Narrative Planning

We decided to base the plot around a love triangle as this is very stereotypical within Film Noirs, which meant we could still use our Neo Noir plot.
We decided to use the Tzvetan Todorov narrative which is very mainstream for film narratives, and it fits in well with the story line of our movie, Cinderella, however we have modernized it and changed it slightly. Our storyline hasn't been finalised yet however we know we want to use this narrative technique, which follows the structure below;
The characters are going to be the most obvious change to a typical Film Noir. We will have a Femme Fatal, Everyman and Girl next door, however the femme fatal is a Male and the Everyman is a female. We have decided to switch these gender roles to give our story a more modern and memorable aspect.

Lighting In Our Film

 At the start of the film, when Cinderella is happy and in a richer position, we are going to use a lot of bright colours and lighting. She will look very cheerful and colourful and her outfit will be very nice. Her Prince will also look nice.

As she continues on to get more and more involved in the drug scene, the colours will become more dull and moody. We will use less colours until eventually, we use almost no colour at all. This is used to represent her diminishing happiness as she gets nearer to killing herself.

Foleyed sounds from "Priests"

We watched a clip from the film "Priests" in silence and had to guess which noises we thought would be in the extract. After doing this, we watched the film with noise and filled in all of the noises that we missed. We were then set a task to recreate the sounds we heard by using foleying, a technique used by film makers to recreate noises externally and add them into films.

Mise En Scene Planning

This is our planning sheet for the Mise-En-Scene for our final production. We decided that the main prop used will be Cinderella's diary and as the extract progresses the pages will get more bloody and ruined. Cinderella will start with nice, expensive clothes and they will get continually worse as she goes on. The Prince wears smart, expensive clothes throughout and the drug-influencing character will wear a tracksuit. We will use dark lighting to create a dark and moody atmosphere. As the extract continues there will be more blood on the book until the end when it is covered because she has killed herself. We used the intro from "Se7en" as our main influence as we liked how they used props and lighting without using dialogue or any actors.

Cinderella: Slideshow - Skupina

This was the slideshow Niamh created to compile all of the photos we took whilst planning our film. She used a comic styled story board, and edited each of the photos in Photoshop. The locations we shot the photos in were changed when we filmed the final piece, and we also changed a few of the characters and modified the story line.

Cinderella - Review

Cinderella Evalution from Matthew Levesley on Vimeo.

This was the review of our production. In this video, we, as a group, address the difficulties we encountered and how we overcame them. We mention how on one day, we only had 1 of 5 members present, which made production levels very limited as there was limited resources, which was an unfortunate and unforeseen issue. One member was also absent for a 3 week period, meaning he was unavailable whenever we tried to film, so he found his work limited to only editing. We restarted our entire production quite late on in the process, which meant we hurried the planning and a lot of decisions were made on the spot as we had to work with what we had before us. This meant that a lot of scenes were not as well planned out as they should have been, with some mistakes and props being missing and costumes going wrong too. The party was difficult to film as we didn't have a free location out of school, but fortunately we found some willing friends to volunteer as we used the school studio. We also lost a number of scenes during the editing process in the late stages, which meant we had to try to make certain scenes make sense, but we couldn't make amends to all of them. We learnt from the task that the group as a whole are unable to work together, so we decided to split the group into a 2 and a 3 for future projects to ensure the highest level of production and standard of work. Generally, I believe we presented ourselves with the most problems as we didn't put enough effort into the planning, but I feel we showed how capable we are of the task by creating a decent final piece out of a difficult project, and we learnt all of our strengths and weaknesses before we got started on the final Film Noir project.

Reinvented Fairy Tale- Initial Planning

As a class, we were given the challenge to reinvent/modernise a fairy tale, but it had to meet the Film Noir conventions in some way.
The full instructions and deadlines are shown below:

As a group of 5, Niamh Gallagher, Heather McDonald, Josh Coe (who was on holiday for the entire task and unfortunately couldn't partake in any group activities until the very end), myself and Matthew Levesley decided to reinvent the story-line and modernise the fairy tale Cinderella, this was done by changing the 'fairy god mother' to a pill, which we named "fairy" and instead of the prince hosting a Ball we used a house party. Also, rather than Cinderella losing her glass shoe, we decided that she would lose her phone for the Prince to find and to suit the cast members, we used an evil step dad rather than the evil step mother. The ending is quite conventional for Film Noirs, the 'evil step dad' shoots the prince as he wanted to marry Cinderella rather than the 'ugly step sister'; this is unconventional to fairy tales as they have happy endings.

