Analysis of Gin and Juice Lyrics by Katie Eve Dibb

AS Foundation Portfolio - Titles and Opening of New Fiction Film.

AS Foundation Portfolio - Group Evaluation of Foundation Portfolio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBgrs2p51mo

AS Foundation Portfolio - Group Evaluation of Foundation Portfolio #2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_mKme_OGHA

I felt that i spoke better in this group evaluation, probably because I had more practise after the first one.

AS Foundation Portfolio - Individual Evaluation of Foundation Portfolio

The Others

The Others, 2001, is a film that i watched, far too young alone in my granny's house in the countyside, already terrified of the dark that has haunted me to this day. Directed and written by  Alejandro Amenábar (Open Your Eyes, released in the UK on an estimated budget of
$17, 000, 000 was a highly succesful Spanish film achieving a worlwide gross of $209,700,000.
The film is about a woman who lives in a darkened old house with her two photosensitive children  and becomes convinced that her family home is haunted. This thriller-horror hybrid was produced by Cruise/Wagner Productions, Sociedad General de Cine, Les Producciones del Escorpion S.L. Dimension Films, and the uncredited Canal +, Lucky Red and Miramax Films- so a mixture of Spanish and other European companies. It was distributed highly through manly Europe but also in Japan and the USA. Althuough directed and writen by a Spanaird it was highly popular in France as well and also managed to crack America, this may have had to do with Nicole Kidmans' previous work in the popular Moulin Rouge. It recieved the certification of UK 12, there was nearly no Profanity or Violence and gore but there was however several Frightening/ Intense scenes. The idea of children possesed or haunted is very intresting and although i did not imediately think of this film while we were working out the narrative of our thriller there are certain links between the two pieces and is another potential insight into what is darkening our child.

The Devil's Backbone

 

 

 

The Devil's Backbone ("El espinazo del diablo"), directed by the mexican director Guillermo del Toro, released in 2001 is a Spanish Civil War ghost story about a twelve year old boy called Carols who arrives at an orphanage after his father is killed at war, he discovers the school is haunted and has many dark secrets that he alone must uncover. It was given the certification of 15+ due to scenes ranging from stabbing to a man taking a shot of rum from a jar containing a perserved mutated baby foetus, despite it's contraversial scenes however it was a succesful film, filmed with the high budget of an estimated $4,500,000 and has since become a world-wide cult film highly popular in countries such as Mexico, Spain and Britan. The narrative shares similar themes to Darkest Child, their is a singular child protaganist that is proceeds on a solitary journey into the supernatural where they are met with threaterning, yet luring children-

             ''What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.''

The reason why El espinazo del diablo was so popular world-wide is due to the vairity in it's production and distribution companies, it was produced by small independant mexican and spanish companies such as Tequila Gang and Canal+ España, this alowed a strong link between the two similar audiences it was primarly aimed at, however they had several distributers in many different countries, rangin from Japan to Germany (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256009/companycredits?ref_=tt_dt_co) In regards to Guillermo del Toro's other work is show clear similarites to his film Pan's Labrynith, in both their is the main narrative of a child exploring a supernatural and dangerous world in a backstory of war and death. Indeed del Torro created them both as siblings to each other, Pan's Labrynith as the sister and The Devil's Backbone as the masculine, brother film.

 

''It changed so much over the course of the year that I had to make a movie that structurally echoed Devil's Backbone, and that you could watch back to back. Devil's Backbone is the boy's movie. It's the brother movie. But Pan's Labyrinth is the sister movie, the female energy to that other one. I wanted to make it because fascism is definitely a male concern and a boy's game, so I wanted to oppose that with an 11-year-old girl's universe.''- Guillermo del Toro

 

 

 

The Woman In Black

The Woman In Black was released on the 10th of Febuary 2012, made on a high budget of $17, 000, 000. It was rated a PG 13 by the American Motion Picture Rating
(http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1596365/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg), it has similar themes in the classification as ours, no nude or sexual scnes, smoking or drugs but plently of shocking and intense scenes. The film is set like ours, in a timeless place with an unclear setting, this alows the audience more control over where they invisage the narrative taking place and stops the product from narowing down the audience to a singular country, making it far more accesable world-wide. The Woman In Black shares the central theme of vunerable children and the adult charachters given a sense of duty to protect them. It was produced by many big companies which would explain that for an unmainstream genre, it was highly succesfull gross of $54,322,273. It also starred well-known actors, such as Daniel Radclife who played Harry Potter in the highly succesfull Harry Potter series. Films adapted from novels are often very succesful, because they generally have a very strong narrative which is essential to any succesful film, Susan Hill is also an already famous author and The Woman in Black has already been running as a succesful theatre production for over thirty years now.

