The Brief - Unit 41

The brief:
The titles and opening of a film in genre of the candidates own choice, to last between two to three minutes. The film opening should include a short narrative which introduces the characters and is a prologue to the film.

Genre Mind Map

Treatment P1 a)

Synopsis 

Title: The Run

Characters: Victim

                  Villain (face never seen in the film) (enigma)

Target audience: Teenagers and older people from 16-40

Location (filmed in the dark) : Forest

                                               Football Field

                                               House

                                               Bedroom

                                               Kent Uni. Campus

Approximately running time: 2m 30sec

We chose our medium to be DSLR Canon 7D, HDV 1080p. The setting that we used in Adobe Premiere Pro was HDV PAL 1080p and 24 fps. We chose aspect ratio to be 16:9.

The main hero runs from somebody who is not seen. He runs through different locations and finally reaches the room where the person that was chasing him is seen.

Scene 1: Titles with backgrounds showing Canterbury at night.

Scene 2: Running away from Kent Uni. to Kent College.

Scene 3: Running through the doors within the building.

Scene 4: Hiding from murder in the room. 

                    

Scene 1: Titles appear. Names of producer, actors, director are shown. Different views of Kent Uni. Adobe after effects is used to add a scary background behind the first title.

Scene 2:  (Will need to be filmed in the dark) Starts in the forest road, camera held by person to make an effect that the audience is running with him. Techniques such as jump cut, continuity editing, overlapping edit Shots from different angles: Long shot, Low angle + medium close up, camera still, person running past the camera…  Around 40 seconds of how the main character is running away. He leaves the Kent Uni. campus and crosses a dark scary field. Character crosses the road and almost gets hit by the car. He is still scared to death, he runs through the arc and knocks a random pedestrian not paying attention on him (pedestrian is Kodolov Nikita)
After this he reaches the door of the building (Kent College) and the scene 2 ends.


Scene 3: Scene starts from the character opening the door and appearing in the building. We will make a shot as he pulls on the door from the outside and then make a different shot from the inside when he will be walking through the door, so we will use the continuity editing technique. George runs into the building through the door and reaches another door. He opens it, runs into and appears in another room. Settings: Dark/Night/Scary room. George runs towards the door with a code on it. He enters the code around 2 times as he does it wrong for several times. Then rushes inside the dark corridor and breaks in the random door.

Scene 4: Dark scary room. George falls down near the table. He is sitting/ hiding from something, scared, intense music. Acting skills of the actor applied to show the intensity of the situation and fear of the actor. Someone knocks on the door, tries to open it. Over the shoulder shot is used to show that the actor faces the door and is very emotionally breathes. Actor slowly turns his head towards the door, unexpected sound and strange person suddenly appears. This is the person that was chasing George through all the film opening. It looks scary and the George covers his face screaming. The strange person moves towards George intending to kill/harm him. Dark background appears instantly and the title slowly appears on the dark background "The Run"

Script P1 b)

"The Run"

Fade in.

Scene 1

Stage Direction

INT

Horrifying music and sound effects.

Background designed with help of Adobe After Effects with title:”Kent College Presents”

Titles "GH production" “Producer Nesterenko Nikita”, “Starring George Danilyants”,”Director Kodolov Nikita” with shots of Canterbury at night as a background.

Fast fade out.

EXT.

Scene 2
EXT.

Stage Direction

Intense music.

Black background is held for a couple of seconds.

The main character is running away through the Kent Uni campus, forest and a football field. Shots are taken from different angles and different shooting techniques are used: pan, low angle, high angle, long shot, medium close up, extreme close up.

The main character is running through the forest on a path and through the football field, tripping and falling a couple of time. Actor shows emotionally that he is terrified that someone is following him, however there is no one seen chasing him. He crosses the road with cars driving past. Runs through the arc knocking a pedestrian on his way. Approaches the door of the building.

Scene 3

INT. (Gamon House and main building)

Shot is taken from the inside as the main character enters the building from the outside. He runs through the one room and goes trough the another door.

Character runs through the room towards another door. He is struggling to open the door and close up of his face show the emotions which he is experiencing. Character opens the door enters a dark corridor and quickly enters another door.