Cast:
We decided to link each character to a Film Noir character.
The prince was the 'Everyman' who was played by Matthew Levesley.
We tried to portray the 'Ugly Step-sister' as the Femme Fatal, this character was played by Heather McDonald.
Cinderella was supposed to be the 'Girl Next Door', Niamh Gallagher presented this character.
The Evil Step-dad was the Villain of the story, played by myself, Jack Grimshaw.

Camera:
For the still photos, an iPhone 6 was used and imported onto a Mac. For the short film, a camera with a tripod was used, until we unfortunately ran out of battery and couldn't recharge it in time, at which point we had to use an iPhone. It was the job of whoever was not in the scene to operate the camera so we all had time to use the cameras and gain experience, using a variety of camera angles and techniques to see what was effective in which situation.

Editing:
For the still photos, Niamh edited them mostly with filters using Photoshop. Also, for the final film Niamh began the editing process on iMovie, then Matthew and I took control during a free period as we have the most experience from GCSE Media and only had a limited amount of time before the deadline; we are using this opportunity to improve Niamh and Heather's iMovie ability and also hopefully our own. Josh also helped with some of the final editing as he wasn't involved during any of the planning or filming process. By allowing every member an opportunity to try their hand at the editing on iMovie, we all had a chance to learn how to edit new things, and for Niamh, Heather and Josh, it was their first experience in editing on iMovie, which allowed them to greatly increase their knowledge and skill in a very short space of time.

Generic Conventions of a Film Noir

Generic Conventions of a Film Noir

Camera and Composition: Camera Angles are essential to a film noir and the way they are used can be hugely influential. Often with the femme fatal or the anti-hero, a low angle will be used to represent the characters power; with women it often represents their higher or equal power to the men in the scene. The camera angles are used to create a sense of distortion and unease by using 'dutch' camera angles, which view things through a slightly tilted camera angle, rather than using a horizontal or vertical camera angle. A lot of shots tend to be set up by looking into a dark room, with the only lighting coming through the venetian blinds, making the scene look very dark and mysterious.

Editing: Film Noirs typically don't involve very much editing, as the time period meant they were very limited to the amount of editing they could actually do. A film noir is often found to begin at the end, telling the story in flashbacks and letting the plot unfold slowly. A film noir will almost always be in black and white, but when in colour they will tend to have a dark or sepia filter added to add to the dark, uneasy and mysterious mood that comes with the film. Scenes often are cut using fades in and out.

Sound: When film noirs became popular, in the 1940's, the white people of America were becoming increasingly afraid of the Jazz music genre, as it was a style that was played by black people. This music was used as it was very downbeat and slow, and created a lot of tension and unease for the viewer as they already had fear associated with the entire genre of music. The protagonist often has a voiceover, talking over a clip as he recalls a flashback of the story. Scenes will often go silent to build up more tension for the viewer, with the heavy breathing of the characters often being the only thing audible. They then use sudden, loud noises to break the silence in the quiet, tense scenes.

Mise-en-scene: Film noirs typically use very normal, urban locations to make the films seem more realistic to the viewers, as the location makes it much more believable if the action takes place in a rainy or damp street, opposed to when it happens in the darker, more nasty end of town. The scenes use very little lighting, casting a lot of shadows and darkness to be in the scene. The shadows are used as a way to put more mystery into the scenes, and often venetian blinds are used as the only source of light coming through. Shadows can manipulate characters faces to make them appear distorted and dark. Cigarette smoke is used throughout films, often with the femme fatal, to add to the ominous and mysterious mood following the storyline.

Characters:

• Every Man (Often turns into anti-hero)
• Femme Fatal
• Girl Next Door
• The Villain
• The Henchmen

The Every Man is the typical protagonist for a film noir and often gets himself into trouble with the Femme Fatal, a woman who is supposed to be seductive and often is working with The Villain, usually because of their relationship they are in when the Every Man meets her. The Villain is usually the antagonist of a film noir and is the reason for the Every Man's demise, either turning into the anti-hero or ultimately ending up dead. The Henchmen work for the villain, and carry out his dirty work against the Every Man.

Narrative: Film Noirs have a story line that differs from normal films, as they begin at the end with the protagonist re-telling the story with voiceovers and flashbacks. The first person narration is quite symbolic for film noirs, as not many films were found to be using this kind of editing in that time period.

My Top 10 Films

My Top 10 Films

I decided to use Prezi to make my presentation about my top ten favourite films. I initially found this hard to use, but after playing around with it for a while I managed to get the hang of it. I used Prezi because I wanted to be able to add the trailers for the videos into the presentations as well as my writing. As well as including the trailers, I also included our sweded version of The Babadook in reference to my earlier work. 

