Storyboarding

We will do a storyboard to act as an initial aid and a guideline for when we are filming our opening sequence for our film 'Love Lockdown'. It will show the different camera angles we will use in each frame, character movements and camera movements; which we can use to organise the actors and save time. It is a general plan of how we will film the different shots so we are clear about it and we don't have disputes whilst in filming process because it has already been set. The drawings will include any sounds/dialogue we require, the shot durations, any camera angles and character movements. We will look at different types of storyboards e.g. animatic storyboards and we will decided which one suits us more. Examples of animatic storyboards are shown below:

Preliminary Synopsis Of Love Lockdown

Characters:

Jermaine - Lovesick Teen, infatuated with Alicia, so much so that he takes the fall for her and attends prison for a crime that she commited.

Ashley - Alicia's boyfriend and father of her unborn baby, cheats on her with Shaniqua, runs away when caughtShaniqua - Has an affair with Ashley and is killed by Alicia upon being caught

Alicia - Pregnant with Jermaine's baby,broken hearted and acts irrationaly upon being informed of Ashley's infidelity. Takes advantage of best friend Jermaine who has had feelings for her for a long time and is left with the guilt of living her life knowing that her closest friend is in prison for her actions.

Love Lockdown

Ashley and Alicia have been in a long term relationship of which they have gone through to the serious sides relating to sexual behaviour. Unfortunately, due to unforseen circumstances, Alicia has become pregnant with Ashley's baby.

Alicia is left upsset and unsure of what to do and so she confides in her best friend Jermaine who advises her to inform Ashley of her current state. Taking his advice, Alicia calls Ashley notifying him that she needs to tell him something important. Ashley, acting incredibly suspicious tells Alicia that he is busy and that he will call back later. Ashley drops the phone but does not end the phonecall allowing Alicia to hear him interacting with her worst enemy Shaniqua. It becomes clear to Alicia once listening to the innuendo between the pair that Ashley is cheating on her.

Overwhelmed with emotion, not only has she just found out that she is pregnant but that the love of her life is lying to her, Alicia proceeds in quickly running to Ashley's house in order to release her anger. Jermaine warns her not to do anything stupid and follows slowly behind her.

Alicia arrives at Ashley's house, for him to answer the door and act like nothing is going on. Alicia, not falling for his tricks barges past him and proceeds upstairs to confront Shaniqua. Ashley runs after her upstairs leaving the door wide open. The neighbours hear the screaming and shouting from inside the house, and upon hearing the racket, Jermaine begins jogging to Ashley's house.

Once at the door, Alicia runs out with her hands coated in blood. She expresses that she does not know what she has done and seeks comfort from Jermaine who tells her that everything will be alright. Sirens are heard and the pair split up to run away and meet at Alicia's. Alicia arrives at home before Jermaine, and washes the knife used to kill Shaniqua. Jermaine does not turn up.

Jermaine hands himself in for murder for the sake of Alicia and her child. Alicia has to live with the guilt until Jermaine is released whilst Jermaine hopes that the sacrifice that he has made for Alicia will result in their combined love once his sentence is up.

Ashley disappears from the area and refuses to take any responsibility for his unborn baby.

Alicia suffers from hallucinations and insomnia and goes to visit Jermaine in prison. Their relationship develops and Alicia delivers a beautiful baby boy and names him after Jermaine. When about to leave the hospital, Jermaine shows up in the doorway. The pair hug and live together happily ever after.

Ratings

We have chosen to give our film Love Lockdown a BBFC rating of 15 because it contains some strong language, it has some sexual references and use of drugs and alcohol which may not be suitable for people uder the age of 15.