Here is an example of an audiences review;

''I went in to seeing this movie after reading the book, and personally I thought it was great. Horror movies these days get loss in blood and gore and that's what the work thinks is "horror" these days, thankfully this movie took a turn to what horror actually is. There are plenty of scenes that make you jump and keep you on the edge of your seat and the storyline is great too. The only weird thing was there were just a couple scenes in which I just couldn't help but think of Harry potter but that didn't even come close to ruining it for me. I was nervous because I thought they Showed all the scary moments through the previews but they did not! Daniel Radcliffe did a great job and I would go see it again with out a doubt. We need to see more horror movies like this one!''

Claude Levi-Strauss' theory of binary opposition

Levi Strauss Media

Todorov's narrative structure

Tzvetan Todorov Had a Theory That All Narratives Follow to Some Degree

Colours

Colo Our

Font

Fonts

Music

I did some research on possible selections of free non-copyrighted music for our thriller;

This first one i thought would be good for the begining half of our opening as it is very haunting and chilling.

This is my favourite of the two, it would be potentially used for the second half, although it may be considered too cheery, but this could be used to our advantage as a way of tricking the audience into a false sense of ease.

Editing 2

Looking back in class at what we re-shoot in the weekend we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of some of the shots, one of my favorites being Eve walking down the path blurry, camera focused in on a leaf. However we clearly still didn't manage to organize our time well as although we started filming early, our last shots of Rachael's Mum looking out the window are in the dark which completely ruins our continuity and confuses our narration. We have discussed ways of correcting this error by adapting the story-line so that Eve has gone missing and the Mother doesn't know where she is, thus the time change and to try and edit out the garden in some of the shots and to zoom in on just the Mum so the lighting change is less obvious. I hope our blunder does not damage our end result and i believe that the change in story could be an improvement as it adds to the audiences tension as they do not know where Eve has gone, especially as we are thinking of ending it with an extreme close up of Abigail's eyes with a darkened (via editing) background.

Editing

We started by uploading and looking through all our footage from two seperate camera's and two seperate day's and organising them into 'Nikon Saturday', 'Nikon Thursday', 'Sango Saturday' and 'Sango Thursday'. We marked our favourite shots and we were happy with them all, nicely suprised by the school camera's quality and The Nikon was great although a little blurry a times. However we did realise that we had missed out some footage of Rachael's mum and had slipped up on continutity issues with me holding the toy! We had only shot Rachael's mum from behind which looked very strange as the viewer, also as i walked up and down the garden i didn't have the toy in my hand. We decided to have another session of filming the following weekend to fix what we had missed but to also film some extra shots of me dissapearing behind the shed.

Saturdays Filming

On Saturday we had planned to meet at Rachael's house at 10:30 am brining all the camera equipment and props with us. We had to organise our time as Tatiana had to leave at one for her gymnastics practice and Rachael's mum was going out at around three we also didn't have Nuriah to help us organise our time so well. We managed to arrive at a resonable time, i stayed at Molly's house the night before so i would be sure to wake up and we all remembered to eat and have tea before we started. Our main obstcle with filming was that the back of Rachael's garden didn't fit in with our storyboards, we'd imagined Eve peering through the behind the gate where Abigail was standing. We didn't have a gate but we did have an old shed which we could just fit round the back of among with Rachael's old trampoline and single kebab takeaway box. We finished all parts with Tatiana in first so that she could leave, we shot from different angles from behind the shed and added extra fotage of her entering the house picking up a book and leaving a toy behind which we had not originally planned. We then shot me discovering the toy and then standing up and leaving the house to follow in Abigail's footsteps. After our lunch break of chicken, mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, ham and a smudge of barbeque sauce sandwhiches (and a cup of tea) we filmed Rachael's Mum from the kitchen window gazing out into the garden on the phone, we took some time to go through the script with Sarah and make sure she was comfortable with her lines. Rachaels and Molly had to film from upstairs whilst i walked up and down the garden in my dress. Overall i felt our filming was succesful, I esspecially liked our idea to shoot Tati and me reflected in mirrors in the sitting room and their were no more fainting issues.

