) he will know a fair bit about northern upbringing, northern sayings, and basically the northern way of life. He also has a huge variety of accents and personas at his disposal so he would be more than qualified to play the part of  Eddie Dunford. McAvoy has also had experience with this style of genre playing Dan Foster in State of Play a short British TV series aired in America.

Director of Photography: Peter Sinclair - One of the main reasons I would choose Sinclair as the Director of Photography would be that he was DP for most of the episodes in the crime TV series New Tricks. Yes New Tricks can be slightly humorous in places however the lighting, colour and staging is absolutely on point with all the episodes. For example if a light hearted conversation is going on in the office a beam of warm yellowish sunlight might be shining through the blinds, but when arriving at a crime scene the frame will be very cold and blue. It is as much about the obvious choices as it is about the subtle ones when it comes to being Director of Photography.



Production Designer: Gillian Devenney - By definition a production designer or P.D. is the person responsible for the overall visual look of the production. Production designers have a key creative role in the creation of motion pictures and television. Devenney was Co- production Designer with two others ( Edward Thomas and Tom Brown) on a TV series called Line Of Duty, however they only worked on three episodes each where as Devenney accomplished nine. Line Of Duty, set in the west midlands, is about a Detective Sergeant who is transferred to an anti - corruption unit but as the story progresses there seems to be corruption a lot closer to home than originally suspected.

Composer: Noah Hawley - Noah Hawely is an American film and television producer, screenwriter, composer, and bestselling author, known for creating and writing the FX anthology television series Fargo. I feel that Hawely would best suit the role of composer for Red Riding as Fargo bares
similarities to it both in story and genre. And if the genre is similar then the composing can be similar which will mean Hawely wouldn't be out of his comfort zone and could draw on previous experience.








Editor: Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir - Ronaldsdóttir is an Icelandic born editor who has worked on the likes of John Wick, Contraband and The Deep. The editing style of Trapped, the series that I came to find Ronaldsdóttir, is harsh and unrelenting much like the environment it is being filmed in. Very little colour is shown in this TV series and lots of subtle cuts are used to imply who is a suspect or lead you into a red herring.

Contextual Studies - 500 word Critical Analysis

For my critical analysis I am focusing on a film called Fight Club that was released in 1999. The film focuses on an individual who’s name isn’t actually revealed until nearer the end, but I refer to him as The Narrator, and The Narrator becomes friends with a man called Tyler Durten. However, towards the end of the film we find out that Tyler is actually a subconscious part of The Narrators personality, everything he wished he was.

One of the many reasons I like this film is because of the vast amount of ways you can look at it, every person who watches it interprets it in their own way. But something universal about this film is its genre. Tudor’s quote (1974) ‘a genre… defines a moral and social world’ applies to Fight Club as the film is about the Narrator’s battle with his own and others (Tyler and members of project mayhem) morals and his disgust for the social concept of consumerism. This of course leads to the question of what the genre actually is, which I am suggesting, is a coming-of-age film. Although the narrator is 30 he is still immature and stuck in a teenage-like frame of mind where he hates the government with its big corporations and feels his life is worthless. He buys things and gets pleasure from surrounding himself with desired objects such as furniture “I became a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct”.  I can relate this coming-of-age theme to other films such as American Beauty. The main character Lester Burnham is a middle aged man who has a boring office job (similar to the main character in fight club) and he also feels as though he is doing nothing with his life. Just like the narrator from fight club however he finds his path and what he wishes to do with his life. In the Buddhist sense you could say that he was enlightened as they both took the view that you should enjoy life and not gauge happiness by how many things you have. However with Lester it seems as though rather than maturing, he reseeds back to his teenage years to the time when he enjoyed his life most.

This Ikea statement reinforces the theme of emasculinity. Fight Club presents the argument that men in today's society have been reduced to a generation of men that do nothing themselves, but have become numb with watching others do things instead. Masculinity becomes a brand, a means to sell products to men. "Being a man" then becomes owning the right watch or car instead of knowing who you are and what your values really are. As a result the Narrator, Tyler, and the other members of Fight Club reject this spoon-fed approach to living and try to find themselves. By putting themselves through the experience of fighting and facing fear and pain, they hope to strip away the unnecessary parts of their lives and discover their true selves. The Narrator also experiences emasculation in the face of Tyler's relationship with Marla. He feels like he has lost his place next to Tyler, who embodies a perfected sense of masculinity. Ironically, Tyler exists in the Narrator's mind as a prime male physical specimen. Something that is reminiscent of how advertising says men have to look. Without Tyler's attention, the Narrator feels a rejection bordering on romantic jealousy. There is also a persistent theme of castration in the film. First, the Narrator meets Bob at a support group for men who have lost their testicles to cancer. Later on, the threat of castration is used by Tyler and the space monkeys to get the police commissioner to call off his investigation. The Narrator, too, is threatened with castration for trying to shut down fight club (by the three policemen he imagines are in the interrogation room). This loss of manhood is the worst possible fate these men can imagine, particularly because they feel they have just begun to appreciate their masculinity due to fight club and Project Mayhem.

