Monday, December 12, 2016

Coursework - inspiration films

Dolly dearest

The doll first appear as a normal looking doll, when one night, it starts to pick up a knife and chasing people in the house.


Annabelle

a possessed creepy doll which moves when you're not looking.


Dead silence

angry spirit seeking for revenges using dolls.

Coursework - concept

Horror supernatural thriller


  • involving haunted dolls
  • and normal dolls

concept

This film will be about the old doll that a girl found in the house. She then put them in her bedroom with all her animal plushies. one day, when she got home, there's a text written on the wall saying "why don't you love me"; the old doll changes its position. Then one night, it walks up to the sleeping girl on her bed, and caress her skin with its plastic hands. the girl woke up the next day, and it was all just a dream, except the doll is lying next to her under the blanket




Coursework - mood board

I choose to do a supernatural thriller involving dolls, and this is what I gathered for the mood board:


Thursday, December 8, 2016

why we watch scary films?

From what Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) said, we are drawn to violent, scary, negative imagery or experiences to release pent up feeling of aggressive.

catharsis → We watch it so we can PURGE

Dolf Zillmann's Excitation-transfer theory → By experiencing negative and scary images, we intensify the positive feelings when the negative is removed.

CONCLUSION
We enjoy seeing evil vanquished! Which gives us relief and pleasure



Wednesday, December 7, 2016

film noir opening

There's been a moider see!

We done most of the storyboard and plot in the first two days

the incomplete storyboard:



the story board ends where the second detective picks up a strange bullet


the plot (written by Richy):






characters:

Toy as detective Jonnie
Jasper as a detective
Saimink as a dead girl

other works:

director, plot, camera work & editing by Richy
 plot, storyboard & editing by Saimink

the video:


Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Coursework - group

I will work with Bamm bamm on the film opening. The sub genre will be about supernatural/crime thriller, which will revolves around the ghost topic. We've planned and discussed some plot, places, and that who will be the actors in the film.

EDITED
we decide to split after we have too much interesting plots.

Monday, November 28, 2016

childhood memory story board





Zodiac still

Casting:

  • May 
  • Michelle 
  • Bamm 
  • Jenny

Editing: Jenny

Camera work: Saimink




Zodiac watch drawn by Bamm



other shots can be found in this google drive ⇨  link


Friday, November 25, 2016

Zodiac

Serial killer thriller genre

this film is based on the real story of the zodiac killer in the late 1960s. The narrative in this film is differ from what other serial killer genres are.

How other serial killer genre plot develops

usually starts with a calm atmosphere the first victim appears investigation takes place 
second victim appears the two cases are linked together tracking down the serial killer
KILLS the serial killer  closure

How Zodiac use the serial killer conventions

  1. there is no closure ⇾ never caught the serial killer
  2. the film starts with killing 
  3. the investigators are never in control

Monday, November 21, 2016

Conventions of thriller


please click on this link to go to the presentation


conventional credits structure


by using the orders seen in panic room opening credits


THIS is the film opening credits structure:


Monday, November 14, 2016

identify and analyse 8 shot from the clip




An extreme long shot of a robber’s car that is driving away from the police, continues from the last shot where the robber is driving out of the car park. This position also is the police kind of point of view, to see that the robbers are getting away into a distance, meaning they are losing them.




A bird’s eye panning shot of the whole bank showing the workers who are walking all around and working on a computer. It looks just like busy normal day before something bad happened. This shot also show how many people are in the bank at the time, it makes me think the robbers are quite confident in their plan setting up their robbery in the midday



This is a big close-up of one of the robbery’s eyes while he is walking casually in the bank full of people and some guards. They trying to tell us the robbers are aware of how dangerous it is to do this job, every robbers in the gang are looking at the possible threat to them such as the guards and polices while acing calm and unsuspicious by only use their eyes.


This is the close-up shot of the robber tying up the guard’s hands. Although it’s a close-up, it isn’t focusing on this shot for too long before going back to the long shot of everything being secure for the robbers to start the robbery plan. It’s like a shot for us to see that, yeah, the guards that are supposed to secure the bank safety get captured completely by the robbers in a short amount of time.


This shot is a medium kind of high angle shot of the robber’s back look down to the small people that are looking toward him in fear. The power of his compares to other people in this shot is very high. The camera movement follows his slowly walking pace tells me that the robbers are not worrying and they had all of the people in the bank in the palm of their hands



A medium long tracking shot of the robber with the background of all other normal people. It tells me that the robber is blending in with the other normal people, but he is still the most important person in that shot, so they need to move the camera along with him to tell us he’s still here



This big close-up of one of the police, hiding from the bullets from the robber from the previous scene while trying to attack back. The camera is very shaky and blurred, it explained how chaos the situation is.



