Post 10 - Film Treatment and Feedback from Class

Below are scans of our original treatment, after reading it to our class we gained feedback which is also listed below.



Feedback from class we need to consider:

• Editing is vital to this film and the effects will have to be done well or it won't looks good.
• Possibly having it so all of the memories Thomas sees add up to something at the end?
• May be too complex, may need to simplify it.
• There was confusion and so we need to make sure we have a flowing plot and name the characters.
• Changing how the woman sees the ring and what she does with it?
• LOCATIONS: Told that our choices of Watford or Hemel were good but Hemel was preferable. Also in these locations to make sure no-one is in the background of the shot is messing around.

Developed treatment of our film:

Thomas, an 18 year old teenage misfit wakes up to find himself with an awful headache, as he starts the day he finds his friends in his house have appeared to have lost their memories of the last 24 hours, confused by their dazed looks and the ache in his head, he puts it down to the drinking the night previous.

Whilst in town shopping, Thomas’ headache doesn’t fade and he starts to notice some of the people around him with the same blank look his friends had had earlier. He is hit by flashes of images and staggers back in pain, bumping into a woman. He goes to apologise but has a sudden flash of pain and falls to the floor and is transported into a different location, he watches from afar as he sees a couple getting engaged and sees flashes of a marriage. He comes back to reality to the woman with the same blank expression. The woman offers a hand to Thomas and notices her wedding ring on her hand, frowning she takes it off and in assumption passes it to Thomas, their hands brush and Thomas gasps with another flash of pain and sees a floating female name appear in front of him, he goes to grab it but fails and turns to find the woman with a confused look on her face as she turns to Thomas and asks who she is.

In a panic, Thomas runs through the town to get away, bumping into a few more people and seeing a flash of memories appear around him. He attempts to escape and sees one of his friends from earlier in the morning in town, in an attempt to avoid him Thomas brushes against his friend, a memory appearing and disappearing. Thomas runs to a nearby park to cool down and try to figure out what's happening, in his daze and still on-going headache, he walks home, finding his friends in the kitchen again, all looking confused. He starts to shout and tell them about what's happening but they don't believe him and try to calm him down, he twitches to avoid them but they touch him. They all stop dead until they ask who he is.

The film ends with Thomas locking himself away in his room and there is a time lapse of two days and we see Thomas surrounded by drawings of the memories. The final shots show him drawing aspects of the marriage from earlier in the film as he slowly breaks down and snaps.

Post 9 - Film Development

INTERVIEWS

For this post, I interviewed a friend,with this information and asked them to provide feedback on our film ideas.

Interview:

ME: What do you think of the plot? Is it a plot which seems fluid and will fit into the 5 minutes we have?
Is there anything which seems out of place? Or can be changed?
Does this film idea excite you? /Entice you?
FRIEND: I think it sounds perfect and I don't think I would change anything, I think it would work really well within the 5 mins time limit. And yes I think it sounds enticing.

ME: Is there anything you think we can do with the character or with locations?
FRIEND: Maybe somewhere busy for the end part where he looses his mind? Because he'd be knocking into lots of people and that would make him even more unstable and also show why he has so many drawings on his walls of peoples memories? And you said someone kind of social awkward was it for the character? i think that would be really good, like if normally he doesn't have much to do with people so that would especially be why he cant deal with all these memories and emotions form other people?

NARRATIVE THEORY

As mentioned in the beats of our film, our plot does not end how the beats of a film normally would, as there is a lack of conclusion. Whilst it fits with the majority of Todorov's theory of narrative, where a state of equilibrium is shown, disrupted, attempted to be repaired and the repaired or a new equilibrium is shown, the ending of our film neither repairs the equilibrium nor brings upon a new one. 

With Propps theory of narrative, our film does not fit either, as our characters do not fit into the categories it suggests. Our hero can also be seen as the antagonist, although the film neither proves this nor doesn't. There is no heroine, or helper, or donor either. Even the antagonist is unknown, as there is not a particular character showing the characteristics of a 'villain'. 

CHARACTERS

From the interviews above, it was clear that having the character as a misfit was a good idea and I decided to work with that. So for similar characters I looked at the TV show 'Misfits' which as it also is related to supernatural powers, as our character may have, it is also relevant to look at.The character of Simon appears to be similar to our character, that of an ignored character who appears as a 'social outcast'. 

I also looked at the character of Hermann Gottlieb from the film 'Pacific Rim', after talking to the second interviewee about characters she mentioned this character as he 'seems pretty social awkward and prefers to stick to numbers which make sense to him?' This character seems to be very similar to our character as he was a social outcast as a child and would rather work with machines and numbers than people. But can have friends and relationships.

LOCATIONS

I’ve looked at locations for our film and the basic ones appear to be one of group’s houses to film the bedroom scenes and the kitchen scenes. This will open and end the film. I also looked at which town we can use for the main part of the film; it will either be Watford town center or Hemel Hempstead. Watford is a more traditional high street and has a lot of space to film and run about it. Hemel has a more modern setting with Marlowes with a lot of glass.

 

I have also looked into parks, as we could have a scene with the main character rushing away to a park. The easiest will be Abbots Langley Park, as two of our group live right next to it, but it also works as a setting with large woods behind a large amount of space. It also contains a skate park which our character could sit on to contemplate his course of actions.