Throughout Fight Club the narrator produces statements which suggest his emasculation e.g. “I used to read Pornography, but now I read the Horchow collection”.  Drinking alcohol, reading pornography and cars are typical things that are associated with what men do, however cleaning, cooking, and reading catalogues are things people typically think of a middle aged housewife to be doing. The narrator constantly does and says things that make you think about how ‘manly’ he is. Even the narrator’s physical appearance is weedy and his voice isn’t exactly sonorous. He also shy’s away from awkward or confrontational situations, as is evident by his inability to speak up to his boss in the opening and when Tyler tells him to just ask if he can stay at his place, he still shy’s around the question. A possible theory for the fighting in the film is that it is not presented as a solution to the character's problems, but is a means of achieving a spiritual reawakening. The fighting itself reminds the men that they are alive. As part of Tyler's philosophy, it also reminds them that they will die. Fighting is used as a path to reach the core of who they are. While the fighting can be seen as an attempt by the men to reassert their masculinity, it is more of a rejection of what they have been told masculinity is by prior generations, their jobs, and mass media. This can be linked to the coming of age genre as they are using fighting to in the sense of enlightenment and knowledge of the universe, “grow up”.

Coming of age notes:

Things that cause a coming of age:

•            Love, relationship, interest in sex

•            Job, money, career change

•            Moving away from parents, independents

•            Becoming more confrontational with parents, rebelliousness

•            Responsibility

•            New situations/ environments

•            Cars

•            New friends/ social circles

•            Angst, confusion, frustration

•            Appearance, how good they look

•            More politically aware (fight club)

•            Buying stuff

Quotes:

-             “Every evening, I died and every evening I was born again. Resurrected ” - Narrator

-             “Only after disaster can we be resurrected” – Tyler Durten

Story Telling - Research of Screenwriting beyond the classroom

This website helped from giving me advice on what makes a good script to dialogue structure to actually explaining what parenthetical information actually is! I would say the most useful thing was explaining what parenthetical information looks like and how to use it, as pictured below.

http://www.screenwriting.info/





There was another another site I also looked at called https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/screenwriting

The video on this site really gave me an insight on how to approach structure when writing a script at University level.

Story Telling - Analysis of unit

Through out this unit the ideas for my short piece have changed multiple times and I have encountered a fair amount of challenges pre and post filming. The first problem wasn't really a problem, more a development of ideas. I changed my first idea that was about a young girl who is killed in the woods not far from her school. There were a few challenges immediately pointed out by Simon,

1. It was based in America so I would have to find people who could do accents
2. It involved quite a small girl so trying to find a young girl who can act would be challenging
3. The storyline is that when the girls murder is announced over the media the town turns on a homeless man who has been known to wander the woods. He is taken in for questioning but his mental health is degrading. In the end it turned out that a teacher at the school the girl went to had killed her in the woods. This is a quite complex storyline especially for 10 minutes, but Simon also raised the question of what I would do to make it stand out from other murder films, as this "innocent been accused" take had already been done before.

So I decided to change my story and involve less characters as well as less locations. To keep the story as simple and easy to tell as possible, decreasing the chance of complications. My new storyline was a boy comes home from school, gets changed, packs a bag and goes off to the woods to make a rope swing, but no matter how hard he tries it doesn't work. Until and old man from a house adjacent to the woods had seen his difficulties and decides to help him. By the end of the day after teaching the boy some knots he learnt in the Navy the rope swing is finished and he gets to have a swing on it. It's good fun but his mum phones him asking him to come home for dinner, so he says his fair wells to the old man and is on his way until he remembers some of the things the old man had said and believes he is going to hang himself. He runs back and the man hasn't hung himself which embarrasses the character and relieves he audience.

