Reply to email

We got a reply from Westwood First School on Monday during class. They asked us to forward them a copy of our parental consent form so they could distribute it to the children and we could be sure their parents are all right with our filming them. We sent it off to them yesterday, and hopefully it'll get approved quickly!

Dear Parents of yrs 3 and 4
On Wednesday the 14th January a group of Westwood College Media students are wishing to visit Westwood first school to film a group of year four children for their yr 12 media coursework project. If you do not wish to allow your child to participate please sign below. They have assured us that the film will not be placed on the internet and is only to be used for their coursework.

Yours Sincerely



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I do not give permission for my son/daughter …………………….……….………………………to be included in the media film from Westwood college.


Signed ……………………………………………. Parent/Guardian

Westwood First School E-mail

We sent an email to Westwood First School to confirm that we would be allowed to film their students on the playground for our film. Until we get a response we will not be storyboarding in case we don't get their permission, so hopefully they reply quickly and positively!

IDEA!

We put together four brief ideas that could be used towards the theme of psychological horror;

• amnesia
• schizophrenia
• delusions
• mental patient

For each of these ideas we came up with some ideas that would be used if we chose each one.

Schizophrenia
Split personality….
Weird visions ……
Believes they are two people…..
A kid at school sees a new kid at school but the truth is that it’s the other personality that the kid has…..
Mental patient
Could be set in a mental hospital showing the lives of patients.
The release of the main character who hasn’t fully recovered.
ESCAPE!!

Delusions
Blurred visions etc… shows images that aren’t real but seem to be there…..
Amnesia
Looking at Memento as an example which follows a similar storyline….
Maybe use opening as not action but links with the storyline i.e. memento uses photos.
A guy accused of a murder but has amnesia so can’t defend himself and he finds out that it was a setup.

After going over these ideas We have chosen the schizophrenia idea of a child at school. He is imagining a new child at school but not knowing that he has gained a split personality disorder and the new child at school, is actually his opposite personality, but he can’t see it because he sees everyone interacting with the child.

The opening will include

• A voice over
• children laughing
• slow motion of children planning (also slightly blurred)
• we will also have a colour cast of grey to show a distanced and depressing mood.

'The Others' Analysis

When analysing The Others opening sequence we noticed many things:

The film starts with a plain black screen with "Dimension Film Presents" written in plain white font. Fades out into image of a sunset, an orange and black drawing lit with a flickering light like a candle. As soon as the image appears a voice over starts by Nicole Kidman saying "Now children are you sitting comfortably?... Then I'll begin." She then goes on to tell the creating story from the bible.
At the same point that the voice over starts the music also begins, the music has an eerie feel to it yet it is soft and classical at the same time, it is in a minor key. As the opening credits continue the music gets more and more sinister.
We reverse zoom on the sunset image to reveal the rest of the picture, there is a beach and various animals, and a picture of a girl and a boy in the right corner. The voice over then stops as the production name appears in the same font as before.
It then fades to black and a drawing of the same style as before of the bottom of a grand staircase fades in and the camera follows up the stairs until near the top we see the same children as before, they are the same two from the film. We then see a collection of the same style of drawings all containing the two children. The pictures, all relevant to the film, such as images of the puppet, a door being locked, and the boy screaming in bed. The last drawn picture we see is of the mansion look from across the lake, this image then fades into the real image of the mansion as an establishing shot.
We feel that this is a powerful opening sequence as it sets the mood yet does not give anything away from the film. We like the way it is simple yet effective.

Ideas

Now we are going to start coming up with ideas for our piece so stay tuned for updates...

Questionnaire feedback

We finally got our questionnaires back, after a very very very very long wait due to... mentioning no names (miss Ratcliffe!).
When analysing the results that D2 submitted we came up with a conclusion,
The results we got back supported our hypotheses which meant that "audience's prefer psychological horror films to any other kinds" as 6/10 voted psychological genre of horror film as their favourite. This is also supported by our poll on our main site as 71% have also agreed that psychological horror is their favourite.

Twilight

We studied the opening section to the book Twilight. We then created a storyboard to show the opening sequence that we read. Once we created it, we then created the poster that would advertise it as a film. Left is a copy of our poster.

Viewing of misdirection

We watched a film called Misdirection which was created by Tom who is a past student who has completed his university course in Media Studies. This had a positive effect on our group because we have decided to base our film around psychological horror. This will be a definate once we gather the feedback from our questionnaire. After watching the short film we found that we enjoyed several things about it. One thing we found about it that we liked was the storyline/ narrative around it. We also liked the story being based around the idea of the 'book' which brought the story together. The filming was of a proffesional quality and contributed to the film making it seem more real than life.

Questionnaire follow up

Once we had a completed pilot of our questionnaire, we choose our target audience for the testing. We choose a year 11 tutor because our age range was 15 and over. We sent out 10 pilots to gather the feedback. Once we gather the results we will analyse them and see whether it corresponds with our hypothesis.

Questionnaire...

As a group we have created a questionnaire that we are aiming at a target audience of 15+ We have a hypothesis that we are hoping to back up when we get our results! First we are going to send out 10 pilot copies to see how we go...If we find something that is a problem once we have the pilot copies back we will soon edit this before sending out the final batch! Our questionnaire is based around the horror genre as we are focusing on this area for our final piece.

Preliminary Project...

To start off our project we had a preliminary project which required us to test our basic knowledge of basic filming techniques and camera angles. This project had a clear structure which we had to follow this was to create a short piece where we see one character walking into a room, sitting down and having a conversation with another character, we chose to do a break up scene between two people. The whole time keeping to the 180 degree line. During conversation we used a basic over the shoulder shot. In our piece we also included Close Ups, Two shots and Reaction shots as well as many others...

Welcome to Cubbage-Patch Productions

Hello!
Thank you for joining Isi Baker, Abbie Arnold, Emily Cubbage and Callum Kerr at Cubbage-Patch Productions!