Final Film

Props and Costumes

The costume design process involves many steps and despite the fact that costumes differ from genre to genre a basic method is commonly used. The first step is an analysis of the script. A costume plot is used to establish the point during the shoot I would need to change costumes. However, this won't necessarily apply to my film because, with the exception of the swimming scene. I shall remain in one costume throughout the film. The next phase in the process is when the designers and the director of the film all meet. The designers must be on the same page as the director, in regards to the theme of the film and what message the director wants to audience to get from the costumes. This issue of communication isn't a problem in my production, as I am taking on every role in the production of Camp Out. I want to be able to portray a teenage who believes he can be just like his hero (Bear Grylls), but who has also greatly underestimated how hard the task to survive in the wilderness is. The next step is for the costume designer to gather research. This helps the designer understand the characters better, thus helping to create more personalized accessories to improve the quality of the costume. For my character this could include having a high tech watch with many navigational applications. Next the costume designers create preliminary sketches. This begins with a very quick rough sketch to gain a basic idea for how the costume will look once put together. I attempted to create preliminary drawings. However, my penmanship is not at a high enough level to create costumes from scratch. That is why I looked at pictures of Bear Grylls to see the sort of attire he wears. I have included some pictures that I found below. The last steps are to create the final sketches of the costume and to then create it. I decided to use a combination of my own clothes and specially purchased items to create my costume. I have include a picture below.

 







Now that I have discussed the costume that I shall be using predominately throughout my film, I shall now talk about the various props that I have decided to include in my film. Since my film is about a teenager trying to survive in the wild I naturally assumed that the majority of my props should have a practical element, much like the ropes and backpacks Bear Grylls uses on his shows. However, I then had the idea to use props to create humour in my film. Since I had decided that my film was going to include mainly slapstick comedy I wondered what props I could add to my script that would fit within the setting. The first prop that I have decided to use is a towel. This was a fairly easy choice because I had already included it in my script. On the day of the swimming shoot I shall play around with this prop and see what humour I can generate from using it. The second and third props I have decided to use are a shower cap and a bar of soap in a bag. The reason for this is because it adds to my characters personality, as it shows that he is very civilized. To the point where he will was in a reservoir with his home comforts. The next prop that I shall include in my film is a tent. This was a fairly easy decision. Not only have I already included burning a tent in my script, but tent are commonly associated with camping. So I felt that anyone who watches my film would notice the lack of tent. This is problematic because my aim as a film maker to create a fictional world that the viewer can get invested in. If they begin to question the props used or not used in my film then this will disrupt any flow they would have from watching my film. So I need to ensure that the stereotypical items that are associated with camping are in my film, which includes a tent. The next props that I shall be including in my film are a lighter and a newspaper. They shall be used during the montage where the lead character is building the tent and creating a fire. Originally I was going to have the character attempt to make the fire without any modern day tools. However, due to the fact that my film will most likely already be over 5 minutes (my allocated length of time) I won't be able to add another scene, which would have involved him failing to create a fire over and over again. I also considered what the character would do in this type of situation and I imagined that he would have come prepared just in case he needed an emergency fire. So the newspaper shall be lit by the lighter in order to create the fire in this film. However, if I do happen to have more time in my film left over to use then originally anticipated then I shall definitely attempt to create this scene. The last prop I shall be using is a car. I felt that this was a necessary prop in order for the plot to be believable. Without including a car the audience may wonder how the character go so far into the wilderness by foot with getting lost. I have included a picture below of all the props I intend to use. 

 

Settings Board

In the video below I have included a range of photos and video clips of the places that I will be using in my film. I chose these 3 locations based on my story plot, which you can read about in my "Plot Ideas" post. Please watch the following video and I shall analyze each location afterwards.

From the video you can see that I am using 3 locations. The first one is the waterfall. There are many advantages to filming at this location. The first is that it is completely covered by trees. This is great for filming because it reduces the changes in lighting considerably, which is important for continuity if I need to film at this location multiple times. After inspecting the surrounding area I have found a foot path that can take us directly to the waterfall wit ease. This is good for me because it makes transporting camera equipment a lot easier to and from set. As you see in the video there is a stable platform that is easy to get to that will allow me to get a great angle of the lead actor under the waterfall. This is good, as there is minimal risk of my camera operator being injured while shooting at this location. Another great aspect about this setting is the positive atmosphere it creates. The footage above has not been altered in any way in regards to colour. This means that the bright colours of the setting can be used to conform to the stereotypical colours of comedy, which I may or may not want to do depending on what the lead character has already been through (whether he is already fed up with camping. Another great aspect about the lighting is that I will only need to make slight adjustments during the editing stage of production. 

