Millie Wyatt Candidate Number: 1874

Claremont Fan Court School: 64680

My brief was a film opening task. I had to produce the titles and opening of a new fiction film which can last a maximum of 2 minutes.

My Film Opening:

My production team consists of Ellie Smart: 1859 , Jess Foster: 1820 and Charlotte Coppellotti: 1812

The title of our film opening is 'Camera-shy'. It is a thriller film. Camera-shy explores the life of a young woman Sarah and the talents she has which lead to the jealousy of her friends. The jealousy extends to stalking and we follow the photos being taken as well as the fear that Sarah experiences.

We all shared the responsibilities in our group. I started off the editing and got to grips with Final Cut Pro. I also imported the music for the backing track. I helped with the camera work as I had worked a Canon camera previously and so knew what to do. 

Our production can be found on Youtube and the link is below: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_jy85oI_WA

My main contributions to our project were in editing and directing although everyone in my group contributed to each element of the project.

Camera Work:

We used a mixture of our iPhone cameras as well as the Canon cameras which were offered to us by the school. We all used our phones to film at one-point weather it was for our actual footage or our behind the scenes construction shots. Ellie filmed mainly as Jess and Charlotte were acting and I was doing some directing. I used the camera quite a lot as I had used them before with my mum and brother. Everyone was able to get to grips with the different camera settings. We were then comfortable with the filming and so could experiment with different camera angles and shot-types with changes in lighting affecting our angles.

Directing:

I contributed to the directing when I was behind the camera by making prop placement suggestions as well as acting encouragement. We all did this but Jess took the main directing role as she has worked in many school productions and so has more acting knowledge and experience. I used my enthusiasm for editing to fuel my directing as I had many suggestions that I could then edit together. A strength of our group was that we all had directing contributions to make.

Editing:

I took the main responsibility for the editing of our film. I used Final Cut Pro and iMovie to do this. I took our film footage from the Canon 650D camera and uploaded it to our Mac computer at school. I imported voice memos and recordings to accompany our footage with music and dialogue. I was able to use the blade tool to cut and fit our footage as well as the volume and colour wash tools to edit the appearence of images and videos. A challenge that we faced with editing was making sure that our table-top scene was filmed successfully as we did not want to edit this to give it a continuous flow.

CONSTRUCTION: REFINEMENTS

Construction: Refinements by Millie Wyatt

CONSTRUCTION: EDITS

Thank by Millie Wyatt

CONSTRUCTION: REFLECTION

CONSTRUCTION: rEFLECTIONS by Millie Wyatt

CONSTRUCTION: CHANGES

By Millie Wyatt by Millie Wyatt

Interviewing:

Process:

•  Go into the sixthform centre 
• Ask people questions:
• Why should we cast you?
• What is your best quality?
• Have you had any pervious acting experience?
• Ask boys the questions so that we can say that we were considering different options for the stalker- chose a woman because there wouldn't be the immedate assumption that she was a sexual predator.

We conducted interviews before our casting process to decide what direction we wanted the stalker to go in. These questions helped us find out who would work best as an actor and a person. We decided, through interviewing the boys, that we would rather a female stalker. We though that Charlotte would be the best as she was already in our production team and so could help to direct her scenes. Charlotte is also cast as the best friend of Sarah, Becky, who we decided should be the stalker. Althouh this is not discovered in our film-opening, havin a female stalker leaves the motive up to interpretation whereas with a male stalker it would be assumed, stereotypically, that thei motivation was sexual.

Female interviews for the stalker:

Male interviews for the stalker:

Filming: Friday- Photoshoot

 Friday the 23rd of April:

• On Friday we went to look at lighting and filming possibilties in the woods near the Belvedere at school. 
• We were looking for shadows which would create a creepier atmosphere as it was the first scene where Sarah receives a photo of herself from her stalker.
• We walked through the pathway of the woods and tried to use our camera to film the phone screen from an over-the-shoulde-shot. We found that this did not work as the light was glaring onto the screen.
• We then adjusted the angle to a bird's eye view shot which meant that the light was blocked from shining on the screen.
• We successfully filmed Sarah receiving the text by focusing on her phone screen which was a unique angle that we haven't used previously. 

Photoshoot:

We needed options of pictures to be able to send 'Sarah' the text of herself in the woods. We went up to the Belvedere and were able to take canted angle shots from behind trees which gave the photos a creepy appearence. We went closer to the wood area but we found that the shadows were too intense and so it was hard to make our Jess' face. We then moved into a more open area where we were able to get pictures of Jess from behind a bush to make it a realistic angle of where the stalker was hiding. We adjusted the angle that Jess faced so that we could see more of her face in the pictures which made it clearer when she received the text.  

This is our final photo that we used because                                                                              you can clearly see her face: