Final Post

After what seems like forever creating and running this blog, I've finally finished the coursework for this course. Thank you!

This blog is now closed.

Evaluation Qu. 7

Evaluation Qu. 6

Evaluation Qu. 5

Evaluation Qu. 4

Evaluation Qu. 3

Evaluation Qu. 2

Evaluation Qu. 1

Showcase vlog

Showcase Screenshot!

Here is the screenshot we decided to use for our showcase. We feel that it really shows what our film is about, not to mention that it's a great shot.

Certificate

For part of our evaluation we have to give an age rating for Beggars Hollow by the bbfc. It's been quite difficult deciding on what to rate our film, but I think we've all come to the conclusion that 15 would be the best rating for us.
Due to lots of controversy on horror films rated 12A, such as The Woman in Black, we decided that 12A would not be suitable for us. The Woman in Black had to eventually change their rating to 15 as many complaints were made about the film rating, and due to this we felt the same may happen to us as it has been our main inspiration.
We also decided that 18 would not be appropriate for our film, as we did not use any gore, strong violence or strong sexual content. Our film is not 'hardcore' enough for an 18 rating, and by giving ourselves one we would limit our target audience also.

Here are the ratings on horror:

• 'Moderate physical and psychological threat is permitted at 12A or 12A as long as horror sequences are not too frequent or sustained and the overall tone is not disturbing.'
• 'At 15 there can be strong threat and horror as long as there is no sustained focus on sadistic or sexualised threat.'
• 'At 18, horror films may contain very strong horror, gore or sustained threat.'

Evaluation time!

The time has finally come for us to evaluate our final film.

Beggars Hollow FINAL

Here is the final version of Beggars Hollow! Mac 1 have come so far from the beginning of our preliminary, I'm so proud of us for what we've managed to achieve. I hope you enjoy our openning two minutes!

Yet another vlog on credits

CREDITS

As a group, we've decided to scrap all credits other than "Ludio Studios" on the black screen due to our audience feedback as many didn't understand why we were using shots relating to our actual film.

Final maybe???

'Ripple Productions'

We changed our credits from 'Bonnie Productions' to 'Ripple Productions' due to the fact that audience feedback showed confusion towards the clip we used. We've again recycled the clip from our previous filming.

Beggars Hollow

Our title is finally here!
After long debate and experimentation, we've finally come up with something we all love. We've used one of our still shots from our second day of filming with the title 'Beggars Hollow' in the same font we'll  be using for our titles.
We had a lot of struggle deciding where to place the name of our film, as iMovie didn't want to cooperate whenever we tried a different position. We ended up placing the name on the horizon of our shot, with 'Hollow' in a larger font than 'Beggars'.
We also decided to have the title as 'Beggars' instead of 'Beggar's' as the apostrophe was really annoying Holly, so after checking it was still grammatically correct we scrapped it.

Yet another draft!

So here is our forth draft! We're almost completely done with editing now, we're just putting together the last touches and we should be finished very soon. I can't believe how far we've come in Mac 1!

Final credits

We've done it!! We've finally managed to settle on a font and finish our credits! It took us a few weeks to come up with a production title name and we played with a few different ideas. Our initial idea was to have Kelly's polaroid camera take a photo of the words 'LUDIO STUDIOS', but we decided that this was too cheesy and way too complicated. So, we decided to recycle one of our previous scenes that we loved dearly but had to delete for timing reasons for our production title. We wanted to use the title 'Sniff Productions' because Bonnie (our dog) sniffs the doll in the clip, but due to certain *cough* connotations with the name we were unable to use it. So instead we decided just to settle with 'Bonnie Productions', which we much prefer and has no weird connotations!

Final titles

So, after a long debate, we've finally managed to decide on the font for our titles. We're also all satisfied with the shots we're using, size of font, positioning of the titles and the length of each title. We decided to go with Adobe Song Std for the font as we think it's very fitting for our film because it's quite old fashioned and has a very eery feel to it. We also decided to have our names larger than our positions, as it gives emphasis to our names and makes the titles slightly more interesting than just words on a still shot. Holly also did an amazing job on positioning the text, making the titles either hit the light perfectly or very clear. The hard efforts put towards our titles really add to the film, making it seem more professional and polished. We love them!

The New Debacle

After having agreed on the sound, clip deduction and name of the film, naturally we would cohere in a new disagreement over the font. We've managed to pick a few fonts that we all like, and now all we have left to do is vote on which fits best. Personally, I feel that the less-cartoonish fonts like Adobe Song Std and Goudy Old Style fit the story line better and is synchronous with the content. These are a few of our choices!

Another final film draft

Unlike the previous draft we uploaded, in this one we have managed to edit in the near completed sound and the font for our credits.

Vlog on sound

The four of us managed to film a little vlog together about our sound dilemma, even though I hid behind a chair the entire video.

Titles and Credits vlog

Deciding on the titles

So, deciding on our titles has been quite a rocky road. With Kelly and Holly doing the majority of the editing, we've found selecting roles difficult and a little sensitive. Due to other commitments that are out of my control, I haven't been able to be around for some of the editing sessions, but I did the hair and make-up on the day of the filming, I starred in the film and I also directed the film with Kelly on the day, so any of these titles are fine with me. Kelly and Holly could have either editing, cinematography or sound by their name and Janadhi could have sound by her name.