Target Audience

Being a group filled with teenage girls, it seemes most sensible to create a film to appeal to an audience of similar ages. Therefore, our target audience are teenagers aged from 14-19. The events of our film are likely to attract a male dominated audience due to the gang violence and prison scenes but there is also an appeal to young teenage girls as we see the main female character struggling to come to terms with teenage pregnancy and the infidelity of her boyfriend. The occurances of the opening sequence are all relatable and our target audience will most likey know someone or have personally been involved in the situations. Sugarhouse Lane is a british film starring Adam Deacon. This film has a target audience for ages 14-19 and has helped us to understand what we must include and how we must film in order to attract our prospective audience.In terms of venue, we must base our film in familiar areas such as, open roads, public parks, highstreets etc. When scripting, we must ensure that the language used is colloquial and identical to the way in which urban teenagers speak nowadays using present slang and gestures. People of authority will have posher voices than the younger ones, signifying the differences in agegroups.As it is an Urban Drama, the scenes will be based in a lower classed environment. It is an inner city film, therefore the cast that we will used will be of mixed ethnicities to symbolise the variety of culture that lies in cities.Keeping the content simple and understable yet interesting will allow us to maintain the focus and interest of our target audience and possibly attract an older audience.The scene below from Sugarhouse Lane depicts an excellent example of how our opening scene should be. The language used is relatable, there is a mixture of ethnicity and the occurances of the scene are common events that occur in inner city life.

Sugarhouse Lane snippet:

Other Influences

Other Influences like E20 influenced our project in the way it appeals to similar age range and it deals with the trials and tribulations the youth face today. In this sequence shown below it gives the viewers a taste of what teenage girls may have to deal with if they get pregnant which is also a main feature in our opening sequence Love Lockdown.



Other idea we had from this is the shot of the boy picking up the phone shown in the clip below from 40 seconds into it. We used this to help us get an ideaof the different camera shots and angles we could use to show the conversation between Alicia and Ashley.



We also used influences from the urban drama series dubplate drama.

Dubplate drama- Recap 0f series 1



Dubplate Drama - Recap of series 2



This is a perfect example of the type of audience intentions we want our aduience to feel and gain from. We aim to give awareness to people and also provide an entertainment which dubplate drama does and Love Lockdown intends to do.

Heres a link to their Blogspot page: dubplatedrama.blogspot.com enjoy :)

Influence

As a group we are greatly influenced by British Urban Dramas. Films such as Kidulthood have played a key role towards allowing us to develop the idea of creating the opening sequence of a dramatic thriller. Dramas incorporate real life situations with surreal not so ordinary events. Kidulthood follows the life of teenagers over a course of weeks. The trials that we as an audience view once following the teenager’s allow us to empathise with the characters. Although we are only doing an opening sequence, we would like to emulate the intense emotions that are expressed in the opening scene of Kidulthood. The isolated scenes in which we see clues as to what different characters are doing are essential in building up suspense in our sequence. In order for the audience to have a brief idea of past events to help them work out the hidden elements of our film, we will show flashbacks of prior events. Flashbacks were used effectively in the infamous Forrest Gump as an alternate method to tell the tale of Forrest’s life up until the time that it is now. Along with this, the movie Seven Pounds also begins at the ending, leaving the viewers to watch the movie and understand why Will Smith ends up as he does in the movie. Many movies use Pre Credit Sequences to grab the attention of the audience before boring them with the credentials of their movie, we will also use this. An example of a movie that uses this element is the movie Cube. We as the audience are immediately viewing the male as he travels around this strange warehouse, when he is sliced into cubical pieces, the name of the film Cube appears, and the viewer notices the connotations. We would like to end our pre credit sequence with our male actor standing in his prison uniform and soon after the title of the film, Love Lockdown, will appear and connotations will be able to be made.

The opening sequence of The cube:

Analysis of Opening an Sequence (Office Space)

Above is the opening sequence for the 1999 comedy Office Space. It is an American comedy film which comes quite apparent in this opening sequence. When the scene begins there is a sound of car horns beeping when the credits are shown initiating that there is going to be a traffic scene. We then see an Ariel shot then a long shot of the traffic establishing where the character is going to be introduced to the audience. Playing over these shots is jazzy Spanish music illustrating to the audience that the film is a light-hearted comedy. Also the use of bubbly, blue font in the opening credits insinuates the films comedic attributes.
We then see a business man in his car clearly frustrated by the traffic and there are a lot of close ups on his face showing this. He tries to avade the traffic by switching lanes as he see the other lanes is moving quite quickly but when he does, the lane he was in before starts to move and he is stuck in the traffic. We then see an over-the-shoulder shot of an old man walking on the pavement overtaking him which makes him even more frustrated which is quite humerous for the audience to watch.

