Our Film - Vengeance

Thursday, 13 February 2014

Development of our idea

At the beginning of the project, we wanted to produce a film opening for an action film with a female protagonist. We wanted to defy three of the usual stereotypes with regards to the main character in the film:
  1. The idea that women in action films tend to be the damsel in distress. We discussed the fact that women in related films seemed to be weak and vulnerable and the man would come to her rescue. We noticed that a female character is ignorant to what is going on and therefore at a disadvantage. However, in our own film, we wanted to turn this on its head by having a strong female character who is manipulative and a man who is less aware.
  2. The idea that strong women in actions films tend to be cold and heartless. We found that the women who are not vulnerable can come across as having no feelings and can be unapproachable and sometimes rude. We decided that, to combat this, we wanted to have the woman fall in love with the man she is manipulating and also to give her an understandable cause for doing so: the kidnapping of her younger sister.
  3. The idea that women in action films tend to purely use their sexuality to get what they want. Although we wanted her to be engaged to the man she is manipulating to get what she wants out of him, we also wanted to show that this was not the only means by which she is going to find her sister. We wanted her to be able to fight and be more physical.
From this, we came up with the idea for the whole film: a young woman searching for her sister who has been kidnapped and is being used for her body in a brothel. She is going to use the son of the leader of the human trafficking ring that kidnapped her sister in order to find her and save her. She does this by dating him and eventually becoming engaged to him, which benefits her as she finally gains some information about the location of her sister.

We were able to formulate an idea for our target audience from the initial story outline. We realised that the themes we wanted to cover in the story, such as human trafficking, would be exclusive to an older audience and therefore established the fact that we would aim for a certificate rating of 15 or 18. Understanding that an appeal of a strong, independent female protagonist would lure in a female audience and the sex appeal would draw in a male audience, we then established our primary and secondary audiences.

After this, we began to brainstorm for the actual opening sequence. We initially planned for it to be a series of flashbacks, but after a conversation with the media department, we realised that this would not work for multiple reasons:
  • Filming all the flashbacks in different locations or dressing locations differently each time would be too time consuming
  • We risked going over the time limit allowed for the film opening
  • Flashbacks are difficult to edit during the editing process
  • It was possible that the audience would find these too confusing and therefore it would make the opening sequence less interesting
  • Creating a tense atmosphere at the start of the film would be more fitting for our particular character
With this information, we went back to the drawing board. Our biggest aim now was to create a visually appealing opening sequence for our target audience. We wanted to make the character more interesting and mysterious by showing her getting ready through a series of close-ups and extreme close-ups and metaphors which would be influenced by the opening sequence of Dexter. We came up with many normal things she could be doing that could possibly be perceived by the audience as suggestive and creepy, such as dripping blood-red lipgloss and decided that we would use slow motion in order to make these shots more creepy and unusual.

Our changes in the opening sequence seemed to change the personality of our character. Initially we wanted to use iconography in order to show that the woman was a well rounded individual, but after realising that we ran the risk of making her seem too young, we decided to make the sequence more sophisticated until she took on the role of a femme fatale. It wasn't until we realised this shift in her personality traits that we decided to choose a name for the character. We chose the name Rose, as we thought it was metaphoric: roses are beautiful but they have thorns that can cause harm. We thought that this was a subtle way of revealing the type of person she is.

The Animatic
Once we began to take the stills for our animatic, we realised that some of the shots we had initially planned for were not practical considering the space that we had and the cameras that we were using. As well as that, we identified continuity errors in our shot list as well as more exciting camera angles that were harder to think of when planning the shot list. We were able to identify the fact that, while shooting the stills, we had broken both the 180 degree rule and the 30 degree rule when planning the shots for our film opening and were able to quickly change these issues. Putting together the animatic was a vital part of the development process as it meant that our ideas had materialized and were much more realistic.

The Test Shoot
During the test shoot, we realized we had to edit some of our shots in accordance of the dimensions of the room, e.g.

We noticed even more instances where we had not fully thought about all the continuity issues related with our opening sequence and were therefore able to add extra shots which we thought were relevant and helped the opening make more sense. Furthermore, as these extra shots added too much extra time (of which we did not have) after consultation with a teacher, we decided that dissolving into black shots of titles, which helped our pace and hence the mood, and also helped time pass so our shots were continuous.
As well as this, the test shoot was a key opportunity to experiment with the lighting techniques and use shadows in order to add to the mood. We eventually achieved the right atmospheric lighting for our sequence and were able to identify set places Shani's bedroom for the positioning of the lights. We were, again, able to experiment with our camera angles in order to make the sequence more visually interesting.

The Rough Edit
During the rough edit we were able to identify the final continuity errors in our opening sequence and were able to correct them swiftly. We also decided to fade to black between certain shots and have titles in order to show the passing of time, which was different to our opening sequence idea prior to the start of this week. We had initially planned to have the titles placed around the action of the sequence, but realised that our opening sequence made more sense when we faded to black and it added to the tense atmosphere.

Our idea changed substantially throughout the planning process to what it is now. We discovered the fact that many of our ideas were not achievable and now fully value the importance of abiding by continuity rules in order to create a believable and effective opening sequence.

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