Twelfth Draft with GarageBand track...

Here is the twelfth draft of our film opening, probably the penultimate draft, due to a few small issues with the sound that we need to edit. Other than those few issues, this is pretty much the finished product!

We turned the volume of the birds down and made the fades in between sections of sound much smoother but now I think the music is too loud so we will need to turn that down too in order to be able to hear the voiceover clearly. I really love the sound of the birds when it carries on going even after the screen has gone black. We also got rid of the random shots of Charlotte that were at the end of the film opening before. Ending our film with 'Leyla' walking off down the path is much more effective.

'Kickass'

Went to the cinema at the weekend to see 'Kickass' and really enjoyed it! It is a film about a teenage boy who wants to help the world by becoming a superhero but ends up getting put in hospital a couple of times and gets in much more trouble than he expected whilst meeting some other - slightly more ruthless/violent - "superheroes" along the way. It wasn't what I expected it to be, I thought it would be thrown on the same pile as 'Superbad', 'Pineapple Express' and the like, but it was quite different in my opinion. Although some of the humour was fairly similar to that kind of film that has grown increasingly popular recently, the content was strange and not what I was expecting at all! Lots of the people that I went to see the film with said that they were quite offended by the way the 11 year old girl was portrayed in the film as she is seen swearing constantly (I can see why people were offended because she did say a word that should never be said by anyone let alone a little girl, this is shown on the clip below...), having a ridiculously extensive knowledge of weapons and even shown as an object of "lust" by the main characters' best friend. To be honest I was more offended by the fact that Nicholas Cage was in the film...
Here's a trailer for the little girl's character called Hit Girl;


There has been lots of debate about the moral issues behind the film and there are loads of different websites that have discussions about it but here is a link to one that I found quite interesting as two guys with very different opinions on the subject discuss whether or not it is right that we - as an audience - find a little girl killing everyone funny. >> click here to read the discussion <<

This man's point particularly interested me; "I don't really think this is going to spur random acts of violence, but it does have me questioning our tolerence for violence in movies, and if we should have a limit. Watching Kick-Ass made me wonder if we've passed the event horizon of mainstream depictions of graphic material. What does it say about us that we enjoy watching a little girl gleefully killing people? And does it even matter that we don't have limits? I don't
know yet."

Here is the main trailer for the film...



I really enjoyed the film and thought it was hilarious (especially when Hit Girl is running down a corridor full of bad guys killing them all whilst a very fitting song plays...) and I thought that it was questioning society about it's increasing naivety towards the influence of violence on kids rather than promoting violence, but that's just my opinion. I would definately recommend this film, and it is so interesting to see how different people react differently towards it.

Eleventh Draft - Background Music...

This is the latest draft of our film opening which has the background music on it. We decided that the film needed some music behind the voiceover, otherwise there was too much emphasis on the voices and not enough on the visual elements.
This draft sounds very rough because we recorded the track over the moving images on iMovie, rather than actually putting the GarageBand track onto the film permanently. We just did this in order to be able to have a rough draft with just the music on it.
The recording is bad quality (will be much better when we actually use the GarageBand track itself) and the fades in between different parts of the music are not as smooth as we want them to be but we can edit that to make it much better.



I particularly like the bird noises at the end when it fades to black, but for some reason the bird sounds are slightly too loud but we can edit that too.

Final Evaluation...

Here is my final evaluation of this whole section of the course. I chose to do it in a powerpoint presentation;


Molly - Media Evaluation Presentation

New part of the script for our voice over...

We had previously written part of a script for our film voice over and we recorded that part with somebody else who was not available for recording the new part of the script which we had written yesterday. Therefore we had to record the whole thing again with different people, so to make it easier for us Charlotte was the police officer and Aimie was 'Mrs. Richardson', our main character's mother.
We recorded it yesterday and began to edit it but cutting out all of the times that anyone said 'Richardson', and putting a distorting effect on that word, in order to create the mysterious/creepy effect that we first discovered on a song called Suzanne by an artist named Plan B.

Here is the second part of the script that we wrote yesterday when we realised that what we originally had was not long enough to fill the majority of the film opening;

(after Mrs. Richardson says: Maybe you should be talking to her boyfriend, not me.)
Police: Why? What was he like?
Mrs. Richardson: I didn't get to meet him. She never let me.
Police: What about her friends?
Mrs. Richardson: I only really met Sarah Underwood and Stephen Land, but they haven't been to the house in months.
Police: Do you know if she is still in close contact with them?
Mrs. Richardson: No, like I said, she never told me anything like normal daughters should.

We are going to add effects to this voice over and edit it all to fit in perfectly with the moving images on the screen.

'District 9'

Here is the opening of a film called 'District 9' which is possibly one of my favourite films that I have seen recently. Just like our opening, all of the production names, etc. appear at the very start of the film with some sound before any images are shown.

The special effects of this film are incredible too and it is generally a good plot. I would definitely recommend this film.

'The Life Of David Gale'

I watched a film called 'The Life Of David Gale' the other day and it was not what I expected it to be, but it was even better than I had thought. I had heard a lot about the film and got the impression that most people that watched it had thought it was amazing and loved it but I was intrigued by it because I had never heard of it before and felt that I should have heard more about it if it was as good as everyone said it was.

When I was watching the film, the thing that struck me most was the intensity that the film managed to create. The whole way through the film dramatic tension is being continuously built up further and further by every aspect of the production; Mise-en-scene, editing, sound and camera work.

One of the techniques I especially liked was the swirling camera movements and flashes of words every time that there was a flashback shown on screen. I also liked that the viewer was shown the end of the film at the beginning.

I definitely did not see the twist at the end of the film coming and it shocked me, which serves as proof as to how cleverly produced the film is.

Also, the opening credits of the film helped us to decide that our title for our film opening would be right at the start too in order for it to look more like a film opening rather than a trailer.

Explanation of the rest of our film...

Here is the basic storyline of our film if it were to continue after the opening that we have produced...

• Leyla has gone missing
• Mother is concerned
• Friend is made out to be the villain
• as the film develops, the mother starts behaving strangely and saying odd things.
• In the end, it turns out that the mother has been trying to frame the daughters friend as she was the one who actually drugged and dumped her own daughter due to her psychological health issues.
• Leyla is still not found...

This explains why we used certain stereotypes in our film to lead the audience to believe that Leyla's friend is the villain, when in fact it is the "loving" mother who has disowned her daughter.

Tenth Draft...

Here is our tenth draft of our film and this one has a sample of the news report voice over that we recorded and edited (to distort Leyla's last name) on it. We have not put the whole track on yet because we've got to edit the whole track before we put it on the film. The recording is not very good because we recorded it on iMovie from the original recording on GarageBand.