The second setting that I shall be filming at is a little beach by the reservoir. There are many advantages to filming here that will improve my story plot. The first being that it is easy to locate. This is good for my production because if the location was too remote and I was not able to find the location again then this would mean i wouldn't be able to do any required re-shoots. This would mean that I would have to find another suitable setting for my film, which will require a lot of time because finding a location that is within walking distance and has a large body of water can be hard to locate. Luckily none of these problems will occur at this setting. As I mentioned in the video I did not anticipate such as massive increase of water in the reservoir between my initial inspection and my second inspection (one day for good weather conditions and one day for poor weather conditions). Thankfully their was a place suitable for my film 15 feet away from my initial setting.

The third and final setting that I shall be filming at is known as Great Links Tor. Despite the tor appearing to be dangerous if there was any danger such as an unsuspected injury then the closet place of civilization is a pub, which is a 10 minute maximum walk away from the top of the tor. This is great for me because the setting has the aesthetic that I aim to achieve for a scene in my film, which is harsh and brutal. However, it is also a lot safer when compared to the other tors that I could have selected. A problem that I may face is the noise pollution from the wind. I do posses a wind break, but after my initial scout of the setting I believe the wind will be too strong for the microphone to discern any dialogue. This means I may have to make a few adjustments to my script in order to compensate. Another great aspect about this setting, that I won't be able to get with the two that i have previously talked about, is that I will be able to show the audience the grand scale of the setting my character is in. This is because it is all open fields. This allows me to show the audience that the character is truly alone from just the size of the place.   

To conclude, I think all of my settings are currently suitable for filming purposes, By selecting the locations prior to completing my final draft of my film it allows me to see what scenes I could realistically create with the locations that I have found. I am also able to refer back to my settings board video and remind myself of the actual size of the locations. This is good because it prevents me from writing scenes that would be impractical or impossible to do in the locations that I have selected.  

Final Script (Camp Out)

 

Camp Out

Written by

David Jones

Fade in:

EXT. DARTMOOR – DAY

A lone car is driving on a road in Dartmoor. It’s slightly misty or foggy.

Jump cut to:

INT. CAR – DAY

DAVE, amateur survivalist, late teen’s, driving down a road, inserts CD and turns up the volume.

VOICE of CD

Step 4 of exploring the wilderness is to allows have a safe route back to civilisation. This can be done by checking your map regularly.

DAVE, looks at map on phone, no signal on phone, looks around for signs on country on.

DAVE

(mumbles)

C’mon Dave don’t get scared. You can do this.

DAVE, parks car on side of road, gets out of car, holds phone in air.

DAVE

(worried)

How can there be no bloody signal? Right, guess I’m gonna have to do this the old fashioned way.

DAVE, starts walking towards hill.

CROSSFADE TO:

EXT. HILL – DAY

DAVE, walks towards top of hill, stumbles on uneven floor, climbs rock face, stands on top of hill.

DAVE

(shouts)

Hello?! Hello?! Hello?!

(FADES)

DAVE, shrugs, begins walking down hill

CROSSFADE TO:

DAVE, walking, yawns, gets key out, unlocks car, gets bags out of boot, shuts boot of car, wipes eyes, quickly looks at hands, looks through rear view mirror of car, keys locked inside.

DAVE

(aggressive)

Eerrgghh!

DAVE, picks up bags, walks towards woods.

CROSSFADE TO:

DAVE, walks through woodlands, sees a lake, drops bags and walks to lake.

DAVE

Meh. Why not?

DAVE, gets fishing rod out, prepare fishing rod, looks determined, casts line, line gets caught in tree, he climbs up tree, tree branch breaks, Dave out of shot.

DAVE

OWW!

DAVE, prepares fishing rod, looks determined, casts line, hook catches his hat, hat gets soaked in lake.

DAVE

Oh for fuck sake! Well if I’m gonna get it I might as well make the most of it.

