8 Years Evaluation How has your research and planning helped you develop your final project?

The final idea For our final project we decided to produce a film within the thriller/drama genre. Our final idea for our film was to use Marni’s idea for the short film. This idea was about a psychologist, Olivia who is also widowed. She was married to a man, Steven who died in a car crash. One day when the widow goes into work and is told to resolve an issue between a couple who have come seeking her help. The widow immediately notices the man and realise it is her husband who is supposed to be dead. The story behind the husband is that he once had an affair with another woman, Sofia (his new girlfriend) after the one off affair Sofia had expected him to leave his wife to come and be with her however he quickly shut down the relationship he had with Sofia. This led Sofia to despise Steven and Olivia's relationship and had quickly whipped up a plan to kidnap Steven. Therefore Sofia had kidnapped Steven, faked his death, erased his memory, kept him hostage for 8 years and formed a relationship with him. After successfully carrying out her plan she took Steven to his ex wife's counselling firm to show off to Olivia. After Olivia had noticed her ex husband Steven, she begins to have a flash back as she reminisces moments her and Steven had whilst they were married. After the flash back, Olivia begins to panic as she has fully processed that her husband who is supposed to be dead is alive and in front of her, as a result of this she runs out of the room and the opening sequence concludes.

Research Before doing any planning or production, my group had to carry out research on films, opening sequences, drama/thriller based films and different film codes an conventions. For our first research task I analysed the opening sequence of a film of my choice, ‘Lights out’. The analysis of an opening sequence allowed me to understand the different camera shots used and the different filming techniques that are often used in the opening sequence of a film. The analysis also showed me what to include in an opening sequence and how much of the story you should reveal. I was also able to recognize the use of music and sound effects. This helped me when editing my own film as I knew what sort of music to use, where to insert the music and when to include sound effects. The use of lighting in the opening scene of the movie was also useful as it allowed me to make similar decisions including lighting when making my own film. I also analysed a lot of angles and shots being used in the film. This helped me to discover new cuts, angles and shot types and helped me to use new and varied shots.

Research Another part of research that my group had to carry out was research into our films target audience. In order to recognise our target audience we done research into similar films that already existed and studied their press pack. Films usually have press packs which indicate their viewings, audiences, budgets and other media related information. We studied the film ‘the forgotten’ as this film has the same theme of psychology and love. It is also a thriller and drama genre film, which is what our production is. In the press pack we found that the target audience is for ages 15 plus due to the nature of the film. Researching similar titles to our own production allowed us to know what to put into our film and what footage we should include. This research also helped us to develop our final idea as we were able to include ideas that would specifically accommodate our audience e.g. music, locations, props and language.

Planning We also had done a lot of planning before creating our film. The planning helped us develop our idea as we had to plan different locations, working around actors schedules and allocating our time on different scenes suitably. For our planning we had to complete tasks such as doing location recces, script writings, completing call sheets and creating a story board.