An extreme long shot of one of the robber getting shot somewhere around the neck from the perspective of his friend. He’s alone, in pain, helpless, far away from his friend, and looks like he can be dead at any moment, gives the feeling of afraid to lose something important.





Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Understanding horror genre (in class)




       The three main points written on the board are personal fears, parents’ worries, and society’s fear. We came up with many types of fear we could think of, and many of them we can find the movies in the thriller genre.
All horror films are made based on existing fear.


These are the example of movies that play with the fear of chaos.
        The walking dead involve surviving through zombies and untrusted people. There are less food resource, water, and living creatures. Everything that controls people vanished, which let the aggressive group of people be able to express themselves: stealing, attacking and killing, which drives the world to a sudden chaos.

        The film also includes many other fears in it, such as losing; when the friends and family are dead while surviving from zombies or from bad people. 


Saturday, November 5, 2016

Analysing Children of Men OPENING in class






SETTING

  • London, 16th November 2027
  • old red bus in 2027(?)
  • on a busy hour in the morning
  • the city is DULL grey, shabby - dust
  • police presence and military helicopter indicate that the city is dangerous


  • there are these vehicles in London (Asian influence?)

SOUND


  • diegetic sound, there is no non-diegetic sound
  • sounds of the news reporters speaking at the beginning of the film opening with black screen


FORESHADOWING




the word 'attack' written on the van foreshadows the explosion at the end of the film opening.

MAIN CHARACTER

the main character in the opening is the man wearing dark, shabby clothes that doesn't shave, who walks in the coffee shop through the other people that are standing still watching the TV. He isn't interest in the news. The camera follows his movement out of the coffee shop and take a shot of him mixing his coffee with alcohol (in the morning).


Enigma Questions

  • according to the news in the film stating that the world youngest person died, why are there no babies since 2009?
  • why doesn't the main character cares about the news like anyone else?
  • and why is Diego's death so important?
  • why is the main character drinking in the morning?
  • who blew up the coffee shop? and why?



Monday, October 10, 2016

One minute film evaluation

Creative process

When coming to deciding on something, doing it as a group gives more views than doing it alone. And as for me that likes listening, this is good. At first, we were thinking of doing the remake of a movie. But after a discussing in our group, we decided to do an interrogation film.
We use about two days to finish all the filming, in two different buildings. We need a narrow corridor for a close-up walking to create a mystery scene. This took about 6 – 7 tries before we got what we want. The next scene is the opening the switch scene, this is kind of hard bit, because there is an air-con switch next to the light switch. So, we used an extreme close-up to exclude the air-con switch.
The other scene used as many tries as the first scene, however, the most difficult one is the shot where the lights suddenly appears on the actress head. One of us had to position himself in front the actress and shine the light from our phone on her, and also to keep himself out of the camera. It was a weird situation, but we passed it.

Technical process

We use mostly close-up in this one minute film challenge to create the mystery feelings, and a medium shot to introduce the characters fully. I helped with preparing the location and some opinion about the camera shots.
We slow down the footage to make it look smoother, and also add up the mystery theme of interrogation. We didn’t bring any audio equipment so the dialogue doesn’t sound as good as it should be.

Final product

The thing I think was successful is the soundtrack we add to the film. It gets more intense every second and then at the climax point where the light turns on, the music builds up really loud. I also like the ticking sound when the finger is tapped on the table, it’s like the count down before the two characters meet. And the last part that the actress lifted her head up before the film ended, gives the feeling of this is just a start.
I think we could bring in the audio equipment to record that ‘Let’s begin’ part, it would improve the video quality a lot. And maybe to plan more than this, because we barely reach the length require for the one minute film challenge. In addition, after more practice in adobe premiere, we would improve the editing skill.

If you were to do this project again is there anything you would do differently?

I would want to try do more on editing stage, since I will have more experience on it later, it would be a great opportunity to challenge myself to make a good video using the video editing software.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

1 minute film challenge

In this group including, Im, Tan, Sunsun, and myself, agree on doing a film about interrogation. Down below is a sketch of story: 


There will be a switching between close-up walking scene and an extreme close-up of hand tapping on a table. Then the man turning on the light, which then appear in the next shot where the light turns on above the defendant.
There will be many use of extreme close-up and close-up of two people in this 1 minute film, and the last scene is the start of the interrogation. This is actually a building up before the real interrogation begins.

After several days of filming and editing, we finished the film.




Sound Mixing

First time doing the sound mixing. I use the key frame in the audios to increase and decrease the volume in each part.