We are then introduced to another character also stuck in the traffic. He is a white male with glasses playing gangster rap music in his car which is quite comical because it is peculiar to see a character like him singing along to rap. It is made even more droll when a point of view shot shows a black man approaching him and he locks his doors and turns down the volume of the music then turns it back up again when the man walks past the car.

Again we are introduced to another chracter stuck in the traffic and it shows he is extremely frustrasted with the traffic as he fights the steering wheel and starts screaming which adds another funny element to the scene.

This scene introduces the characters showing their personalities so the audience get a concise insight on the nature of the film. Also music and sound effects are illustrated throughout the opening scene stating there maybe many comical moments in the film.

Looking at this opening sequence has made me realise i need to establish what genre my film is, it is also key to introduce the main characters and give the audience an insight into their personalities, also use appropriate music and sound effects to add an atmosphere.

Analysis Of An Opening Sequence (Adulthood)

We previously mentioned that Adulthood was a significant influence for our opening sequence. Adulthood begins with Titles and then moves on to silent flashbacks of its prequel Kidulthood. This allows memebers of the audience who have watched Kidulthood to be reminded of how the story ended and informs new members of the audience of the last major event. Although we are not reminding our audience of a previous film, we would like to inform our audience of the events that have taken to land our characters in their current state.

The shots used are short and often flash from scene to scene, this is an excellent idea for us to ensure that our flashbacks establish the main scenes of Love Lockdown. It is vital that we establish our characters in our opening sequence with shots focused on their faces to signify theirt importance. Characters such as Jermaine and Alicia must be shown clearly to identify their importance whereas short term characters like Shaniqua do not need to be shown as clearly.

The opening scene of Adulthood not only introduces us to the characters and their urban setting but immediately it informs us that the film is based around violence. It begins with a harsh encounter with a male and the boyfriend of another. There are a variety of effects in the opening scene of Adulthood with split scenes to show different areas of the club and the occurances within and speeding and slowing down of pace to echo the club like atmosphere in which many are intoxicated and therefore disorientated like the effects used.

The flashbacks in Adulthood not only give a brief history of the story line but establish the main characters, setting and mood of the scene. We must ensure that we mirror this effective use of flashback to ensure that we obtain the best results.

Preliminary Project

Our Preliminary task was inspired by a nail varnish with the colour named Midnight Passion. Immediately upon hearing the adjectives used for the nail varnish, we came up with the idea to base our task around a romantic comedy. The play on words in order to seduce the male actor, allowed us to build suspense as to what the midnight passion may actually entail. The close up of our female character (Nikkie Okubadejo) , revealed the comical side and the actual connotation of the midnight passion with the use of her wink.

Overall, the preliminary task was successful. We had a variety of shots and transitions which coincided well with the underlying theme of our video. Our favourite aspect of our clip, was the match on action shot in which the viewer sees Nikkie entering through the door and soon after this, they are again shown her walking towards the male character as the door shuts. Unfortunately, we did encounter some technical difficulties in relation to framing. When shooting the shot/reverse shots during the conversations between the male and female character, we failed to block out exterior distractions such as lockers and tables that we did not want in the frame. Luckily, we were able to disguise this with a special effect which ellipsed our shots with a black border.

Due to noticing our pros and cons, we have analysed and created solutions to our framing problems. When filming our opening scene, we will ensure that before each clip we have a clear view of exactly what is in the frame. If we confirm that all frames are perfectly planned and executed, we are positive that we will produce an excellent Opening Scene.

Media Studies Brief

The set brief for our Video project is to create the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. This blog will document the pre-production, production and evaluation stages of this project.