R+P Post 20: Reflections so far / looking ahead

Our Primary Moodboard

Below I have embedded a Prezi which discusses my thoughts and reflections on our last week of research and planning. As a whole, I am very happy with the work completed by both myself and my group during the pre-production stage. I personally think the most useful documents produced by us, were the mood boards as it got everyone in the group on the same page and got us to all start having to fully explain our ideas to each other and I felt the moodboard really helped aid this communication of ideas.

R+P Post 19: Our rough cut

Our rough cut helped us work out exactly which shots we wanted to film in our main shoot. When reviewing our shots at the start of the rough cut it became clear that although certain shots seemed good inside of our own heads and when filming, these shots infact did not look as we expected and ended up being completely scrapped, even in our rough cut. That said, some of these shots we looked to rework and shoot from a slightly different angle in our main shoot.

Another important part of our rough cut was working out exactly how we wanted our voice over and music to sound as we recorded our music and voice over ourselves. Recording the music proved to be far more time consuming than we expected, however recording the instrumental allowed us to record each individual verse, chorus and bridge independently and have full control over how the music would fit with the visuals. Below is our rough cut.

When we finished the editing of our rough cut, we showed a focus group of LGBTQ+ teens for feedback on our rough cut, to integrate into our final product. These faults and improvements are listed below:

• A more concise, yet more authentic voice over
• Script the conflict and conversation between the bullies
• I was in the cereal GoPro shot
• Shoot longer takes to improve continuity
• Improve the consistency of the lighting
• Make the representations of the characters more obvious
• Increase the volume of the music

If we were to do our rough cut again, I would have spent more time grading our footage. This would have given us a good idea of roughly what sort of settings we want to use in our main edit and also allow us to try to pin down a look for our footage. This would greatly decrease the time required to complete our main edit, which is normally a time consuming process.

R+P Post 18: Our Test Shoot

For our test shoot, we encountered many issues whilst filming. Some of these issues were due to our own failures and others were completely out of our control. It almost became a running joke during our test shoot and I kept a list on my phone, just so that we didn't forget anything that did go wrong.

Probably the biggest issue that faced us was in the evening, where a plug in my house blew causing all power in the house to go out, even when the fuse box was reset. As we had planned to shoot at my house in the late afternoon (between 3pm and 5pm) there was little natural light, but we had to make do with what we could get. This meant rearranging furniture and the placement of our camera, just to maximize the number of windows behind the camera providing natural light. This consequently meant that alot of the shots filmed in my house ended up being a little too dark.

Another major issue we encountered was the fact that we all forgot to bring a paper copy of the script. Thankfully, we had already uploaded a copy of the script to the internet for our blogs, so it was relatively easy to get on our phones for the actors to look at before we took our shots.

One page from our Test Shoot's Shootboard

Another issue we were able to fix for our actual shoot was, we had two shooting locations, one at my house and one in a park about an hour away on public transport. Getting to the park early in the morning was difficult as we were relying on train lines which only one member of the group was used to travelling on, which meant everyone ended up at different train stations, all within a few miles of each other. However, this overall was good as it helped us all get to the shoot in good time during our main shoot.

However, the test shoot as a whole was a very useful learning experience.

Shooting Craig's Desk in my Bedroom During the Test Shoot

R+P Post 17: Our planned costumes, hair and make-up

For our costumes hair and make-up, the main two focuses of our attention were Craig and David. David had to be instantly recognizable as gay, as he said very little in our opening sequence, where as Craig had to be dressed more subtly as he was still in the closet. We casted my friend Alex as David because the kind of clothes he wore, his personality, as well as his bleached blonde, quiffed up hair matched how we envisioned David to be. This is because stereotypically gay men have dyed hair and Alex was an obvious person to type-cast. We also wanted Craig to have slightly nerdy, bed hair. Therefore, we told Reuben not to touch his hair in the morning, as it normally is pretty curly and a bit messy, but we felt that if this was slightly exaggerated it would only help our production. Below is David's hair and make-up grid.

In hindsight, I think we would have stylised the bullies hair and make-up slightly more as it would have made them quicker and easier to recognize, by drawing on the audience's prior experiences and preconcieved stereotypes, as dictated by Barthe's cultural codes. That said, overall I feel our dressing of the characters in the hair and make-up segment proved to be good and created a better sense of character in our opening sequence.