Thursdays Filming

The first issue with our filming is that except for Tatiana, our Talent we all arrived late. Though not drastically only by ten minutes or so, it still meant we missed out on valuable time to get the costumes and props sorted and to eat some food before filming. The filimng went well, at the start it took us a lot of time to move from one shot to the other but thankfully with some help from our teacher keeping time, we managed to move from shot to shot efficently. There were some issues with dog walkers and their spaniels walking into our frame but overall the footage was great and the snow ended up being an assest and gave a great atmospheric quality to our work, though a little chilly. We were unable to get the last shot, a 360 turn around me standing by the edge of the lake as having not eaten anything, wearing a constricting dress and having just done more running than I've done in the past year i feel faint and we thought it would be wiser to cut filiming short and return to school.

Preparing for Filming

In Preperation for filimg on Thursday my team and I made a checklist for everything that needed to be bought and finished before we started to film at 8:30 Thursday morning. We made sure that our mood boards and animation were completed so that we would have a definite guideline as to what we needed to shoot and gathered ideas about how we each wanted it to look like from our moodboards. We wrote a list of all the props that we needed to bring and assigned each of us the resposbility of doing so, Rachael's main task was organising Tatiana and making sure she came on time and bought shoes and tights for her part, we had already brought in the dresses but Molly had to bring in knee high socks, her camera and tripod and most importantly the toy. My job was to bring in shoes for me to wear, hairbrush and make-up for me and Tatiana to use. The biggest potential issue with filiming was the Snow, we did not know how heavy it would be and as Tatian and I had to wear minimal clothing we did not now how cold we would get and there was the possiblity we would be too cold and have to go back to school having not completed all our filming.

Organising, Props, Costume, etc.

We wrote a 'To Do List' to help organise ourselves with our filming.

'Rope' Alfred Hitchcock opening analysis

Rope is a 1948 American thriller (based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It's edited so as to appear as a single continuous seamless shot through the use of long takes. I studied the first three minutes which opens with a mise-en scene long shot of a street scene viewed from above; classical music is played in the major key giving a false sense of calm as it fades out and is replaced by staccato minor notes typical of a thriller before focusing ominously drawn curtains.

The narrative entices the viewer on wards focusing on an everyday street  scene watched from the angle of a viewer on a roof top before focusing on a pair of curtains behind which a pair of almost comical gangsters strangle a man with a piece of "Rope'. This prop immediately makes a connection with the title . They then proceed to comically dumping the corpse of the young man in an old looking chest before leaning over it and catching their breath.                              

Alfre Hitchcock starts with an establishing shot to set the scene and contrasts the general theme of the film band ordinary street scene with happy music, viewed from a high angle the camera moves so that the frame has the corner of a roof as through through the eyes of some invisible watcher. Working with this uneasy suggestion the camera pans over the short area of the roof and focuses on a pair of drawn curtains. A half-hearted scream is heard and the shot changes to inside the room to a close up of the man being strangles. The camera zooms out to include the supposed hit-men in the shot wearing smart black tuxes who then dump the body  and the camera zooms back in to the hit men bending over the case.

Memento Opening Analysis

Memento Opening Analysis

Classification

Classification of a film is the age restriction imposed for the sake of the potential viewers of films, television series, computer and console games etc ranging from Universal- suitable for all to R18- To be shown only in specially licensed cinemas, or supplied only in licensed sex shops, and to adults of no less than 18 years. The typical Issues that invoke age restrictions are -any context of drug abuse, sexual violence, pedophilia, racial hatred or violence. Language is also surprisingly highly influential as many people are still offended by bad language and a single curse word can bump up the age restriction. Our film contains no drug abuse, any kinda of sexual context or violence any thing that could be seen as racial hateful neither is it essential for us to use swear words. However Horror is considered by the board as potentially harming to the young and vulnerable who may not be used to such an intense cinematic experience these restrictions would obviously need to be considered in producing our film as well as the newer issue of Imitable techniques which is the glamorization of illegal or anti-social behavior which young children could potentially copy like self harm, petty crime and even suicide. I believe that if we had to put an age restriction on our film it would be a 15 because although it only fits in two categories it is on the extreme end of Imitable techniques as it could be read as ending with suicide and the character being a young child makes it especially bad, although Thriller is not Horror our film could potentially leave our audience anxiety ridden, panicked and depressed, though that is artistically our aim it is not maybe seen as an all round positive thing especially legally.