Media and Me

Media and Me

This is a short presentation about myself and how I am involved in the media. I used Emaze to make this powerpoint and found it was very easy to use and I got my head around it very quickly. The presentation is only short and very easy to navigate.

Ideas for our Sweded Film

Before deciding to recreate 'The Babadook' for our sweded film, we went through a process of deciding from a number of different films.

We decided to use 'The Babadook' as it is an enjoyable film that all four of us liked before the filming. The trailer itself only had a few characters in, so we could easily fit everyone in, with some of us having to act more than one role. The props used in the film are quite basic and easy to get, so that was another good reason to choose the trailer, which was originally around two and a half minutes, making it the perfect length for a sweded film trailer.

We considered doing the trailer for 'Insidious' as it is a film that did not have many characters in it at the same time. The trailer was too short for a sweded film, not even being two minutes long. The trailer would have been good as it only required very basic locations, but the make-up for costumes would have been too much work to do multiple times.We also found that the trailer wasn't very interesting, so we chose not to use 'Insidious'.

We also considered the sequel to Insidious, Insidious 2, as it is another popular, well known film. It is similar to its prequel as it also only needed very basic and easy to recreate scenes, but again the make-up would have been too hard to do accurately. Unfortunately, this film would've required 7 people to do one scene, one for the camera man, and we only had 4 people to use. This, on top of the fact that the props used in the film are too hard to remake or get hold of, are the main reasons we chose not to do Insidious 2.

Step Brothers was another film we considered watching, as it's a funny, comedy film and would've been funnier than the horror films we were trying to choose from. The trailer for the film was over two minutes long, and only really filmed in very basic locations so we could have remade many scenes very easily. However, we lacked some props, most importantly the drum kit, and did not have enough people as we would've needed one more person to use the camera for some scenes. Also, we would have found it very hard to recreate the scene in which one character is buried alive.

Superbad was the last film we considered, as it's another comedy film and much less serious than the other horrors. Superbad has a very inappropriate humour in it and would have been very funny to remake, but a lot of the scenes, for example the one in the shop or the police car scenes, would have been almost impossible to film. Also, not all four of us had seen the film, and it required a lot of extras to be in the background, so we chose not to use 'Superbad' for our swede.

Props, Costume and Scenery for our Sweded Film

In the trailer of The Babadook, there are only a few props needed, mostly the props were items of clothing to make us look more like the characters we portrayed. To make Josh look more like the mother he needed to look more like a woman, to do this we used a wig the Jack has.

In the start of our sweded film we needed a book that could be used as the Babadook, inside the book we included drawings on plain paper that were drawn by Niamh.

Dressing gowns and hoodies were worn over the top of our original clothes in some scenes when we were filming the scenes with the boy, Sam, and the mother. Matthew and Jack both had to wear a smart white shirt and tie when portraying the characters of the headteacher and the doctor.

In one scene there is wood being sawed and hammered, this was simple as in Jack’s shed he had planks of wood, a saw and a hammer. Also, there was a crossbow used; luckily Jack’s brother had a toy crossbow which we borrowed for the scene.

Multiple scenes were filmed inside a car so, with no keys in the engine, we borrowed Jack’s car to film a few scenes with the mother and son.

Crossbow used by Jack as Sam.

Wig worn by the mother. Jack and Josh as mother and Sam in costume in the car.

The Babadook Sweded Film: Location, Camera and Editing

As Jack had all of the props needed available at his house and he had areas perfect to film from such as a table outside, we decided that we should film at his house.

We decided to use Jack’s iPhone 6 to film on as it has a great camera quality and he will always be there as it is being filmed in his house. Every single one of us had a turn filming parts of the swede and it was whoever was not needed in the scene being filmed.

To edit the swede we used a free app on the App Store called iMovie, this meant we could easily rearrange the clips in order, remove audio from some clips and add voice-overs all on one iPhone.

Here is an example of the layout of iMovie. At the bottom there is a camera button to add videos, a microphone to record sound and a settings button to edit a clip. In this scene we muted the video, added a voice-over then recorded Matthew playing the piano to add some audio similar to the official film.

Here is a photo of Jack recording Matthew whilst he plays the piano for the background sound.

What is a Sweded Film and where did they come from?

What is a Sweded Film and where did they come from?

The idea of a Sweded Film is to recreate famous films using limited resources and technology. This idea was first inspired in 2008 by the comedy film ‘Be Kind Rewind’. Generally these films are much shorter in length than their originals and are filmed on virtually no budget.

