FINAL CUT

FINAL IDENT

This is our final ident for our film opening. I used the application MOTION to create it and personally, I think it works really well because of the cyclical movement as well as its minimalistic nature. I didn't want to incorporate too many things into it, but i think the clean and simple look of it has been achieved successfully. I used HELVETICA NEUE simply because I love that particular font and felt it had the crisp feel we wanted.

I think the main inspiration for me in making the ident like this was having loved BBC One's cyclical ident since I was a child.

I love the way they have adapted the malleable idea of a simple circle into all manner of different things, appropriate for different TV programmes and films. From hippos to footballers and even the surface of the moon, it is obvious to the viewer that it is BBC One due to the shape and motion of the ident, with the objects or people orbiting the logo. I also think the logo is really clever due to its simplicity, with the classic layout of BBC letters and the simple lettering of 'one' in a larger font.

FINAL CLUB SONG

Me and my brother Joe have finally finished the song we are going to use for the dance sequence. Using Logic, we were able to incorporate everything I was looking for - a house beat of around 130bpm, an interesting bassline and most importantly a slow climax in the music which would alert the viewer that something wasn't 'quite right'. I think I achieved this through the minor synth which kicks in half way, and also the increase of reverb on the vocals.

For the voice in the track, we sampled a Beyonce acapella called 'Me Myself and I', before pitching it up and reverbing it. These snippets of vocals are common in modern dance music, especially house - where the clipped words and sounds form actually part of the melody. Here, the sound 'eee eee' becomes the focus point of the whole song, as it does in song like 'au seve' by Julio Bashmore:

We also incorporated a single sound of a reverbing drum from the song 'Alberto Balsam' by Aphex Twin:
This is really not obvious, but I thought using this particular sound would make our 'house' track more unique as it's not the kind of thing you might usually hear in mainstream music.

This screen grab shows the process we went through in building the song, on the left hand side you can see the different tracks, from the garage bass to the clap, to Beyonce's audio and at the very bottom the resounding minor chord that kicks in as Alfie is seen dancing with Helena. I found it really fun to create this piece, and by teaching myself how to use the programme I hope I will be able to use it future projects. Overall, I am really happy with the result. I think it's realistic (something you could well hear in a club) yet fits the scene exactly and the feeling of unease.

Here is the final song (I didn't take the picture in the background)

FINAL FILM TITLE

FILMING - BEACH SCENE AND WALKING HOME SEQUENCE ANALYSIS

I found the beach scene really fun to shoot. It was well organised; we gathered our equipment at around 3 and met Anna schofield, our actress, at Clapham Junction before travelling to Waterloo by train.
The walking home sequence proved to be quite difficult in terms of arranging everyone (me, Emma, Blake, Anna Schofield, Helena Eades, Joanna Murray, Emmy Pollock, Lara Redmayne) to be in the same place at the same time wearing the right outfits. I brought the props and clothes for our characters and we met at the 'club' in Clapham that our actresses would walk out of. We then travelled to our final setting which was the alleyway. As people needed to get home the process was quite rushed and stressful, bearing in mind this was before we realised the camera wasn't recording any sound.
Overall, I think the filming went well, but the beach scene was most enjoyable to shoot because of how well it had been planned out and how easy it was to manage a smaller group compared to 8 people, or with the club scene around 15-20.

PARTY SCENE ROUGH CUT

This is a rough cut of our dance scene

FILMING DAY 1 ANALYSIS

We began our filming with the second scene in our piece, this was the party scene. We wanted to achieve a club like feel and so we kept lighting to a minimum. however we did use key lights that we constantly changed from red to blue. We also used a strobe and laser to add greater visual effects to the shoot.

We had 15 extras including our three main characters (the woman on the beach; the friend and the unknown man) We positioned one camera on a dolly, and we used one handheld. For the handheld camera, the key was to allow the viewer to feel as if they were part of the crowd. it was very challenging trying to coordinate every one in the scene. 

After shooting, we found that the film from the camera on the dolly, was overall less in focus and was more distant which showed that there weren't that many people present, when we actually wanted to make it look like there were 30+. We mostly used shots from the hand held camera as they gave a more intimate, close up feel.

These are some screen grabs from our film: