Editing

Day 1 of Editing

Today we made a start with editing our footage. We also made a note of everything that still needs filming. We plan on using the film countdown at the very start of the documentary to introduce the whole film. By doing this we will be able to hook and engage our audiences attention straight away, having their full attention ready to manipulate them into siding with us about what we think of horror films - one of the key conventions of documentaries; make a point or state an opinion but then manipulate your audience into siding with you. 

Objectives: Research and Planning

Script

Script for voiceover:

 

“Do you want to play a game?” – Saw films

Have you ever been scared of a horror film?

Have you ever felt influenced by a horror film?

Have you ever acted out of character because of a horror film?

“Do you like scary movies?” – Scream

*Alice’s scream*

*Black and white slow mo clips of people fighting* OR *Film montages*

You’re not alone!

Ever dreamt of being a hero?

Ever wanted to blow up a building?

Ever wished of saving the day?

*Explosion* *gun fire*

*film montage*

Questions get asked as to whether horror and action films actually have an affect on people in everyday society. *People committing crimes*

2,500 books and articles have been written on this very subject

We are here to investigate that…*cuts to black, fades to next shot*

*Film montage with facts and subtitles of the names of films*

In 2012 Action films were the highest grosing genre of film and accounted for 7% of releases that year.

During this year there were 47 action film releases which made an outstanding 328 million pounds. Alongside this horror films had 45 releases, which made a significantly lower amount of 62 million pounds.

However in 2013 there were 47 action releases making 215 million pounds, and for horror there were 37 releases making 57 million pound with 73 of these films deemed 18 rated films.

*Panning shots of college*

We interviewed a variety of students at The sixth form college Solihull, to find out their views on this topic.

*Vox pops*

What is your favourite genre of film?

Do you feel like you've been influenced by a horror film?

Do you think there’s too much violence in films?

Do horror films ever scare you?

Do you think action/horror films have an influence on society?

Did you know by the time the average US child starts primary school, they will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence in films and tv shows which is taken from a 2007 study.

We went to talk to Film and Media Studies teacher Nick Waring. We asked his expert opinion on the following questions.

*Over shoulder shot of Alice and Nick*

Do you think that violence in action and horror films are popular and why?

Do you like violence in films?

Why do you think its getting increasing popular?

Do you think they have an influence on people in society?

Could you explain why for us?

There are many ways people can view films, one being the cinema. *Shot of the cinema in 201?*

Horror films have been shown since the 1890’s in cinemas where they were silent and a lot more spooky and surreal.

Actions films weren’t introduced until later with some of the first motion pictures being about the first world war.

Todays television also allows people to watch more violent scenes even during the day!

In 1992, an 18 hour broadcast of television was monitored which showed a total of 1846 acts of violence. 471 were from cartoons and 188 from toy adverts. The cartoons were in fact the most common show that showed violence, which emphasizes that violence in widely broadcasted to children.

 

Booking the Microphone

We booked a microphone recorder so we could upload one of our diary entries as an audio file. We did this so that we could show more of a variety of IT skills in our reflection process.
Here is our booking form as evidence:

Draft of Storyboard No.2

Storyboards

Log Sheets

Schedules and Booking Sheets

video reflection

Update

Today we have our day of filming before the half term. We plan to get as much done as well as brainstorm ideas and plans for new filming after half term as we will have one week left. We feel like the progress we've made so far is very good and we have been well organised. We now just need to keep up with our timings and make sure that we can get all our initial filing done by the deadline! :)

Update

Today we videoed some of our potential vox pop interviews, within the refectory in the sixth form college solihull. We hope to use these as well as other videos and interviews of which we wish to obtain over the coming weeks. We can add or change our questions now that we have used them and can improve them from person to person, with the feedback which they give/gave :)

Diary Entry 1

Camera Introduction

Expert and Voxpop Questions

Expert: Nick Waring (film/media teacher), Tom Krawec (psychology teacher), cineworld worker/manager, GAME worker

We are also planning on asking everyone/voxpops what their favourite genre is (horror, action, comedy, drama, romantic, scifi) 

Nick Waring:
We think that Nick would be an excellent choice for a expert interview as he can help us to get what we want from our documentary as he is a media studies teacher. Also his opinion is valid when it comes to our documentary topic as he may be knowledgeable about the amount of violence in films and its effect.
We would like to ask him these questions:
1) Do you think that violence (action and horror) films are popular and why?
2) Do you like violence in films?
3) do you think they have a influence on people in society?
4) Explain why

HMV: 
HMV would be a brilliant place to get our interviews from as they are obviously one of the largest UK stores to distribute films. They would be ideal for answering questions on the popularity ad the need for Action and Horror films, dependant on their sales and how common those kinds of DVD's are.
We would like to ask a member of staff these questions:
1) Do you know the sales for horror or action films?
2) Do you think they're rated inappropriately?
3) they're opinion on claims that films influences certain behaviour

Cineworld: 
We think that cineworld would be, again, ideal for our documentary because they can offer information about how often action and horror films are showing in the cinema and how many people go to see them. Also we could possibly try and find out what kind of age groups go to see theses kind of films and their opinon on the age ratings on action and horror films.
We would like to ask a member of staff these questions:
1) Action and Horror films showing? rating?
2) have you heard of crimes influenced by action and horror films?
3) ????