As mentioned before, the actual term ‘Sweded’ was founded from the 2008 comedy film ‘Be Kind Rewind’. The plot of this film involves two characters attempting to replace a store’s video collection by recreating films using a camcorder and claiming they are special editions from Sweden. This is where the name ‘Sweded’ came from.

Before the actual film came out, a YouTube channel was created to help promote the film. The channel contained a film that the actors had Sweded and a video called ‘How To Swede’. Obviously the production of low budget films had existed for years before this film arrived but the term originated from the 2008 film ‘Be Kind Rewind’.

Sweded Films became more popular following the film in 2008 and thousands of people now create a variety of videos recreating films and trailers. When making and recording a Sweded Film, people spend little to no money. Props and outfits are made by hand and location is very simple. Our Sweded trailer is a prime example of recording with no budget.

Film Noir - A Brief Background

Film Noir - A Brief Background

The term "Film Noir" is French for "dark film" which was first applied to films in 1946. The film genre was huge in the 1940s and 50 due to America's involvement in the Second World War, which left Americans with a new taste for violence and crime after the war.

The films are typically crime films in America, more often than not set in black and white, using the sense and feeling of mystery throughout the films. 

Film Noir films begin with an Every Man in the majority of films, reflecting on how things went wrong. The Every Man is a character who works in a normal day job and leads a normal life, all until a Femme Fatal usually comes along and ruins everything, leading him down a line which ends in bios ultimate demise. The Femme Fatal is a female character, always cast as an attractive woman who the Every Man character falls for. The Femme Fatal in older Film Noir's would wear clothes that were considered as revealing and seductive at the time, designed to seduce both the every man and the viewers at home, most typically middle aged men who were mostly similar to the every man. the Every Man always finds a way to meet the villain, or to cross him and get on his wrong side. The Villain of a Film Noir are often with the Femme Fatal or going to do something to her, which leads the Every Man to turn into an "anti-hero" and do something that will get him into trouble. In some Film Noir's, the Every Man himself can become the Villain because of what he does, often for the Femme Fatal, or the Girl Next Door. The Girl next Door is a character who is often innocent and isn't looking for trouble, she just happens to know the Every Man through their history. In some cases, the girl next door will end up being a main part of the plot either because of the Every Man's relationship to them, or their involvement in the crime. Finally, some Film Noir films contain Henchmen, who are strong men that do all of the dirty work for the villain. Often, henchmen will be the ones that shoot the Every Man or cause him to die or end in a situation he shouldn't be in, as they are the ones that cause the trouble for the main villain. 

The Babadook - Sweded Trailer: Script

The Babadook - Sweded Trailer: Script

Joshua Coe- Mum

Jack Grimshaw- Samuel (Child), Head Teacher, Old Lady (Hooded)

Niamh Gallagher- The Babadook, Assistant Head Teacher

Matthew Levesley- Robbie, Old Lady (talking to mum), Doctor, Babadook voiceover

(Mum and Samuel in bed)

Mum: Where’d you get this?

Sam: On the shelf

Mum: Whether it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook. A rumbling sound then 3 sharp knocks-

Samuel: Bababa dook dook dook

Mum: That’s when you’ll he’s around, you’ll see him if you look

(Mum and Sam search house)

Mum- Nothing bad’s gonna happen, Sam

Sam- Did you think that about my dad before he died?

(Old woman outside)

Old woman- He sees things as they are, that one

Samuel (Voiceover): I promise to protect you if you promise to protect me

(Mum in school with two teachers)

Mum: Oh my God, did he hurt anyone?

Headteacher: The boy has significant behavioural issues

(Mum and Sam in car)

Mum (voiceover): This monster thing has got to stop, alright? It’s just a book, it can’t hurt you.

(Mum sitting with Robbie)

Robbie: Are you alright?

Mum: Yeah, yeah, I’m fine

Robbie: You don’t have to be fine, you know

Mum: Just a bit stressed at the moment

(Mum and doctor in doctors office)

Doctor: All children see monsters

Mum: Not like this!

(Mum in police station talking to officer)

Mum: I’d like to report someone stalking me and my child

(Door swings open)

Sam (Voiceover): You can’t get rid of the babadook!

Babadook (voiceover): You can bring me the boy (x3)

Sam (voiceover) : Don’t let him in! (x5)

(Mum in car with Sam)

Mum: WHAT DO YOU WANT?

(Mum coming towards Sam)

Mum: You are trespassing in my house!

(Mum forces Sam into bath)

Mum: I’m sick Sam, I need help

(Mum screams)

TITLE SCREEN

(Mum under bedsheets)

Mum: It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real

Babadook (voiceover): Baba...dook...doook...dooook