British Social Realism // Production Log Twelve, Thirteen & Fourteen

Christmas Break
(19/12/14 - 05/01/15)

We are currently on christmas break. Our footage is all filmed near school and our actors are fellow students in our year group. These factors led to our decision of not filming over Christmas. Over christmas, we re-checked with our actors if they are available for certain dates, so we could start filming as soon as we got back to school and our regular schedule. Before breaking up from school we had already planned many aspects of production and researched our locations leaving not much left for us to do over the holidays. 

Credits
(05/01/15)

This week we made our credits in LiveType.  To the right you can see an example of the LiveType set-up. We have never used this software before so we were learning while making these credits so it was quite time consuming to start with. We decided to have a simple font, that is easy to read. We didn't want anything to complex and so we can ensure our audience will be able to see all our graphics. We opted for the colour white, with a black outline for our text as we wanted them to be super-imposed. We decided to use super-imposed graphics so that our audience do not lose interest in our opening. Also the only credits with a simple effect on it are "Film 4 presents," "an EN production" and then our main title, "Positive." This should make the credits more aesthetically pleasing to our audience. We did not want these on all our credits as they would have to be left on the screen to long to ensure the audience has seen them. The only credits that will be shown on a black screen is our production company and Film 4. We have also created a production logo to make our opening look professional. Simple credits  in either black or white that are super-imposed is conventional to British Social Realism films, which helps us show the theme of the film we are creating.

Filming

(05/01/15)

This week was our first week filming shots for our opening. We filmed twice this week. We organised the location of shots so we could film each location in one filming session rather than filming in order of our shooting script which would be extremely time consuming as we are filming our opening in a non-linear style. On our first day filming we filmed all of the bathroom shots and some of the bedroom shots which was both in the same house. The day was extremely successful as we managed to film more than what we thought we could. We are extremely happy with how the shots are turning out and the commitment of our chosen actors. The second day filming consisted of the alley way shots. We found this difficult as people were walking past, and we had to wait for perfect times to film. However we were very happy with how the scenes went and the rainy weather added to the atmosphere of the shots which we never planned. We filmed just before sunset, which created a nice light for these scenes, we didn't want it to be too dark as the audience wouldn't be able to see what is going on. 

After filming the majority of shots we started thinking about our plan, we have decided that we have given too much of the story away with our character Becca's father finding out about the pregnancy. Therefore we want to reconsider the opening sequence ending or add scenes to the begininng making it so the audience only see Becca finding out about the pregnancy and the flashbacks to the rape.

Filming so far has been very successful and next week we are planning to upload the footage and start editing. We are also going to start looking at suitable music, as we are yet to find something we think fits our theme and the tone of our opening. We want music that compliments our smash mouth opening. This may require having separate music, perhaps something quite sad and dark, for Becca waiting to find out her pregnancy results so the audience will empathise with her but then something quite aggressive or maybe a heartbeat sound effect for the flashbacks.