This seemed like a more feasible storyline to shoot, the woods were down the road from where I live and there were only two characters. I thought the location permissions would be the hardest part of the shoot as it isn't owned by council like a normal piece of public property, it is under the protection of the Kent wildlife trust.  However it came to light that when actually preparing for the shoot, the hardest part was finding actors, but when I finally found a family friend and a friends younger brother who said they would do it they pulled out the evening before the shoot. NOT GOOD. So I scrambled together some friends and decided that I had to shoot something as that would be better than coming back with nothing, but fate had other ideas. I had the camera equipment packed in the car and was waiting outside while a friend was getting ready and the heavens opened, big time. So considering the only place I had permission to film was an outdoor location we called it off that day. The next morning came, the last day I had to get any footage, so I went out borrowed a sleeping bag and filmed a storyline I had created the night before. The premise of the story was that there were two brothers, going on a camping trip to enjoy the views and have fun bonding etc. Only that the older brother is actually dead, died years ago and the younger brother's mind is constructing an imaginative camping trip. so he wakes up the next morning next to an empty sleeping bag and has flashbacks of opening the car door to nothing and walking alone talking to himself.  The lesson from this would be either use proper actors from an agency or get someone who can not say they can't make it e.g a sibling.  

The next week I found out we could re-shoot so I decided to stick to the first two minutes of my script as I would not have enough time to request a film permit for the woods again before the deadline. I shot all the angles I wanted and the actor did not pull out. Unfortunately when I was telling my friend how to use the TASCAM I neglected to tell him to press record before every take, so my re-shoot had no audio to it. This was quite a big problem as it took me a fair amount of time to dub my voice over and it makes the video poorer quality.

Also because the camera hadn't recorded any sound there was no atmospheric or background noise e.g. cars going past, footsteps or doors closing, so I had to try and record and download sounds and then slow them down or speed them up to fit the picture in frame.  

Story Telling - 180 degree rule

https://youtu.be/iawUOW4MFVo

Story Telling - Screen writers

Screen writer 1

Graham Linehan:
Key Work - IT Crowd (2006), Brass Eye (1997)
Lineham has done other works than these two television series however I have only seen these two most likely because they are of similar genre; comedy/ mockumentary. Satire is the main component of Brass Eye which covers some otherwise sensitive subjects such as Paedophilia and addiction to drugs. However Lineham uses over exaggeration to cause a sort of 'nonsense' feel about what they are talking about. For example in one of the "Drugs" episodes the show got Bernard Manning (a comedian at the time) to say "one girl threw up her own pelvis bone". The IT Crowd is a more recent series that Lineham has written and is also a comedy, however the humour is more subtle here for example Moss's inability to extinguish fires or deal with spiders and covers a broader subject continuously unlike Brass Eye which changed subject per episode. In this TV programme the main character is Moss the Computer technician and his friend and work colleague Roy, later in the series Jen is appointed Head of IT by the company's boss because she bluffed her way through an interview.  I like both Brass Eye and The IT Crowd and they appealed to me because originally I had thought about including some subtle humour in my script. After filming however I felt that humour would not fit the general atmos of the piece.


Screen Writer 2

Duffer Brothers:

Key Work - Hidden (2015), Wayward Pines (2015), Stranger Things (2016)

The Duffer brothers' latest work is a Netflix series called Stranger Things. Based in the 80's Stranger Things is a Sci-Fi/ Horror series that follows a group of friends in their childhood as an alien escapes and townspeople become prey to it, including one of the boys. Both Hidden and Wayward pines are feature films so they have developed their writing to fit a TV series which so far, has been going quite well for them. They don't often stray from the horror/ Sci-Fi genre (Hidden being an apocalyptic horror and Wayward Pines being a psychological horror/ thriller TV series) they tend to specialise in delivering a dark and scary cinematic experience. I personally chose this screen writing duo because of their skill at perfecting the language and mannerism's used by the kids in Stranger Things, especially in the first episode where it opens with them playing Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to try and incorporate their style of portraying the personality of a kid of similar age to the ones in stranger things for my character Seb.

Story telling - Script writing research

Simon Ellis - Soft

film inspired by father being a bus driver and his son is being bullied on the bus but he does nothing to help him.

Genre: Drama/ Suspense/ short film
Setting: Modern day/ Urban
Characters: Father and Son
Conflict: Fear/ Pride/ Power/ Emotional conflict
Change: Change in moral compass/ Role reversal/
Theme: Coming of age/ Father and son relationship/ Karma/ Bullies
Tone: Gritty/ Real

My Own pitch
In an Urban Drama, a father/son relationship is tested when confronted by a gang threatening their serenity.

Think about character details, if they are in a house, what type of house is it? if they drive a car, what type of car is it? what condition is it? this all builds character.