R&P Post 16: Casting

Cast List for aglet

For casting we were keen to type cast as much as possible. A friend of mine had a very similar character and way of dressing to how we wanted David to be and became a key inspiration in the creation of David. Although he didn't play a major role in the opening, we thought it was still important to introduce him and make it clear what sort of character he was in the opening sequence. It became even easier to cast him into the role as he was good friends with the A Level drama student we chose to play the main role and therefore gave him more incentive to act in our small media production. This can clearly be seen in the cast list.

When casting our lead role, we thought it was very important to choose a confident actor, who also bore some physical and personality based resemblances to our main character. Another friend of mine, Reuben, was chose for the role as he did A Level drama and thus could give a convincing performance as well as offer strong similarities to the image of Craig we all had in our heads. Thankfully, he was happy to take part and I honestly feel that the opening would have been of a very sub-par standard had we not had access to Reuben. 

Our moodboard for Craig

Overall, I think that our choices when casting were strong as the people we chose closely resembled the characters we wanted them to play. That said, if I were to make our production again, I would have only added characters to the storyline if we knew exactly who we wanted to play each character and that person had agreed to acting our piece. This is because the actor we had lined up for the bully pulled out, resulting in me having to play the bully, which definitely negatively impacted the opening as I do not resemble the "Essex lad" archetype very well.

R&P Post 15: Our planned filming location/set design/props

Our Set List

For filming our opening sequence, we immediately pinned down Bowyer's Water lake as a good shooting location. It was located near Georgina in our group and offered really aesthetically pleasing scenery for our shooting and when coupled with good weather, was an excellent place to shoot as it offered our opening sequence something to make it stand out, being good aesthetics. As we developed our opening sequence, it became apparent we would need to use a house to film some simple interior shots to start the sequence off. My house was chosen due to it being large enough to film in (albeit sometimes not comfortably) and it also offered lots of natural light through sky lights and windows, which would result in better looking shots in our final piece. We often chose to shoot in the mornings at Bowyer's Water lake as the sunrise and early morning sun suited our shots better and the mid afternoon bright sun was far better suited to shooting indoors at my house. We created a prop and set list to help us manage which sets and props we needed, as well as when we needed them.

With props and set design we really wanted to reinforce Craig's character, as well as our film's aesthetic. One key prop used to reinforce Craig's character is the notebook. We wanted to make it clear that Craig is an introvert and contemplative character who allowed himself to explore this through his notebook, therefore his notebook was used as a running motif in order to try to portray this. We also paid close attention to Craig's bedroom when thinking about props. We acquired two classic film posters from Casablanca as well as North by Northwest to try to show a little about his character as well as countless pieces of music equipment such as a drum kit, guitars and amps, as well as the vinyl player. Vinyl was chosen specifically as it suited the aesthetic and indie nature of our film and character. We also thought it might offer interesting cinematographic possibilities aswell.

Images of Bowyers Water

If we were to do the project again, I would have chosen two locations far closer together and locations closer to our own homes. Bowyers Water was located about an hour and a half away from everyone but Georgina's home by public transport and it took us around 45mins to travel by car between Bowyer's Water and my house in the middle of the shoot days by car. This meant that the logistics of travelling proved to be a serious issue that had to be solved by the group and even with the help of parents offering lifts, it still proved to negatively impact our shoots. This was evident as always during the ends of our shoots at my house, it was clear everyone was very tired and everything ended up taking longer that it should. That said the group managed to push through it and it resulted in lots of very aesthetically pleasing footage which the group was very proud of. Overall though, I am happy we chose the shooting locations we did.

R+P Post 14: Our Call Sheet

For our main shoot, we produced a call sheet in order to communicate to our actors when we wanted them to arrive, a basic schedule and some contact mobile numbers for them to call if they had any problems. We felt this would make it far easier for our actors to know when and where they had to be, which made it easier to convince people to be our actors as they had all the information they needed and thus made it less of a burden for them to feature in our sequence.

Our Call Sheet

If we were to produce our call sheet again I would have included 2 further details. Firstly I would have included a basic risk assessment on our call sheet, as this would show to the actors that we had evaluated all the risks involved and had made it clear that there was little chance of them getting hurt during the production. This risk assessment would also have made the production seem more professional, which again would have made it easier to convince actors that working on our production would be worth their time. The other detail which would have been useful to include, would have been a prop and costume list personalized to each character. This would have meant that it would be less likely that an actor may arrive poorly dressed for the role or without relevant props, as they could simply refer to the list if they needed reminding, rather than waiting on a reply to a text or email from a crew member.

