Music Research

Filming parts 2&3

On Saturday the 28th February, we will be filming our pre-scene of the wedding. We have been given permission to use St Mary's Church in Hadlow for the whole day, which gives us plenty of time to go to the location and roughly walk through where we will position the cameras for each shot, using the finished storyboard as our guide, before bringing the actors in. As our actress Iona has other commitments, we are going to use Pip's mum to be the bride, as there are no head shots in this scene so it isn't much of an issue using a different actress for this part of the film opening. We are going to be filming in the afternoon, due to weather conditions.

On Sunday 1st March we will be filming the car scene, using Pip's neighbour as the chauffeur as he is the owner of the 1920s car which we are using in our film opening. Iona will be filming with us on this day, as there are long shots and close ups, so unlike the flash back wedding sequence we will need shots of her face so she will need to be filming with us on that day.

Storyboard part 3/3

Storyboard for the Car Scene

Here is the storyboard for the final part of our opening scene:

Shooting Script 2

‘The Ring’

Shooting Script

1) Slow motion falling Confetti shot - credit 1

*2 seconds*

2) Establishing long shot of the church

*2 seconds*

3) Long shot of couple walking out the church door

*2 seconds*

4) Slow motion falling confetti shot - credit 2

*2 seconds*

5) Medium shot of bride and groom feet

*2 seconds*

6) Medium shot of crowd clapping

*2 seconds*

7) Slow motion falling confetti shot - credit 3

*2 seconds*

8) Close up champagne glasses

*2 seconds*

9) Extreme close up hands

*2 seconds*

10) Slow motion falling confetti shot - credit 4

*2 seconds*

11) Close up flowers drop

*2 seconds*

12) Slow motion falling confetti shot - credit 5

*2 seconds*

13) Medium shot feet

*3 seconds*

14) Over the shoulder point of view shot

*8 seconds*

(END SCENE)

Iconic Directors

Here is an Emaze presentation on the famous film director Fritz Lang:

Non-Diegetic Sounds and Music Ideas

Music and Non-Diegetic sound ideas for The Ring

Pip has created a mixture of different sounds to show how we want our new scene to sound like.

She used a variety of sounds including footsteps, wedding bells, champagne glasses clinging together, birds, background group chat and laughter from the website Freesound.org to create this sound montage. She then downloaded them and imported them onto Garageband, where she edited the sounds together so that they overlapped each other to create a realistic sounding wedding scene. She exported the finished music track onto iMovie and added in some images from Google that were similar to the shots we want to use so that she could show us how the sounds would correlate with the video.

The scene begins with the sound of wedding church bells and a long shot of a church, so Pip overlapped the sounds of birds tweeting to create an atmosphere similar to a typical wedding scene. She then added the sounds of crowds cheering, for when the bride and groom walk out of the church door. After a sound of champagne glasses clinking together and someone proposing a toast to the newly-weds, there is a loud bell chime which is the beginning of the tension being built up. the bell chimes once more as the bride is walking up some wooden stairs to the top of the church and after she sees her husband with a knife dripping blood, she screams. There is then one last bell chime and the title screen fades in

Audience Expectations

As part of our research into the Film Noir genre, I have created a survey on an audience's expectations of a Film Noir. This has been a great way to gather some useful information which we can use in our further planning stages during our coursework. We can now see what an audience would expect to see when watching a Film Noir, even if they have not seen one before, and so this will help us structure our opening and think about the conventions of a Film Noir.



From this survey, one can conclude that, whether someone has seen a film noir before or not, they expect the film to be based around a murder. One can also draw out that they expect a Film Noir to be set in a big city, with the 5 main themes being: Secrets, Murder, Revenge, Betrayal and Love. This is significant because these 5 themes are all very important in any Film Noir, and is what differentiates a Film Noir from a normal crime investigation film. The questioned people recorded that they expected a mysterious and dark atmosphere throughout the film. In addition, they said that they would expect a thought-provoking ending to the movie. Some people gave us some extra information and said that they would expect a 'femme fatale', a melancholy atmosphere and a slow pace throughout the movie. These are all very helpful points, as they will aid us structure our final draft of our film opening.

Iconography of Film Noir

Here is a collage that I have made with pictures from the internet of what I think are some of the main attributes of a Film Noir:

I have created a word cloud to summarise our film opening, using some key words and phrases that are linked to the opening scene:

Props and Costumes

Here is a Prezi presentation on what costumes, props and cast we will need for the remaining 2 parts of our filming for the opening of 'The Ring':

History of Relevant Film Genre

After doing some research into the history of the genres of 'crime' and 'thriller', I found a genre that relates more so to our film than we realised when we were first creating and planning our film opening.
The genre 'Film Noir' is used to portray "cynical attitudes and sexual motives" (wikipedia). It is mainly a mixture of romance and crime, however my group and I have decided to give it a modern twist and add in a thriller element and only have a small amount of romance, some of which is shown in the new wedding scene.

Film Noir's peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, some having been famously directed by the likes of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock and many others.

Here is an example of what a Film Noir genre trailer looks like. It is Fritz Lang's piece 'The Woman in the Window' - 1944:



Here is some information on the history of the Film Noir genre that I found from the website www.filmsite.org:

'A wide range of [film noir] films reflected the resultant tensions and insecurities of the time period, and counter-balanced the optimism of Hollywood's musicals and comedies. Fear, mistrust, bleakness, loss of innocence, despair and paranoia are readily evident in noir, reflecting the 'chilly' Cold War period when the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present. The criminal, violent, misogynistic, hard-boiled, or greedy perspectives of anti-heroes in film noir were a metaphoric symptom of society's evils, with a strong undercurrent of moral conflict, purposelessness and sense of injustice. There were rarely happy or optimistic endings in noirs.'

It goes on to say how Film Noir is, strictly speaking, not a genre: '...but rather the mood, style, point-of-view, or tone of a film.'

I feel that this is the perfect way to categorise our film, as the style of our film and the way in which we have planned the shots on our storyboard correlates with the standards of a Film Noir piece.

Filming Part 1/3

On the 1st February, my group and I filmed the bedroom scene from our film opening. This is how we planned our day:

10:30 - 12:00 

Iona, our actress for the protagonist, arrives at Pip's house where she is talked through the context of the film so she can get a clear idea of how to portray her character through her acting skills. She also has some time to style her hair and do her makeup.

12:00-12:30

Lunch break

12:30

Issy and Bella arrive

12:45-1:45

Set up the room (mise-en-scene)

1:45-2:00

Head shots of actress with hair, makeup and costume

Shots of the room, so if we need to film anything again we know where everything is in the room

2:00-3:00

Start filming

3:00-3:15

Break

3:15-4:00

Filming

4:00-4:30

Review over our filming so far and see what we can improve on

4:30-5:00

Clean up the bedroom

During our filming, we decided to film every shot at least twice. This means that whilst editing in post-production, we can choose the best shot.

We had no technical issues when we filmed, however when it came to uploading the footage onto iMovie we faced a problem- The camera only films in the formats MXF and MP4, none of which are compatible with iMovie. I spent lots of time researching and downloading conversion programmes from the internet, and tried ones such as VLC and Aiseesoft, but they didn't work because they lost the high quality, which defeats the point of filming on the Canon camera in the first instance. Luckily, I found a conversion software from the App store called Prism. It was free and converted the MXF files in a high quality to MOV files.

This has been a big learning step for me, as I have learnt all about the different formats that can be used when filming and how some software such as iMovie is not compatible with these file formats, however some more advanced programmes like Final Cut Pro, which I have used many times before in previous projects, do take these files.