Scene 5

INT (Gamon House Bedroom)

Stage Direction

The main character is in the same position as in the first scene. We hear a knocking on the door and once again the character turns his head towards the door. Over the shoulder shot of the door. Extreme close up of his face is zoomed out as he is nervously looking at the door. Character is showed in medium close up sitting on the floor. As the character is showed in medium close up the light suddenly go off. When the light is on after a second dark figure stands in front of the main character. Sudden horrifying music. He starts screaming and covers his face with his arms.Black background appears. The title “The Run” starts slowly appearing on the black screen.

Fade out. 

Storyboard P1 c)

This was the first of the storyboard but in the process of making our film opening we changed some of our ideas and so I have created a new storyboard which is later in this post.  

Here is a final storyboard that we have used when filming our film opening.

Set Designs P1 d)

So this is the picture of George sitting and hiding from the stranger.

This is how exactly will the corridor where George will run looks. 

On the left there is a picture of the field and the path that George will make across it. On the right there is another picture that shows the field. 

Here is the park in the Kent Uni campus where George will run to get to the field. 

Recce P1 e)

This is the field where George is going to run. This is really close to Kent Uni, so we choose it as a location to add a little more opened space in our footage. 

This is the road that George will cross after he will run out of the field. There are usually a lot of cars here at night, so there is risk that George will get hit by a car. 

This is another picture of the road. 

Here is a photo of the main building of Kent College from inside. Here George will run when he will get in to the building.    

This is the place where George will run from the arc to the door of the building. At night this location looks quite scary. 

  

This is the room where George will get after he runs through the main entrance of Kent College. The room looks quite creepy at hight as you can see.  

Here is another corridor where George will run to get to the room where he will be killed later. 

This is actually the room where George will be in the last scene. 

With the help of good lightning we will be able to make the room dark and scary. 

Risk Assessment P1 f)

Daily shooting schedule P1 g)

Date	Scene	Time of Day	Summary	Location	Actors	Equipment
17/10/13	1	evening (18:00-22:00)	George sits in his bedroom looking nervously at the door waiting for someone to come in	bedroom	George	cam crane, steady camera
20/10/13	2	evening (19:00-22:00)	George is running away in the forest	path is the forest, football field,	George	camera tripod
21/10/13	3	any time of day	George enters the house	some rooms in Gamon house	George	camera tripod
17/10/13	4	evening (18:00-22:00)	George sits in his bedroom looking at the door and a figure appears behind him	bedroom, parts of Gamon house	George Nikita.K	stage light

Contingency plan. 

In the scene 1 there is a chance that we will have problems with equipment, as a camera crane is a very difficult thing to deal with. We will have to make sure that the camera crane is stable and everything is connected and works properly. But if something happens with the cam crane we will have to change the date of the filming and do it in another day. This is very problematic as we have to have teacher who supervises us with the crane and we will have to carry the crane to the football field again which is hard thing to do. 

In the scene 2 we can have problems with the weather as I looked at the forecast and it says that there will be rain at that date. Hopefully there will not be any and we will be able to film. But if there is rain we will have to wait in a dry place till it ends or change the date of the filming. This is problematic as we have limited number of days when we can go out if the school. In the case the weather will be bad through all the week when we allowed to film we will probably change some of the outdoor scenes at indoor. 

In the scene 3 where George enters the house we will probably have a problem of student interrupting us. Because of this the filming may take a long time. To avoid this we will ask some of our friends to stand and ask student that pass by to be quiet and not to get in the shot by purpose.

Crew and Actor Call Sheet P1 h)

Setting up appropriate equipment P2 a)

Here is our booking sheet for the equipment that we have used. 

For our shooting we have chosen camera Canon 7D DSLR. This camera allows to capture a high quality video shooting but its microphone is not so good. Because of that we have been using an additional microphone Rode VideoMic-R Shotgun that allowed us to record all the sounds we wanted from hard breath of scared George in the bedroom to his quiet footsteps when he was running away at the field.

So on the right you can see the microphone that we have used when filming our film opening. 







