Filming

Over the past week, Hannah, Finley, Jacob and I have been filming for our opening title sequence, we have found this challenging but have now got most filming done. This experience has allowed us to understand the difficulties and problems filmmakers have to face as we had to overcome problems of our own. One problem we faced was that some shots were harder to do than we originally thought, for example, zooming out of a TV as it's very hard to keep the zoom straight. We had to make sure we always shot more than one of the same thing to compare and see which one was better. However, we all had a lot of fun filming and I think we worked really well as a group. I'm pleased that we ended up adding in different shots to make it look better and overall filming so far has been very successful.
Below are pictures taken during filming.

Actors

The actors we will be using in our opening title sequence are Callum Carroll as the mad teacher, Reece Garside as the Prime Minister and Millie Warren as the interviewer.







Reece Garside
We thought Reece would play a very good Prime Minister. This is because we didn't want to use an adult for the part as it would be difficult to choose a time when everyone is free, therefore we needed someone that looked a bit older and can pull of the smart/sophisticated Prime Minister look to create realism. Reece was very confident and conveyed a sense of authority. Like Millie he was dressed smart/casual with a shirt and trousers.

Millie Warren
We chose Millie Warren to be our interviewer because we needed someone enthusiastic and confident to play the role and we needed them to seem very interested in what the prime minster had to say. Millie was very good at acting in this scene and her costume was perfect because it wasn't too formal that it would appear on BBC/ITV news, but more smart/casual for younger viewers that would be watching.

Shooting Schedule

Our shooting schedule for media is below

Wednesday 16th- Interview scene outside- front of school

Sunday 19th- Teacher's house and montage at Jacob's house

Thursday 24th- Re-shoot at Jacob's house

Scripting for our opening title sequence

SCRIPTING

Interviewer (MillieWarren): I'm here outside of the Chalfonts Community College with the Prime Minister David Cameron. So why have you decided to visit schools around Buckinghamshire?

Prime Minister (Reece Garside): I want children to be aware of the current state that the country is in and I want them to understand the reasons behind the decisions we make. There were rumours that we're sliding into a triple dip recession. I can confirm these rumours are not true.

*Change of location to the mad teachers house*
 *Montage of newspapers, alcohol bottles, empty pill packets etc to indicate how unstable the teacher is*

Wife (unseen): [Shouting from downstairs] Dinners ready!

*Teacher walks out the room and slams the door, allowing the viewer to see a dart board on the back of the door with a dart in the middle of a picture of the Prime Minister's face*

Our Animatic

This is our animatic. We had to do a storyboard containing every single shot of our opening title sequence. We imported the pictures to Adobe Premier Pro where we inserted the pictures in order and set the correct amount of time it stayed on screen. We also added some diegetic scripting (the speech from the interview) non-diegetic ambient music, titles, transitions and effects such as panning and zooming in/out. This took alot of time and allowed me to realise how much work goes into animatics. This has really helped me come to terms with how to use Premier Pro which will really be useful when editing our title sequence. I learnt how to make images pan right/left or zoom in/out which is also very helpful. Overall, this has allowed me to stand back and see roughly how our opening title sequence will look and has also allowed me to identify any problems that we may face. For example, we were going to use a shot reverse shot for the interview, however we realised this wouldn't create realism as interviews shown on TV usually consist of the interviewer and interviewee standing side by side and both facing the camera. After creating the animatic, I am confident to start filming.

Political Thriller Conventions

I decided to go back and revise the conventions of a political thriller as we have been so busy creating our storyboards and organising the shot lists that we have forgotten the conventions we must stick to in order to make our opening title sequence successful.

Conventions
-Usual conventions of a thriller but set against the backdrop of a political power struggle
-Either political corruption, welfare or terrorism is a main theme
-Innocent people are usually drawn into political world
-Different locations shown
-Different cultures/countries
-Deceit- false hero

Considering these conventions is not something we've done very carefully as we've got caught up in the storyline we created about a demented and unstable teacher wanting to assasinate the prime minister due to his strong views against the prime minister's views. However by choosing to do a montage of paperwork and newspaper articles on the prime minister alongside bottles of alcohol and prescription medication, we find ourselves going down the psychological route rather than political and this is something that we want to avoid.

To ensure we stay on the route of a political thriller we will need to add in a government crisis (political power struggle convention) which is why the teacher will want to assasinate the prime minister. We already have more than one location and I want to add in the teacher's wife and portray her as innocent, this is so she can be the innocent woman drawn into the political world. I think with these aspects we have made it more of a political thriller than it was before.

Updated roles in the group

Due to the deadlines we need to meet, we have decided to briefly split the group up and have given eachother different roles.

Myself and Finley are in charge of the animatic storyboard
Hannah and Jacob are in charge of the location, props, costumes, shot list etc

These rules will ensure we meet the deadlines and it allows us to understand what we've done and what we still need to do.

Deciding on locations...

We have been thinking about locations for our opening title sequence. We have three possibilities of where to shoot our interview location. We want it to be outside our school because that is where the interview is taking place. These are our three possibilities...

1. This is the first possibility. We thought this would be good as this is the entrance to school and it has both the school logo and motto at the top, however we realised that it would be a burden having to stop everytime someone goes in or comes out and the automatic doors may stay open.

2. This is our second possibility. We originally thought this would look good as it's the sign for the main entrance and has the name of the school and logo etc. However we don't like the brick wall and fence and it doesn't look how we wanted it to look.













3. This is our third possibility. This is our favourite one as our school logo is prominent and bold emphasising the school location, the only negative point is that it doesn't have the school name written but that doesn't matter to much.
















I'm happy that we have kept our options open and had different possibilities and overall I think it's good that we have chosen option 3 due to the boldness of the logo which makes it stand out.

Storyboarding and Development

In our last media lesson of the term, we finished off our storyboard for our thriller opening title sequence, we took a considerable amount of time putting them together and changing them around to experiment and see what looked best. It was really interesting to see the visual side of our opening and how we wanted it to look. This will make it much easier and less time consuming when we come to actually filming because we will know exactly what we're doing. We originally had it in a complete different order but having the shots down on paper allowed us to see what it looked like so we could decide what would be better. We changed various shots around because some shots went on for too long or needed to be broken up, we also added a few to also help break it up and this was the end result.

At the bottom of each picture we have written the time the shot lasts, what type of shot it is and the transition. In the picture you can see the costume and facial expression. Overall I am happy with our storyboard and think that it's detailed and easy to understand for all of my group.