Steve coombs

1 hour of film - 12,000 words
log line - one sentence that describes your film
Bibles- breakdown of what the story looks like e.g. future plot twists etc

All sunny in Philadelphia and fleabags both started on net

5 golden rules for structure:

1. A screenplay doesn't tell the story at the audiences pace. CLARITY, CLARUTY CLARITY! audience must knowingly know they are being led somewhere worth while.Only tell the audience what they NEED to know and nothing else, do not bore them
2. SHOW DON'T TELL!
3. A screenplay is like a joke - set up, distraction, punchline 
4. Know your ending!
5. Count your "moments" - key great scenes that will be memorable

Story telling: more script ideas

- Someone seen as a stereotype e.g. black or skinny geek
- They overcome enormous adversities such as discrimination or bullying to prove to themselves
- They under go a change (key part of plot) that result in difference in physical appearance/ personality
- Skinny kid starts building himself physically or Black kid starts doing something that goes against his stereotype e.g. ballet.


Everyone sees an individual as stupid or presume something about them e.g. living statue is just a no-good scrounger, but what if he is actually a university professor and does the living statue gig in his spare time.

Focus on someone possibly quite young, attempting over and over and failing to accomplish something. They come back the next day, try and fail, show them at different times trying and failing, then they meet someone, they work together, and succeed.

Young boy, age 10,

Story telling: Script writing - charcter profiles

Claire

• 39
• Dark brown hair, all natural
• Lives with son (husband deceased)
• lives in suburbia
• Commutes to work
• Works with CID (Criminal Investigation Department)

Damian

• 53
• Scragly dark hair with strands of faded blonde
• Squatter for last 24 years
• situated in outer parts of city
• Used to work an office job for insurance firm

Sub - character: Charlotte

• 8 years old
• Fair blonde hair
• small for her age
• lives in the country and is driven to school by parents

AFTERNOTE:

Since this session early on in the course I have developed different characters and changed my storyline completely. I did this due to the plausibility of filming and how well I would be able to pull it off as the whole "society blamed the obvious culprit but he was actually innocent" thing has been done before.

Louis lecture

How important is sound?

Can you have sound without pictures?

Can you have pictures without sound?

examples of films with sound and no moving pictures:

• Derek Jarman's Blue
• Chris Marker's Le Jetee (sound with still images)

Function of sound:

• Aural narrative (dialogue, voiceover)
• Sonic ambiance (mood, atmosphere, sound effects)
• Emotional or intellectual resonance or dissonance

27/10/2016 louis lecture Documentary

Book to read: Stella Bruzzi

Narrative Documentary modes:

• Expository - Narrating "voice of god" BBC documentary style
• Observational - "fly on the wall" no voice over, (Maysles Brothers)
• Participatory - Onscreen relationship between filmmaker and subject, usually via interview
• Reflexive - Seeks to challenge our assumption (Nick Broomfield)
• Poetic - Relies on expressive editing of sound and image (Adam Curtis)
• Performative - Filmmaker/ subject conveys personal experience (Michael Moore)

Critical approaches to documentary:

• Realism - making it look as natural as possible, as least artificial lighting sound etc. as possible, even when using artificial lighting make it look natural
• Mediation and Repressentation - What we see is NOT objective reality or truth
• Reception Theory - How we as the audience mediate texts, and factors that might influence us.
• Ideology - A set of opinions, values, belifs and assumptions that one uses to think about and relate to the world. Propaganda in documentary Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929) and Leni Riefenstahls Olympia (1938)

Editing workshops

On Fridays Fergus hosts editing workshops at the Rochester UCA campus. Here we learn how to make editing easier faster and more fluid through the use of command keys instead of the mouse. For example creating "L" edits, this is where you use the ripple tool to overlap part of an image but keep it's audio, leaving the effect of de-intensifying/ making the subject of the shot less important.

We also learnt about the tool panel (pictured below). The first thing I learned about was using the ripple tool, this means moving an edit point and causing the rest of the timeline to move the same amount to compensate. Fergus showed us that to do this you just select the ripple edit tool from the tool panel, position the mouse at the edit point in the timeline and drag left or right.

Both the Ripple edit and the Rolling edit look similar but perform very different roles. A rolling edit means moving an edit point without affecting the rest of the timeline. The first (outgoing) clip is made shorter while the second (incoming) clip is made longer by the same amount, or vice versa.

I have not used the Rate Stretch tool yet but after researching what it did I now can think of many instances in which I could have used it. The Rate stretch allows you can change a clip's speed to fit a duration by selecting the Rate Stretch tool and dragging either edge of a clip in a Timeline panel.