On the right there is a Canon 7D the camera that we used to film our film opening. It has 18 MP APS-C CMOS sensor and is capable of doing 8 fps continuous shooting and shooting Full HD movies. 

On the right you can see what we got when connected these two devices together. By doing it we was sure we will achieve extremely good quality of the shooting and of the sound. 

We also used a number of lenses for our camera. These were Canon 50mm, Canon 18-55mm and the Canon 55-250mm lenses. They all differ from each other and therefore were useful for different situations. The 55-250mm lens was used in shots which had to be zoomed in quite far. The 18-55mm lens allowed us to film in a wide angle which we used for some closer shots. The 50mm lens was used in some shots to create a human eye effect.

 

For some shot we have used a tripod that allowed us to make some of our shots stable and clear when we needed to rotate the camera on 90 or 180 degrees. 

When filming on the football field we used the Sony HVR-Z5E camera together with the K9 Hague Cam Crane and Lilliput 668 Monitor. The camera was put at the end of the crane and the monitor was attached at the crane so that we were able to see what we are actually filming.This piece of equipment was extremely useful when we were filming the high angle shot on the football field. The Cam Crane not only lift the camera but also lets you smoothly control it while you are filming what we found to be very useful.

Here are some photos where I hold a piece of equipment that we have also used. 

Following the shooting script/storyboard P2 b)

As you can see from the examples below we tried to follow our storyboard as close as possible in order to get the final film opening that we wanted. In these series of screenshots it is shown how precisely we followed our plans. In some cases however we had to change our footage as we did not get what we exactly wanted. For example in this second of these two screenshots the title "GH Production" is situated in the different part of the screen.

Filming Diary P2 b)

17th November 2013: On the first day we was filming how our main hero (George) was crossing the road and entering the school. The weather was quite good for filming as there was no rain and we choose a good time to film as there was dark enough. However the movement on the road that George needed to cross was really busy and it took us a considerable amount of time to choose a right moment to take our shot where he crosses the road. Also, when we were filming the scene where George knocks Nikita Kodolov when running some children from primary school were trying to get in the shot on purpose. That made our filming process longer than we expected.

20th November 2013: On this date we have been taking shots using camera crane. Our teacher was supervising us and so there were no problems with the crane. The filming in the forest went quite well, but when we were filming on the football field it became really dark, so some shots was a bit darker than we expected. Apart from the darkness there were no other problems as there were no people walking at the field at this time.

21st November 2013: On this day the filming went good, this was a very short scene for us to film so we were finished quite quickly. We were shooting the scenes during prep time in the school building so all the students were in their rooms allowing us to film in the empty commons room, corridor, ground floor, etc. This day we didn't have any problems at all.

25th November 2013: On this date the filming went good as well. We were filming the scene in the bedroom at the school boarding house. There were no people at the room except us so there weren't any problems with people interrupting us. A problems of background noise occurred cause by some of the members of the boarding house in other rooms who were too loud. We also invited our friend Nicolas Morel to help with the lighting in the room.

While filming all the scenes we waited for dusk. The genre of our film opening is horror so we chose to film in the darkness to create tension. So we would not start our filming before 18:00 any time we went shooting. After 18:00 is was dark enough for us and if there was too much light we would just adjust the aperture and the ISO of out camera.

Following Safe Working Practices P2 c)

1) Camera crane collapsing. Due to the late time of the day and darkness some of the filming crew could have made a mistake when setting the crane and so it could have collapsed. As the result somebody from the crew could have get hurt as the crane is quite heavy and unstable. So our main safety objective was to ensure that the crane is set stable and it was not going to fall during the filming process. To do this one person was always standing near the crane and made sure that it was not going to fall down and hurt anyone.

Below you can see the shot we made suing the camera crane. We filmed from a high angle and lowered the crane as the actor got closer. While rotating the camera crane we had to be careful not to drop it and not to hit the crew standing next to the crane as it takes up a lot of area when rotating.