CUT TO:

DAVE, in underpants, towel wrapped around hips, looks determined, places shower cap on head, holds bar of soap, drops towel, walks towards water, feet touch water, he stops, he quickly turns, picks up towel, sits on rock.

DAVE

(teeth gitter)

C’mon Dave. You can do this. What would Bear do? What would he do?

DAVE, breathes slowly, closes eye lids

(Insert emotional Bear Grylls speech. Duration 10 seconds max)

DAVE, opens eye lids.

DAVE

Fuck it.

DAVE, drops everything, runs into lake, stands up in lake, looks behind him, sees soap.

CUT TO:

EXT. LAKE – BAR OF SOAP – AFTERNOON

DAVE

(shouts)

Oh for fuck sake!

DAVE, walks to soap, picks up soap, looks around

DAVE

(sighs)

Fire.

CROSSFADE TO:

EXT. CAMP SITE – EVENING

DAVE, looking confident.

DAVE

Let’s do this.

INTERCUT MONTAGE OF DAVE CREATING FIRE AND BUILDING TENT

CUT TO:

DAVE, tent on fire, big flames, he lies down and falls asleep.

THE END

Final Radio Advert

I am very pleased with how the final edit for this advertisement came out. This is because I think that all my planning, which included researching other examples of comedy film radio adverts, writing a script and seeing who would best play the characters, was very extensive. I have also included a copy of the script below if anyone reading this blog has issues with their hearing and would like to follow along to the advertisement. I feel that my radio advert sets up the premise of the film by establishing a teenage boy has gone missing. This is good because it doesn't let the listener know when this conversation would occur in the film, as in is she reporting her son being missing immediately after seeing him in his room or could it be during the night where he could have gotten into hilarious trouble. It's questions like these that raise the listeners excitement because they want to know the answers. During the recording of my radio advert I made sure to get my actors to do multiple takes and in various ways. For example, I asked the voice actor for the policeman to act like he was nervous and then to act like he was confident. I was unsure on whether the character should be confident or not because I did not know which one would be funnier to listen to. In the end I decided to use the clips that made him sound slightly nervous, but then resulting in him being fine thinking that David (the lead character) would return at some point or another and he wouldn't have to worry. I chose these clips because they when comparing the two tracks the slightly nervous one was funnier than the serious. 

 

 

Final Film Poster

After various attempts at creating my poster, I am really pleased with the final result. I feel that this clearly represents the story of my short film, which is a comedy in a nature setting. I made sure to include elements from previous documents to show that my research had an impact on my final poster. For example, I added the age rating of my film in the bottom left corner. Despite the fact that this brakes away from the codes and conventions of a movie poster, as not many include the age rating, I decided to do this because when I sent out my first draft of the film to a select group of people some of them decided to show it to their children prior to watching it themselves. They were not aware of the age rating and didn't know the film contain some strong language. As the distributor of the film it is my responsibility to ensure that this doesn't happen again. I noticed that I had not included this age rating anywhere else in my advertisement campaign. So I decided to include it in my poster. 

The background images consist of a photo taken during my location recce of Burrator Reservoir and a royalty free picture of a cloudy sky that I picked from the internet. The photo that I took during my location recce originally had a bright blue sky, which then added a lot of warmth to the image. I felt this wasn't appropriate for the message that I wanted to portray in my poster. So I replaced the sky with the image I found on the internet. Then I slightly decreased the saturation and brightness of Burrator Reservoir to match the sky. This then represented the mood of the character, which is that he is unhappy. This was a technique that used throughout my film, which was that the saturation level resembled the characters emotions. In the top right corner I have included a watermark from Happy Madison Productions. This relates back to my institutional research where I talked about the reasons why I chose that company to produce my film.

What is storytelling?

When I wanted to start writing my script I came to the sudden realization that I don't know how to create and write a story. I do have some prior experience from writing a short script for my year 12 horror film opening scene. However, with that piece of work I did have help with some of my classmates. So in order to make my script and story as good as it can be I decided to look at what makes a good story. 

When I look back into my childhood and think about what stories stood out and have had an impact on my perception of the world the same thing kept popping up, which was Pixar. Pixar is an American animation film studio that have created, what I consider to be, some of the greatest stories ever told on film. Some of these films include; 'Wall-E', 'Toy Story' and 'Finding Nemo'. So I looked at who were the screen writers for these films. A name kept repeating, which was Andrew Stanton. Andrew Stanton (born December 3, 1965) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor based at Pixar Animation Studio. After conducting more research I found that Andrew has appeared on 'Ted Talks' where he talks about the clues to a great story. Here is the video. 