R+P Post 13: Our Shoot-Board

Our shootboard is a document produced to allow us to track which shots we need to get, how they need to look, who operated the camera, etc. on a shoot. We prepare this on a simple gridded sheet as seen below in the week coming up to the shoot and when filming this document is relied on heavily as the main source for information about each shot and takes are recorded on to it, as well as any possible good takes. The shootboard is a useful planning exercise as it allows us to evaluate how much time we will spend shooting on our shooting days, as well as when it would be most appropriate to take breaks. This makes it easy for us to plan a shoot schedule as well as arrange call times with actors, so as to not waste their time.

However, I feel this document is not perfect and if we were to change it in the future I would make the following changes:

One page from our Shootboard

• Remove the column with who used the camera, did sound, etc. as it is just easier to work this out on the day rather than pre-plan.
• Remove the shot timings column, as this can wildly vary depending on how easy the shot ends up being to shoot.
• Replace the shot timings column with timings for each set-up in each location, as this is easier to monitor and follow.
• Add a shooting date on the top of each shootboard.
• Change the props and actor lists to be for each set-up as opposed to each individual shot.

 Overall, I think the shootboard is a really integral part of our shooting process and is found at each of our practice, main and back-up shoots.

R+P Post 12: Our Animatic

As part of our pre-production preparations we created an animatic. An animatic is essentially a storyboard in video form. We believed that the animatic offered us many advantages over the storyboard as it makes it alot easier to visualise what our final product will look like. This is because when producing a storyboard it is difficult to tell how the timings between the shots, music and voice over will work. A good example of this, is that when making our storyboard we allocated far too much time to our voice over, however when we were able to review our animatic, we realised this was the case and thus shortened our voice over. Below I have included our animatic.

In retrospective, I think our animatic was a really good way to help us plan our opening sequence as it was our first time producing any video content for the project. However, I think that if we were to do it again we would have used our actual voice over actor in the animatic as well as in the rough cut and final edit, because it would have allowed us to iron out any issues we had in recording the voice over for the first time, in the rough cut. We had a problem with our voice actor sounding very depressed when he recorded the voice over for the first time, meaning we had to rerecord it last minute. This would have been easily circumvented had we recorded the voice over in the animatic with the actual actor.

R+P Post 11: Our timeline and storyboard

Our Timeline

The beginning of our timeline

When we began to devise our opening sequence, we decided that we first of all had to think of what sequence of events we wanted to show, before we began storyboarding. To do this we created a timeline by selotaping 3 pieces of A3 paper length wise and split it into 3 tracks for video, sound and voiceover. We used the video track to allow us to think of what visuals and which settings we wanted to use, without having to pin down exact shots and timings. Again for the VO track it helped us work out for how long we wanted to have the voiceover play for and also where we wanted to match the visuals to the content of the voiceover. Finally, for the sound track it allowed us to work out what music we wanted and when, as well as which sound effects we wanted to use for both diagetic and non-diagetic sound. This process gave us alot of freedom to adapt our ideas as we had them and manipulate the project as we saw fit, 
be it due to creative, continuity or practical 
reasons.

Our Storyboard
To produce our storyboard we used a large piece of sugar paper, which we then stuck post-it notes on using the colours as a key as below:

Key:

• Yellow - Mid Shots
• Blue - Close-up 
• Orange - Long shots

We used post-it notes as it allowed us to shuffle shots around and adapt the sequence as we saw fit. It also allowed us to add and remove shots easily, which happened in our group very often, especially towards the beginning of the storyboarding process as we were more interested in just getting as many ideas down on paper, than actually assessing the quality of the ideas. For our ideas we often sought inspiration from other media, such as the opening sequence for Elephant (2003) which included its titles superimposed on the sky. Another key inspiration was a video on the GoPro youtube channel showing 2 sisters make an apple pie, as this inspired us to use interesting shots for filming Craig make and eat cereal, as we felt otherwise this could quite easily become a simplistic and boring sequence within the opening. Overall, I was very happy with how we approached the storyboard as a group, as we were not afraid to make changes and even added half a dozen shots after completing the animatic in the name of continuity.