2) Actor getting hit by the car when crossing the road. There were a lot of cars at the road and there obviously was a danger for the actor to get hit by the cars passing by when he was crossing the road. To ensure that this is safe to do we had to give George signals when he is good to cross and when not. This was a difficult task as we wanted a tense shot where George crosses the busy road and does not get hit by luck. So we needed to find balance between safety and our desires for an interesting shot. I think we achieved it and screenshot below represents it clearly. As you can see from the screenshot the car has just passed by and the George is crossing the road.

3) Actor falling down while running. In most scenes of our film actor is running away as you already noticed. This made us to think about the safety of George as he could have fallen while running and got hurt. That is the reason why we choose his clothes to be sporty and told him to put a pair of trainers on. Almost every time when we were filming it was dark and it was easy for George to slip on wet grass on the football field or stumble and fall down so we told him to be extremely careful and we checked all the path not to be wet before we actually started to film the scene.

4) Camera failure, before borrowing the equipment we would check to make sure that the camera is functioning normally and can record. If the camera would not work we would have to reschedule and tell all the people involved that there was a change. To prevent this from happening we checked the equipment before we went to the filming location.

On the right is an example of the situation where the equipment (the camera that we used) refused to film because of the problem with the card slot. That could have ruined our filming day but as we usually checked all the equipment we did not face such a problem. 

5) Damaging equipment by rain is another big problem that we could have faced while filming. As we was filming in autumn there have always been a risk of rain starting. The rain could have damaged our equipment so we decided to stop filming if the rain starts. Luckily we did not face this problem as the weather was good during filming and we carried all our equipment in special bags while traveling to the location of filming. 

6) There also has been a danger of photobombing. In Kent College there are a lot of students from primary and secondary school. And when we were filming the scene where George was running through the arc some students purposely tried to interrupt our filming by jumping in the scene. 

Following production process P2 d)

On our camera Canon 7D we used mostly manual settings as due to the fact that we had to control the level of the light in the footage. We were changing ISO and aperture quite frequently to achieve a desirable level of lightning that suited for the horror film genre. We always changed ISO several times in the process of actual filming as it was becoming darker. So when it was early at the evening we had to decrease the ISO so that the image sensor would be less sensitive to light. And we had to increase the ISO when it was becoming darker to get the same level of lightning in each piece of our footage. When filming inside we generally had to increase ISO and decrease the aperture in order to make our footage seeable.

When installing a microphone (Rode VideoMic-R Shotgun) which is a very sensitive part of our equipment we had to decrease its sensitivity by setting the sensitivity level at 0 as shown at the picture below. If we chose higher sensitivity that may have caused unwanted noises and if we chose lower sensitivity that may have resulted in not enough sounds being captured.

We had to use this microphone because a microphone installed in Canon 7D camera wasn't sensitive enough to capture all the sounds we wanted to capture.  

We used the multiple lenses for taking different shots like 50mm, 55-250mm, etc. Usually we set their focus to be automatic but when we needed to control the focus during filming the scene or adjust it somehow we switched focus by twisting the lens itself. Different lenses helped us to film at different ranges. For example at the field where we were at a long distance from George we had to use 50mm lense. 

Below is an example of one of the lenses we used. So by switching from AF to MF we were able to manually control the focus of the camera.

                                  

Below is a full map of settings for Canon 7D. From these we mostly used only aperture and ISO settings. 

I would like to talk more about camera settings that we have used in different situations.

On the right is an example of the shot we have done in front of the street lamp. The lamp gave too much light in the shot so we decreased the ISO to make the footage more dark and scary so that it would suit for our horror genre.

On the left is an example of the shot where we had to increase the ISO. We filmed it around 8pm so it was too dark and we hardly can see George on the footage. So we decided to increase ISO to make the footage clear and to add more light to it.                                                                                                                  

When filming our film opening we tried to follow the genre of horror movie. So generally low levels of light were used to create scary effect. Also, the end of the film opening is unexpected and mysterious. These are typical characteristics of horror movie.

In professional production process horror films are usually filmed at the day time and then the colours and the levels of light are adjusted to create an effect of night. In our horror film opening we were filming at night and evening and only one scene was shot at the day time. This is the final scene where George is being murdered in the room. We had to cover all the windows with blankets to not let the light in. And this gave us a dark room where we were able to control the lightning using a lamp.