Group : Soundtrack

• This was the original soundtrack but after our pitch we were told it may be too upbeat, and although we were trying to create a sense of irony and contrast with the upbeat music and the sinister actions we have looked around and found another song that we will try and either replace this one with or maybe mix them together so each one reflects each side of the main characters life. This second one would be used on the killing scenes whereas the first one would be used over the breakfast/kitchen scenes

AW : Location Reccie - My house

Kitchen 

• We have decided to only film one half of my kitchen, which is the one pictured in the first image, as it is cleaner and looks more organised, reflecting the killers personality
• We will have to remove a lot of the excess stuff from the kitchen to make it more minimalist but as you can see it is fairly well lit and white, the image we were going for.

Garage

• As you can see from the pictures my garage will also require some things being removed, like the ikea furniture
• There is a large work bench in the middle however with some strip industrial lighting over the top, allowing us to create a very dark, low-key lit scene, we will also try and use sheet plastic  around the garage to make it more like a 'kill room'
• As you can see there is also rows of tools on the wall and another work bench beneath that

 

Driveway / Road

• The first image will be a similar shot to the reveal when the woman opens the empty garage in the final scene 
• The two long shots on the right side will be used when the car pulls into the driveway and the woman walking up to the garage door
• The road on the bottom left will be where the victim is captured and the killer will be behind the wall in the foreground while the victim is walking up by the fence

Group : Wilderness Woods reccie

We decided, the best way to explore a vast range of shots was to create a music video. Also since sam had a broken arm during this project, it was left to Alex to star in it. In the clip we used

• High angle shots
• Low angle shots
• Birds eye view
• Pan shots
• Tilt shots
• Close Ups
• Long shots
• Establishing shots

We also were able to take some still shots including low angle, high angle, canted angle and handheld cam. POV shot.

Group: Font Ideas

Fonts:

• We did some research on 'dafont.com' to find our ideal font for both credits and opening title. here is what we found:

 

 

• We considered using all of these fonts for titles and credits, however our top 3 our '28 days later' 'Action of the Time' and 'crimes times six'
• We thought that '28 days later' and 'crimes times six' would work best as credits, where as 'Action of the time' would be best for our final opening title saying 'IDENTITY'
• We thought the fonts One Direction and Harabara, whilst being quite blocky, was too casual and curly for the stern image we were trying to portray
• New Stencil was not curvy and was blocky, but we thought that it was slightly too stereotypical and looked very 'cheesy'
• We may also used the font we talked about in a previous post called 'Bebas' we are waiting for the final piece to made then we will see what font looks best over the action

Group : Props and Costume

Props

• Digital alarm clock with backlight
• Small, thick rope
• Various murderers tools
• Simple essential grocery items
• Chopping board
• Lots of cling film
• Fake newspapers
• Map
• Knife
• Knife block
• Orange
• Orange juicer
• Car

Costumes

• Jake Nolan
• Boxer shorts
• Suit trousers
• Shirt
• Tie
• Long sleeved black top
• Black trousers
• Balaclava
• Black Shoes
• Wife / Woman
• Pyjamas
• Blazer
• Trousers
• Work Shoes
• Hair up
• Victim
• Suit
• Work shoes
• Coat / jacket 

Group: Pitch and Pitch Review

 

Pitch Review 

 

Some problems were brought up when we made our pitch:

•  Originally we weren't going to reveal that the murderer was the same person as the 'good guy'. However it was thought that this would not leave enough of a cliff hanger to our story line.
• So we decided to change this and the cliff hanger is now going to be that the wife/girlfriend becomes suspicious of the main characters goings on.
• We also decided that we need to do some more research into fonts.
• Also we found that we needed to create a more dense storyline as we did not believe we would have enough footage.
• Finally, we decided that our soundtrack would not be suitable for our storyline and was not sinister enough. It felt like it was to upbeat to fit with the characters emotions and we are now in the process of finding a new soundtrack to use.

 

 

 

Group: Current Progress

Currently:

• We are in the process of storyboarding all of the shots and possible shots we will need.
• Alongside this we are adding detail and finishing touches to our storyline, for example we are adjusting the ending of our story from revealing the murderer as the same man as the good guy, to the murderers wife/girlfriend returning home to nearly catch him.

Still to do:

• We have to do some location reccie's of:
• A modern looking bedroom
• A dark, dingy garage
• A light, modern kitchen
• We need to plan a way to make our murderers 'lair' to look realistc. We have looked into buy polythene plastic roles to hang from ceiling and a wooden work bench to have tools on.
• We also need to decide on some final mise-en-scéne details, like colours of bedsheets etc.
• We need to create a call sheet and risk assessment sheet for each location, this should be fairly simple as there are not too many dangers associated with our locations. Also we do not have many external crew members required for many of our shots so this should make organising filming more simple.