Tom Krawec:
Tom is a psychology teacher at our college so he would be easier to get hold of to ask questions to. We would aim to question him about aggression and perhaps violence which could give us the more biological or psychological reasoning behind it. We could then relate this to films and how that may bring on certain types of behaviour.
We would like to ask Tom these questions:
1) Knowledge of influence of films?
2) are you against ratings of horror/action films?
3) Do you think that it makes a major impact on behaviour?

Is violence getting worse? 

Vox Pop:
1) Favourite genre?
2) Do you think action/horror films have a influence on society?
3) Do you feel like you've been influenced?
4) do you think theres too much violence in films?
5) does it ever scare you?
 We chose these questions because we believe that they can enable us to receive short-ish answers that we can cut down to make their responses snappy for our documentary.

Film Club:
Monday 12.45 - 2.45

Location Recce

Location Recce

Risk Assessments

Reflection and Targets

following on from our recent Reflection, we feel as if the research we have carried out has helped us improve drastically as now we have an idea of how we want our documentary to look and the type of shots we want to include in our documentary. In addition to this we thinking of WHO we want as our expert interviews: film teacher, psychology teacher and members of public. 

From all the research we have carried out, we have learnt, as a group, that most documentaries include expert interviews giving facts and statistics followed by important information to support an argument of some sort a raised in the documentary. An example of this is made apparent in Super Size Me for example. Spurlock interviewed experts relevant to his argument about the fast food industry and how McDonalds food is having a drastic impact on society and health in general. Therefore, by having the experts we are thinking of including in our documentary (at this stage) will be somewhat beneficial, as our target audience will be left feeling informed and entertained. 

However, after doing research into previous documentaries it can be made clear that 'Super Size Me' is a different genre of documentary to what we want to do. We want to make a mixed documentary, as we feel this would not only be the easiest to make, but the most conventional. It allows us to be creative with the our film making but still include mostly all the features included in a documentary: interviews, voiceover, music, facts and stats, archival footage, recreational footage ect. Therefore making our work professional looking and interesting for our audience, as the target audience we wish to target, 17 years and over, get distracted and bored quite easily, this can be considered to be a challenge but we know this age group well as we are this age ourselves, so meeting this target should be quite straight forward. 

Targets: 

• plan out our shots so we can't start filming 
• draft a quick story-board so we know EXACTLY what we are filming
• send out e-mails to plan our expert interviews

Research into the Topic

Similar types of documentary (Supersize Me)

Research into similar styles of documentary

Mood Board

Our Mood Board can be used to help us identify themes in horror and action films so that we can use clips from films that can relate to our topic!

Proposal

Questionnaire Evaluation

Questionnaire

Audio Update

Orgnaising Expert Interviews

Idea 3 - Final idea

Idea 2

Idea 1

Our ideas and collection of images to help us with research

Gatekeeping and Construction of Reality

Reflection

To aid the production of our documentary we have done this research to enable us to identify the different characteristics of a stereotypical documentary.

The different theorists and modes we have identified can help us to structure our documentary when we get to the planning stages. It will also help us to pick a concept and possibly adapt a story line into our documentary to make it more characteristic of a professional documentary. This can lead us to developing a better relationship with the audience in the way that we can connect with them through our filming.

Strengths:

• We have worked well as a team to complete each of our set tasks on time
• We feel like we are adding sufficient detail to each post 

Improvements:

• I feel like we should try and aim to add detail that shows how we can use these posts to help us decide on our documentary style and themes
• More varieties of post software should be used

We believe that our research can help us to plan and create a brilliant documentary :)

Update

Focus group

Focus Group Questions

Discuss:

Would you watch a documentary on Celebrity’s influences on the general public? What would you expect it to be focused on?

Do you think the topic of phobias is interesting? Would you be interested in finding out more about it? Do you think it’s a good idea for our documentary?

Have you ever considered whether there’s an influence on people from horror films or action films? We want to do this for our documentary, would you watch it and do you think it would be gripping enough?

Any extra comments?

Narrative structure continued.

Structure from a2media14e

Narrative Structure

Narrative structure from benmcg

Shot Types

Key Conventions of a Documentary

Types of Documentary (the links made present in the slides are the followed by an embedment of the selected youtube clips)

Documentary Genre

Documentary genre:

A documentary is a nonfictitous film intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record. Documentaries main purpose has been to inform and educate, but in recent years the aspect of entertainment has become more important, especially with maintaining viewership of the documentary.

The term documentary was coined by ‘John Grierson’ in 1926, he coined the term when reviewing Robert Flaherty’s Moana.

Documentaries are now shown through television and there are channels specifically known for showing documentaries as opposed to other shows on their channel.

A problem over recent years that has been linked with more modern documentaries is that of disneyfication.  In Layman's terms, this refers to the dumbing down, of the documentary, or genre as a whole. 

Documentaries can be split into 6-sub categories, these being the following:

·         Poetic documentaires.

·         Expository documentaries

·         Observational documentaires.

·         Participatory documentaries 

·         Reflexive documentaries.

·         Performative documentaries.

Documentaries are not confined to just one of these sub-categories, but can have overlapping elements.

Explaining the Brief

Profile

(Left to right) an Alice sandwich with a Ben filling

This is our A2 media group. Alice and Alice met at AS in the same media group last year. one of the Alice's is currently in the same Film Studies class as Ben, but Alice and Ben have never met.

Roll on A2 Media!