I was the teenage Steve McQueen..

Friday 29th 2009

In today's session we have been using CeltX to take apart a chase scene in the film 'Bullitt'. We were asked to bear in mind the '180 degree rule' and 'Crossing the Line' which is when an object goes from camera left to camera right. then in the next shot it goes from camera right to camera left. This can make it appear that the object is going backwards. After screen-grabbing each different shot we then had to load them into CeltX and arrange them into the correct order. We then analysed each shot, deciding what type of shot it is and why it may have been used. Also checking that the next shot didn't 'Cross the Line'.

What to do...what to do??

Tues 26th Jan 2010

Today our group (Carlina, Tom, Harry & I) decided to brainstorm some ideas for our short film. Our original idea was going to be based on karma, where a homeless person is attacked by a group of people who are then reprimanded for what they did in numerous ways. It then dawned on us that it would be quite difficult to fit it all within our 7minute limit. In class we watched a short film-making documentary by Robert Rodriguez. In the '10 Minute Film School' Rodriguez shows how he managed to make a short film on a low budget, which is very handy for us poor students! Although he managed to spend $3000 which is about $2999 more than I can really afford. We also watched one of his first short films,‘Bed-Head’ which was most probably on a much lower budget and more achievable in our time-limit and level of expertise. At the moment we have only come up with a few basic ideas. However, we plan to meet up in our groups over the weekend to discuss further ideas. Hopefully we will have the basis for our project in time for us to pitch our idea on Tuesday.

I Propose...a proposal

Fri 22^nd Jan 2010

I would like to make a short-film! And luckily, so does Carlina, Tom & Harry. So we got ourselves into a group for our next film project. It was just me and Carlina today though, so we went through a few ideas of what we might like to do and came up with a few interesting ideas…

Proposal
We are asked as a group to make a short video on whichever genre we wanted. The duration has to be 5-7 minutes and can be on a pop video, documentary or short film. We had to get into groups and brainstorm ideas.
Considering which type of film people wanted to do, we decided we wanted to make a short film, due to never having done one before and having wanted to do one for ages.
We started to brainstorm on the 22nd of January. We came up with a range of ideas. We decided we would use some creative writing practice students in order to script our film. However, coming up with a base for our work would be key. Some ideas that we had are:
- school life
- love
- drugs and the effects
- paranoia
- hard hitting horror
- ghosts/paranormal
- dark or comedy?
- Mixing different genres together
- e.g. in death sequences, using red glitter for blood - slightly Tim Burton, but less Gothic.

However, we decided on a topic related to Karma, where what goes around comes around.
We've decided as a start location, to film in Bath and Bristol. Having it in this area would mean that there is less risk with the equipment and certain locations in bath, e.g. all the old roman streets look quite stylistic and genre based.
We want to make the film more stylistic than naturalistic, possibly using techniques such as flashback, stop motion and images. We want to stick with the idea of having interesting props to grab audience attention and relieve the tension in the dark atmosphere.
We want to leave the audience with something to think about. Therefore catching them with a narrative storyline will help them empathize and see how the events unfold.