RESOLUTION

After we had decided we would most likely end our film with a cliffhanger or without resolution, I looked into some books which I love and have read to find similar endings. I looked at the book 'Emil and Karl' by Yankev Glatshteyn. Whilst the story is a suspense novel, the ending is something of importance, at the end the reader is left with a feeling of lack of resolution as after all of their trials and tribulations the two best friends are separated at a train station with one off and one on the train. Looking more into this ending as a group, to me would benefit us as writing a novel with an unknown resolution is difficult to pull off well as is doing so for a film.

I looked more into use of cliffhangers both in stories and in films. The definition of a cliffhanger can be 'an ending to an episode of a serial drama that leaves the audience in suspense', however, as our film is a one-off without a sequel this definition does not work. 'Cliffhanger' may not be the right word to use for our film, however, as our film had no resolution and the audience is left with a sense of questioning, it is what I will use.

The video below is about whether 'cliffhangers are overrated?'

Note from this video:

I also looked through a website and looked at whether happy endings are a must and the 'ingredients of a perfect ending'. Key points from this were:

• 'Without doubt, happy endings are enjoyable, uplifting, and reaffirming.'
• 'But does this mean all endings should be happy? Are sad stories with sad endings the domain of the lonely, the manic-depressive, and the masochistic?'
• Sad stories don't equal depressing ones. A story can be sad to someone but not to another if they evoke emotions within parts of the audience.

Post 8 - Film Language

For this post I have seperated camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene into different sections and have made Prezis for each section. Below are the four Prezis.

CAMERA

 

EDITING

SOUND

MISE-EN-SCENE

Post 7f - Audience

DEFINITION: A collective group of people who comsume a form of media, whether it be film, text, radio etc.

Mass audience - a.k.a 'broadcast audience' - Very large groups of people - Hollywood Blockbusters.

Niche audience - Small groups - very influential - art house films common for this audience

Classification of Audience types:

Two of the main ways of dividing audience are:
Demographic: Gender, sex, ethnicity, age, class.
Psychographic: Interests, hobbies, attitudes, beliefs.
Media outlets mainly use social grades, starting at A with the upper middle class to E, the students and unemployed.
This is done so that during research of a film or television show, production companies know who their film or program is target at and how to target them in the best way.
(Table below is from here)

Grade	Social class	Chief income earner's occupation
A	upper middle class	Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B	middle class	Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1	lower middle class	Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2	skilled working class	Skilled manual workers
D	working class	Semi and unskilled manual workers
E	non working	Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners, and others who depend on the welfare state for their income, this also includes students.

The negative side of this that households are pre-determined based on one person's income, a household will most likely have conflicting views on media.

Impact of New Technology on film audiences:

• Old media [TV, PRINT, RADIO] were directed for high audience numbers, but in the last few years must now work hard to maintain this audience.
• New media [DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY] has led to an increasing uncertainty in how audience should be defined, as audience fragmentation has led to multiple branches of audience type.

Fragmentation:

• The branching out and breaking up of audiences into smaller groups
• With this media must change their ways to meet their audience, such as newspapers and magazines, who now have both online and hard copies of their text in order to meet as many people as possible.

How institutes make money to combat both new media and fragmentation:

• Free apps have adverts
• Websites and search engines target you towards certain adds.
• They attempt to lower production costs to make profit - Such as newspapers printing less copies.

Post 7e - My Film's Genre Convention - Summary

Our film's genre is a hybrid of Mystery and Drama, I have conducted research into conventions of both these genres below, in hopes that within our group we can use these to our advantage. These conventions will include plot and structure along with mis-en-scene.

Mystery conventions

Whilst the website below is about Mystery in literature, it is very similar in film too.

http://www.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/r/reading_bestpractices_comprehension_genrechart.pdf

• Based around puzzle solving, there will often be a detective character who is the one 'set out to figure out the mystery'.
• Foreshadowing, red herrings, suspense and inference gaps. These four conventions of the mystery provide connections between the film and the audience. An audience will be able to connect to character or plot points or clues easier.
• Gaps are used in the mystery genre, leaving the audience with a sense of the unknown that will later be revealed.
• Mystery films are very realistic, often involving crime, again connecting to an audience at a level of 'this could be happening around us', almost the opposite of escapist, although the extremity of some mystery films cancels this out. The film 'Trance', as an example of this, is a collection of the genres: Crime, Drama and Mystery.

The film is set in London, the basic plot is based around an art robbery gone-wrong, this incorporates the genres of crime and drama. However, Danny Boyle [the director] adds the mystery genre as the film progresses, the audience will see clues about the background of the character Simon, little hints which most don't notice the first time viewing the film. The mystery genre uses subtlety in order to convey a complex plot. Like with 'Trance', where the film suddenly becomes more complex than expects when the elements of amnesia and an unknown story hidden within the main plot are built up and revealed.

Drama conventions

Post 7d - My Film's Genre Conventions

For this post, I have collected photos in the website Pintrest which I feel relate to the genre of a Mystery/Drama and show the conventions of both Mystery [puzzle solving, the unknown, detectives] and Drama [physical and inner conflict, dark tones, relatable to the audience]

http://lauraobrienstuffformedia.tumblr.com

http://www.pinterest.com/lelouchslove/conventions-of-genres/