Group : Animatics of the storyboard

Group: Call Sheet & Risk Assessment

Call Sheet

• A call sheet is usually used in all types of filming or film making to inform cast and crew where to be for shooting and involve a small amount of detail of the filming process. A call sheet also includes contact information for both cast and crew scheduled to be filming, information about shot types (movemtn, framing and angles) and any techincal notes important to the image. Basically a call sheet includes everything the crew and cast need to know about a days shooting arrangements.

• On our call sheet we have included:
• The general location of shoot
• The shot number on storyboard
• The type of shot (ECU, CU, establishing shot etc.)
• Who from the cast is going to be involved, in our case we only had ourselves as cast members.
• Techincal notes- Camera movement, sound, mise-en-scéne.
• We also had a list of any props that would be needed
• Crew needed for the shoot would be listed
• Contact details.

Risk Assessment

• In filming the director(s) have to consider any possible risks that could occur at any of the location shoot and must outline or find someone to reduce this risk or to prevent it all together to prevent harm to cast, to crew, or to any expensive filming equipment.

• Our risk assessment sheet includes:
• The location or description of the shoot
• What the actual hazard is (however insignificant it seems) eg. slippery muddy ground
• Who or what is likely to receive harm and why
• possible steps to minimise the risk, eg. provide some suitable footwear when not filming.

• It is important to have a risk assessment to ensure that know crew members  or cast are brought to any harm, because if they are unable to film due to injury it will delay the rest of filming and may cause a delay to the finishing of the film etc.
• Also any filming equipment that is damaged is likely to be expensive and will cut into the budget of the making of the film if anything needs to be replaced.

Group : Survey Results

• We set up our suvey on surveymonkey.com and I e-mailed it to all of my e-mail contacts to try and gain a vast range of different demographics for our research. The response was overwhelming, after only expecting 25 or 30 responses,  we checked after an hour and had 130 responses, we left it for a few days and had 413 by the end. We now had a large sample to use for research, unfortunatly with the website we used would only allow us to view results for the first 100 people who took the survey unless we were to pay a memebership fee for the site, we however decided that 100 would be sufficient enough for our research.

Question 1  and 2:

• For our first 2 questions we wanted to establish the general people we were going to be analysing to make sure they were not all crammed into one demographic. As you can see we did actually recieve 7 more women answering our survey than men and the age shows that the majority of people (87%) were between 15 and 34 years old, which is an ideal target audience age for our film.

Question 3 :

• From question 3 we wanted to find out how much violence we should show in the opening, we didnt want to turn people off the film by being over violent, however without it we were worried we might turn our audience off by making it boring and not conveying the intended genre correctly. From this we see the 'Mild' and 'Pyschological' forms of violence would be acceptable in keeping the interest of our interest.

Question 4 :

• We had originally intended to use a garage as the location for the 'killing room', however from this survey we have decided if it will appease our audience, we will try and use a basement as a lair, this may involve however filming the scenes in a garage, but filming the entrances and exits to it in a separate location so that it gives the illusion it is set in a basement.

Question 5 :

• Here we wished to find out what diagetic sounds to include in our opening. The top 3 answers we hope to include all off : Screaming, dragging of metal and metallic whirring. These should be easy to create a 'sound match' with the breakfast routine in our other line of action.

Question 6 :

• This was the only question that we included where the respondant could select multiple responses, as you can see it is hard to draw a conclusion from this. However, the most popular reponses from the 'Image of a serial killer' question were : disturbed, organised and mentally unstable, all of these will try to be conveyed from our character to make it very clear in the opening that he is a killer. Organisational skills will be present in both the breakfast routine and the killing scene.

Question 7

• With this question we debated maybe showing some of the film from a different perspective, for example a victim or detective. The purpose of our film is to give the killer more of a 'human' side, and from these results, with 77% of people responding 'Yes' or 'Maybe', we believe we can make people sympathize with the killer more than a normal detective crime thriller.

Question 8

• What we were trying to acheive with question 8 was firstly what colour to make the credit / title text, aswell as what tint or colour wash to put over the killing scenes. Red, black and dark red all came out on top, which are the three colours we will try and give a prominent role to in the opening credits.

Conclusion

• Overall, we think the research we gained from this has changed some ideas we previously had and just because we thought they were good ideas, does not mean that our target audience would, so now we can tweak our film to fit the expectations and demands of our audience



Group : Opening Sequence - Narrative

• Organisation and Structure
• The film will be shot in two lines of action, one of a murdering stabbing / disposing of a body and another one of the same man (this is not revealed until the end of the clip) waking up and making his morning breakfast. The killing will be taking place at night and the breakfast obviously, in the morning.
• There will be little dialogue in the clip and the rest  of the osund will be a mix of diagetic sound from the events taking place when we think it necessary and then a non-diagetic soundtrack underneath this.
• The location for the night time scene will probably be a garage or shed workshop type area with very low-key lighting, whereas the breakfast scene will be in a very high-key lit kitchen to show the vast difference in the two events bringing more shock when it is revealed to be the same person.
• Audience Positioning
• The audience will be positioned with the murderer throughout the film to allow them to see both sides of him, allowing them to sympathise and empathise with him more. He will be shot from close ups most of the time in the opening sequence so that you do not see his face thus adding to the tension and mystery created.