He gave a great and insightful talk about storytelling. Here's how defined storytelling. "Storytelling is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline. Your ending. Knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings."This is very useful for my production because when I come to writing a plot for my story I will attempt to implement his advice into my story.

What makes a script?

In this document I wanted to explore what makes a script. I feel that by learning this information it will help me create an overall better script when it comes to me writing my film.

The first aspect of script writing that became apparent to me is that there are many types of scripts. Each type serves their own function in the media they are used in. Here are some examples:

·         Manuscript, any written document often story based and unpublished

·         Play (theatre), the dialogue and stage directions for a theatrical production

·         Screenplay, the dialogue and language for a film or show

·         Script (comics), the dialogue for a comic book or comic strip

·         Scripted sequence, a predefined series of events in a video game triggered by player location or actions

As much as I would like to explore all these aspects of script writing, I am going to focus on the form of script writing that applies to the creation that I want to make, which is a film (screenplay).

According to ‘Writersstore.com’ the definition for a screenplay is “…  a 90-120 page document written in Courier 12pt font on 8 1/2" x 11" bright white three-hole punched paper.” Since my film will only be 5 minutes long I will only need to write 5 – 6 pages long, as 1 page tends to equate to 1 minute of screen time. Screenplays can either be an original piece, or based on a true story or previously written piece, like a novel, stage play or newspaper article. Since my plot is a comedy about a man whose car breaks down in the woods and him trying to survive the night, mine would be consider to be an original piece. 

Something that I need to consider when I begin writing my script is that film is a visual medium. So I need to remember that many of the emotions conveyed in my film will be visual and not require dialogue. This is especially true as there is only one character throughout the whole film. So instead of writing elongated paragraphs depicting the shot or scenes I need to remember the images will be more important than the script. For example, instead of writing many sentences about what should be achieved in a shot or shots I should just write “close-up on characters sad face”.

Below I have included a picture of a script and I have noted the key elements that need to be included. A script writing tool that is not included in this example, that I will be using, is ‘Mores and Continueds’. These are used between pages to indicate that the same character is still speaking.  

Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 3

I wanted to receive some more audience feedback and see how people outside my target audience would perceive the film. That is why I asked a select group of individuals, all above my target audience age range, to ask their opinions on the film. These are the results that I gathered.

 

 

The feedback to the first question"Who do you think are the intended audience for this media text?" all pretty much concurred with each other. One person said the intended audience was 16 - 22 years old. Another said it was 16+ and the other said it was 15+. These all fit within my target audience, which I was trying to aim for in the film through the use of semi-nudity and rude language. This is good as it indicates that I have achieved my aim of making a 15+ rated film.

The feedback to the second question "Do you think that the text is appropriate or suitable for the target audience? Why?" the answers concurred once again. They all agree that the vernacular was appropriate for the age group that I was appealing to (15+ year old's). This is good as it shows that the strong language to include had a positive effect on my reaching my target audience.

The feedback to the third question "What do you think are the strengths of this piece of work?" was positive and talked about a range of aspects include in my film. For example, one persons mentioned that they thought the "movement" and "shades of colour" had a good impact on the film. Another person mentioned that "the limited use of speech make it suitable for a wider audience (foreign and deaf listeners)." This is an advantage I had not previously considered when using slapstick humour. This is good as it enable my film to have an international audience that can still interpret the humour without knowing English.

The feedback to the fourth question "What do you think could have been improved?" proved to be very constructive. Two of my participants said that the main character should have more dialogue. When creating this film I thought a limited amount of dialogue would only be need to set up a few scenes. However, after reading these comments I think I should reconsider and possibly include more dialogue in future projects, even if they are slapstick comedy's.

Regarding the statements that I asked them to rate from 1 (disagree) to 6 (agree) I found that the results are positive. For the statement "The text is technically convincing" I received a 4, a 5 and a 6 rating. This tells me that the technical aspects such as colour grading, cuts and so forth are all enjoyed by these participants. For the statement "The media text is successful"I received a 5, a 5 and a 6. This tells me that my participants really enjoyed the narrative of my film. All these positive reviews tell me that even people outside my target audience can enjoy my film just as much or even more so.