Film Locations

Wealthy Life Location

Wealthy Life Location

Wealthy Life Location

Bournemouth Beach Location

Bournemouth Train Station Location

Grace and Lucas House Location

Wealthy Life Location

Lucas First House Location

Costume and Props

This costume is worn by Lucas for the proposal scene to bring originality we decided the proposal scene would be filmed by revealing a t-shirt with 'Will you marry me?' printed on it.

These props are used to show the juxta position of the two lives. The cards are almost identitcal to show that Lucas has a choice of being alone and wealthy or having a family but having money problems.

Essay answers

How did your research into institutions responsible for the production and regulation of the media influence your production work?

When researching into institutions responsible for the production similar to aspects of the products we made both within the foundation portfolio and advanced portfolio, we found it incredibly helpful to look at popular and common aspects of other production companies similar to the genre we had chosen. For the foundation portfolio we hoped to make a children's film but we firstly had to research into the conventions often found in children's films. The influence of Jacinto came primarily from Narnia produced by Disney and Walden Media. The whole narrative is based around Narnia and the theme of entering another world often is found in children's films and the element of fantasy is also apparent in Narnia. However films like Narnia are produced on a high budget with facilities to produce CGI images, we had to work around a low budget and create a film opening similar to other children's films as possible. Other institutions we researched with were Universal Pictures who produce a wide range of film genres, however there is evidence of many children's films which we could use to influence our production work. This includes films like Peter Pan which focuses on having children as the main characters so audiences can relate to the characters. So the research into other institutions was a large influential factor to our film opening and determined the main characters and narrative. Another opportunity to research into institutions was for the advanced portfolio project were we planned to make a drama with elements of fantasy. This genre itself is reasonably hard to find a particular institution which represents this so we decided to look more into similar films with a similar narrative. This can be found in the 1998 film Sliding Doors produced by Mirimax films and Paramount Pictures, we noticed that the genre is recognised by smooth editing and nice framing of shots so we planned to get this feel to our short film as well. We also noticed that there is specific focus on one female protagonist so we decided to use this focused but on a male protagonist. The narrative of this film is incredibly similar to ours however this gave us an opportunity to make note of what this institution had done and change parts of our narrative to make originality. Memento a film produced by Newmarket Capital Group and Summit entertainment have produced a film where after colouring effects the narrative in order to show two different things, these things we hoped to do as well which gave us influence to our narrative and editing techniques. Memento also gave us inspiration to our film name as we liked the effect of just having one word. These institutions produced these films with the audience in mind, they have used an effective technique of using American lead characters to appeal to a large American audience, we are doing a similar thing which attracts audiences by using a very British cultural feel to the short film which is attractive to many audience and we are also using an American title for the film in order to appeal to an American audience (Intersection.)

How did your research into audience contribute to your production work?

Research into audience has been an incredibly important contribution to our production work in both foundation portfolio and advanced portfolio. During the research for Jacinto, the foundation portfolio, into audience we decided we needed a target audience and this was young children between 5-15. From there we decided we needed to know what was popular with audiences of that ages. So we produced a mood board with a range of images related to what we hoped our film opening would look like and images we all related to children. During our audience research we noticed that characters were incredibly important to our audience and having them at similar ages were used to promote our film. Further more the whole feel of our film would be incredibly important so because of our audience research we noticed children's films often follow conventions of being brightly coloured and vibrant and this would help promote our film to a young audience. Another example where research into the audience was helpful to our production work was for our audience for 'Intersection.' It was difficult for us to know roughly what audience age and groups would be interested in our film idea, so we produced a survey to work out our target audience, we observed that our audience would be majority female between the ages of 17-35 as it follows a light hearted romantic story line popular stereotypically with these people. We also noticed that audiences were often attracted to films by certain actors like 'Johnny Depp' 'Nicholas Cage' 'Helen Bohen-Carter' 'Angelina Jolie' because of their appeal to audiences. Although we do not have a budget to hire any famous actors popular with audiences so it persuaded us to create characters who would be popular making them quirky and give them normal life issues which audiences can relate to.

How did your research into genre contribute to your production work?

Genre was almost one of the most important research tasks which contributed to our production work. Looking at other films with the same genre was incredibly influential to our production work. In our foundation portfolio work genre was important, so we researched into the narrative, characters, mise en scene and editing of other children's films. We researched into films like Narnia, The golden Compass, Peter Pan, Millions and many other films we have watched in the past. It made us make decisions like the characters we were going to use being ages of 10 and 14 and the two different genders to appeal to a wide audience of boys and girls. It also persuaded us to choose a editing technique to follow the conventions of fantasy by changing colour schemes like with the purple sky once the characters have entered the world of Jacinto so it shows the juxta position of reality and fantasy. It was influential when choosing costume with the typical childish outfits and the fantasy costume ideas for the creatures inside Jacinto. It also had an influential aspect of the name of our film, similar to Narnia we chose to create an unknown word which would fit a fantastical land. Research into similar genres was a large contributor to our foundation portfolio. Genre also was one of the things we researched into first to decided on exactly what we were going to create in the advanced portfolio. We made a list of genres to decide which genre to follow and its conventions. We decided the best fitting genre for our plot would be fantasy drama. It also gave us the opportunity to research into similar films in the same genre like Sliding Doors. From there we worked out the conventions from nicely framed shots and a complex plot often leaving the lasting decision up to the audience. So genre was a very important aspect of research into our portfolio's.

 

Filming dates and the start of editing.

Editing
We have begun editing some scenes for our short film. This enables us to view what we have captured and possibly have to re-shoot certain scenes because we either have new ideas or are not satisfied with the footage we have got. However we are pleased with the footage we have gathered and feel it sufficient enough to tell our narrative. But we hope to film the proposal scene again to gain a better quality feel to the shots to go with the overall feel of the short film.

Filming Dates
We have done a large section of filming over the past weeks but we still have one section of Lucas's life to film. This will be done in the next two weeks so we can concentrate on our auxillary tasks and editing our film together. The post production work for us is going to be incredibly experiemental, because we know a structure of what we want to follow with editing, but we hope to add some interesting effects of which we are undecided at the moment.

Complications with filming

Unfortunately after lots of planning with our filming schedules and dates we came across another problem. Our main scenes located at the train station were all going fine until and duty manager of Bournemouth Train Station did not believe our student identity, so while we were half way through filming we were asked to leave because he believed we were press. We then sent a letter asking permission for a second time to film on the train station. Hopefully if this gets approved we will continue our filming on the train station and complete this section.

Research of Reviews

Here are two contrasting reviews of different films one from Empire's Website and One from The Rotten Tomato's Website. We have decided to go with the style more like Empire as it uses traditional star rating and a clean layout with areas like the verdict and important information about the film text boxes. We are deciding this because we feel it would suit a magazine review rather than a website format better.