Group : Titles

As a group, we needed to decide on the type of font we wanted to use for our opening sequence and what connotations that would reflect onto our film.

• American Pyscho

• In the opening credits for American Pyscho, the font is very simplistic and plain, all in capital letters with large kerning between each letter. The surname of the people are also in bold, which is very simple but an effective way of making people notice the credits when they may usually be ignored.


• Breaking Bad

• The credits in Breaking Bad are usually overlayed on top of the action. The teact once again is very simple, with normal kerning and all in bold. However one of the show's main foci is chemistry and chemical symbols in the persons name are usually made bolder and in green font to make them stand out. For example Thomas Schnuaz has 'Sc' in green the chemical symbol for Scandium.
• Dexter

• Dexter is written in a very tall, slender red font which bears both strong conotations with blood but also with lust and love, again showing both sides of the killer's life. I think we will use a red font for some of ours in the high-key lighting parts, however I worry it will not show up under the low-key lighting meaning we may have to use a white font to make it stand out on that background. After a few minutes research, I have discovered a very similar font called 'Bebas' that would be good to use for our project as it is very simple and plain, both of us think that if we choose a too complicated font it may be hard to read considering it will be overlayed ontop of the action. A sample for the font is seen below.



Group : Soundtrack

To research our soundtrack we looked at several film openings and the music from particular films/tv shows which we enjoy or are similiar to our target genre.

• American Pyscho
• This is the opening soundtrack to the film American Pyscho, also paired with a voiceover from the main character. This non-diegetic sound is quite eerie and mysterious while also being very serious and classy. There is no vocals in this clip it is merely one instrument which sounds good when it has a narrator over the top however for our clip I think we may need something with a bit more depth as we will probably not be using a voiceover.
• Fight Club

• This song sounds very 'metallic' and unlike the previous example is quite loud, brash and has multiple layers of sound. This song is much like the opening track to another of David Fincher's films 'Se7en'. There is no narration over this track in the movie and I do not think that it is creepy or mysterious enough for our project.
• Dexter

• Dexter is a TV show very similar to the premise of ours, with a serial killer who acts in a normal way. Me or Sam had never seen the show and were surprised at how light and cheerful the opening track was, we thought it played well upon the audience with it reflecting the 'happy' or 'cheerier' side of the serial killers life. Since we will be showing both sides of the main character we are looking for something like this but a little bit slower making it both creepy and slightly cheerful.
• Breaking Bad

• Again this is another TV show rather than a film, we both however think the soundtrack is very reflective of the ideologies and mood we are trying to convey, the only downside is it does not seem to 'flow' very well, we think it is very jumpy and in-consistent, this could however be of an advantage as it reflects the unstable mood of our main character.
• Breaking Bad - Soundtrack

•  After looking into the related videos section of youtube for our recent video, we have stumbled across this song, used in season 3 of Breaking Bad, the show who's title sequence both me and sam enjoyed. We beleive the opening 3 minutes of this song is the perfect mix between Dexter, Breaking Bad and American Pyscho, reflecting the methodical and precise nature of the killer aswell as the madness and scariness of his attitude. We are fairly certain the first few minutes of this song will play a large part in our opening sequence.

Group : Film Synopsis

• The film will be a psychological crime thriller, following the actions of a normal business man who moonlights as a serial killer.
• The film begins by introducing the character, before explaining why he kills particular people (he kills young fathers who reject their children as he never grew up with a father himself).
• In his job as an investment banker in London, his co-worker begins to suspect him of his illicit activities due to being be a lonely outsider and hardly ever leaving his large house.
• The killer is very careful about his work, disposing of the bodies by decompsing them in hydrofluoric acid, before poring the melted remains down the drain, this will be shown in our opening sequence.Thus police reports are only ever filed as missing person cases.
• The killer see's the man is getting close to discovering his sins and, trapped in a corner, is forced to kill him. The mans wife, a close friend of the killers, refuses to accept that her husband would just abandon her and confesses to being not able to sleep in days and she pursues an investigation herself.
• She discovers the killers identity and kills him in his own 'lair' disposing him in the same manner he did with multiple other bodies. The film closes with the woman going home and laying in bed, falling asleep.

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• The intention of setting the entire film from the perspective of the murderer is to play on the audiences emotions, despite him being a bad person who commits illicit crimes, the audience will empathise and be sad when he is finally killed as they were the only people who knew both sides of him.