Overview vlog

Janadhi and I have just made a quick little vlog on our film as a whole (including editing, sound etc.), and hopefully we'll get one f all four of us soon!

Current editing

So far, Kelly and Holly have been doing a huge bulk of the editing for our film and have been able to stay after school to complete it. Unfortunately due to work and other complications I haven't been able to stay after school to edit as much, but I'm trying my upmost to be present for editing sessions during lunch breaks, study sessions and class time.

We're currently having a bit of a crisis with our timing, as our film so far is 2.46 minutes when we need it to be 2.00 minutes! We love all of our shots so much, it's so hard trying to find clips that we're happy to cut down or remove all together. However, we've decided that we're going to have to cut something down, so I suggested that we cut out the scenes in which I walk through the forest after Keeley. This will probably be for the best, as it will cut our film down around 40 seconds and we won't lose any of Keeley's great shots. 

The only other shots that we could cut down would be the still shots for our title sequence, but cutting those down or getting rid of them all together would completely ruin the atmosphere we want to create and would make the film bland and unexciting. 

Hopefully we'll be able to upload a new draft soon so you can see the difference that cutting out the scenes has made.

Final Film Draft

Sound

So, as a group, we are having an eternal (and harrowing) battle with the music. We're obviously not allowed to use copy write music without using the cheesy "headphones in" technique, and having Keeley (a 100 year old girl) put in her Beats headphones while holding her iPhone 6 Plus as she walks creepily through the forest would look slightly terrible. So we're ruling out all copy write music, which sadly includes The Woman in Black's "Tea for Three and One".
However, we've managed to find a website called Epidemic which is basically a huge library of non-copy write music. There are few good tracks on there, but we haven't found one that we're completely in love with. For now, we've chosen a track called 'Night Terrors', which we may or may not keep.

Crisis aside, we've managed to find a good drone track which we're using for our opening credits and we've also found a great creepy violin track to use on top of 'Night Terrors', so news is not all bad for us!

Filming Vlog

So, I've managed to make a little vlog on our filming and how it went. Here it is!

Reverse time lapse

For our film, we decided to time-lapse the sky, like in the Haunting of Radcliff House. However, we decided against the sky time-lapse because the clouds weren't making much movement and it didn't even seem like anything was happening. So, instead of time-lapsing the sky we've decided to time-lapse a lake, but reversing it like in the TV drama Remember Me. We weren't sure how it would turn out, but we've ended up really liking the effect it has and the atmosphere it creates. Here it is!

Footage from Friday

Here's some of the footage we managed to catch on Friday during filming!




The reverse time-lapsed lake we discussed will be up on my blog soon also!

Friday's title sequence stills

Friday's filming!

So, last Friday we finished off our filming during our morning media lesson. We planned on re-filming my scene with Bonnie the dog as we didn't feel that we had continuity in the filming that we already had (which is why I'm wearing the same clothing), but we ended up sorting it out so we didn't re-film that. We did get a few still shots for the title sequence, though, which have turned out really great on Kelly's canon!

Storyboards

These are the story boards we ended up using for our final film. We obviously didn't stick to them 100% as we ended up adding a few things when filming, but here they are:

Costume

As I was scanning through my blog, I realized that I hadn't made a post about the costume used for the film! We decided to have Keeley wearing a stark white dress (which ended up costing £50!!), a plain black pair of Mary-Jane's and a crimson ribbon. We felt that the combination of the fancy dress and simple shoes would look quite formal, which we liked. We also thought that by using the red ribbon we would create a symbol that would be easily recognizable and that viewers would pick up on whenever it reappeared on screen. To make the symbolisation really strong, we decided to use it in the dolls hair also. Before filming, I put a slight curl in Keeley's hair and tried to make her look a bit dead by hollowing her cheeks out, paling her skin and bruising beneath her eyes with make-up.

The set

So, we ended up filming at Hilly Fields, as planned. After filming at Tucker's Park, we decided we needed to find somewhere a lot more secluded and surrounded by greenland. We walked for ages to find the perfect tree to attach the swing to, and we finally found one in close proximity of a large forest. Here it is:

Filming stills

We managed to capture a few stills from Sunday, mainly of the creepy setting and our poor, frozen leading actress Keeley. After freezing her to death, we force fed her marshmallows and hot chocolate, alongside wrapping her in 12 blankets.

Filming (finally)!!!

The other day we managed to finish our filming! We've created a little montage of the days antics and tribulations, here it is:

We're having a last minute costume meeting today about everything we've managed to find and how we're going to make it all work. Hopefully everything will go well!

Quick vlog

So, here's just a short vlog with Mac 4's Elle! In this vlog Elle and I just discuss how our opening 2 minute films are going and our progress in media. Here it is:

We've had a bit of a shop around for props, but everything so far has either been too expensive or not what we're looking for. Hopefully we'll find something soon on eBay or Amazon, nothing too expensive but something just right!