A Slip Edit means adjusting the in and out points of a clip simultaneously by the same amount in the same direction. The duration of the clip stays the sameTo use the slip tool select the Slip tool from the tool panel (shortcut is Y) and click on the clip in the Sequence. Now drag the cursor left or right to roll the clip forward or backward.

I remember the slip edit as the edit that slips underneath the footage. By this I mean whichever footage you have hold of with your mouse will be slid underneath the other two pieces of footage (these other two will remain unchanged. In the diagram below the green section would be the footage using the slip edit.

To perform a Slip edit, select the Slip edit tool from the tool panel. Position the mouse over the clip in the timeline, click and drag left or right.

The Slide tool does the exact opposite, in this case the green section would slide over the top thus cutting footage from the end of the blue clip and the start of the red clip.

The pen tool I have only ever used for audio, I am not sure if it has other functions, if so I'm sure I'll find them out as I progress through the course. I use the pen to adjust the volume or gain of a clip, by simply selecting the desired clip, enlarging the view and then clicking on the clip will display small dots that you can drag up or down to make it louder or quieter.

The last two tools are pretty self explanatory, the hand tool is used to drag the viewable area in the timeline left and right. The zoom tool is well, used to zoom into and out of the frame.

Story telling - Analysis of 3 short films

Film 1

8 - Eight is a film set in the WW2 era based around two characters, one a German soldier and one a

     British fighter pilot. The German soldier captures the pilot as he has crashed landed and takes him walking with him at gun point, until he tries to run and so he shoots him in the leg. They continue walking (or limping in the pilots case) until the German then steps on a land mine, the pilot then tries to run again and for a second time is shot, this time in the shoulder. This repetitive shooting causes a kind of slapstick dark humour to the film. The pilot hobbles back to the German and wrestles the gun off of him and walks away. Until the German does a strange kind of whistle to him which he has been doing through out the film to communicate with him. This seems to push the pilot over the edge and he takes aim and shoots, but misses, after a couple of shots he steps forward to decrease the chance of missing and accidentally steps on a land mine. The film ends here with an overwhelming sense of irony and a close up of the German with a large grin forming on his face. I am very fond of these dark humour endings as they deliver both closure and an emotive response from the audience.There is also no dialog in this short film which I am a passionate supporter of  as I believe that sometimes, especially if you do not have access to high end equipment, poor quality dialogue can disturb the suspension of reality. I also admire the use of moving medium close ups that I took inspiration from and used twice in my short film.

Film 2

DISSAPEAR - This is a short stop motion film evolving around a single character who over the course of the film is shown to have a passion for magic and illusions. At the start of the film he is depicted as an unhappy individual due to his lac of facial expressions and how he ignores his phone ringing and his work paging him. There is also no dialogue through out the entire film which as I said previously I am a fan of, but in doing this, especially with an inanimate object such as a puppet, it is hard to show any degree of motion both sad or happy. After he walks in ignoring the ringing phone, he puts a meal in the microwave and looks through reports with post-it notes on saying "overdue". This a key element in relaying narrative to an audience without talking to them, using narrative devices to show not tell. His microwave pings and he sits down to eat it, all the time ignoring pages from work and the ringing phone, but as he goes to eat it he sees his wardrobe and walks over to it. After performing a plethora of magic tricks he throws a blanket up in front of him and disappears. The camera hovers over the discarded blanket and all that is left of him is his pager, which bleeps one final time "WORK"  

One of my influences was the establishing shot of DISSAPEARED, it is level with the worktop but just adjacent to it as to create importance of the phone ringing (that is the first thing you hear before you see anything in the frame). I used a similar shot in my first scene where my character walks in and puts his keys down on the table which the camera is level with.

Film 3

Disregard - This short film is about stereotypes and how individuals can be forced down paths towards the very stereotypes people are tormenting them with. Their are three main characters, a white teenager with blond hair and blue eyes, an Arab teenager, and an Hispanic teenager. Through out the film you are shown the struggles of being someone who is having pills pushed at them instead of supportive conversations, someone who is constantly being called a terrorist or having those types of joke made about him, and some one who is being provided with no support from home. I loved the use of sound tracks towards the end of the film where they have all gone down these dark paths, one become a KKK type gang member, one joining the Islamic State, and one joining the Cartel where the music is played without any environmental sound e.g. footsteps and background noise like cars going past. I feel it really impacts on the audience and makes what is in the frame more significant that other shots without music.

Story Telling - SOFT trailer

https://youtu.be/gyv3_kNpnZw