Film Schedule

Where? : It will be filmed in one of the offices in the school and in another area possibly in town. When: 4 days in December. Around the middle of the month. Continuity: We plan to shoot it on 8th, 11th, 12th and 15th of December. This will be filmed after school, as we need semi-darkness.

Film Synopsis

A victim of economic downturn, John Smith is made redundant and is plunged into severe debt. The only method for him to survive is crime and this changes his life causing him to be constantly under pressure and stress. It starts with minor crimes like shoplifting, but then it evolves into more serious crimes like burglary and bank robberies. His intention is never to hurt anyone physically. He is someone who just takes the goods and goes, he’s not a killer.

During an armed robbery a person appears who’s not expected and falls victim to the startled Smith. When investigating into the murder starts, Smith is not found to be one of the suspects. However, due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time an ex- convict, who has turned his life around, is found guilty and sentenced for life. Smith runs away and one who knows the truth searches him out looking for revenge unless Smith confesses. Smith can’t go back or he’ll be caught and maybe face worse consequences.

After 7 years of running Smith is run over by the one who knows the truth and left for dead, but he is saved and the experience is a turning point convincing him to turn himself in. It shows that there was still a part of him that contained pity and regret. He is jailed for life and can’t turn back time and save the person who he killed, but at least he has regained some self respect and no longer feels the guilt of leaving the innocent person to rot in jail.

Film Project Pitch

Thought provoking, feature length thriller set in the suburbs during economic collapse. John Smith, a previously average man, is separated from society by the tragic events from his past. Can he rectify his mistake and find forgiveness or will he be overcome by the guilt, tragedy and self pity?

Storyboard

Preliminary Task Evaluation

This is an evaluation of the preliminary task set as a practice for the main filming task. We were given a sequence that we had to follow which was:

Character approaches door
Character opens door
Character sits down in chair opposite Character 2
They share two lines of dialogue

We also had to include shot/reverse shot and match on action techniques as well as follow the 180° rule.

The match on action shots were the opening of the door (slides 2 and 3), when the “wigman” got burned (slides 9 and 10) and the running of the villain (slides 10 and 11). The shot/reverse shot was the conversation between the two characters in slides 6 and 7. These two slides showed clearly the following of the 180° rule because they were filmed from within the 180° region. The soundtrack fit along with the video and was synchronised with the clips. We managed to edit it easily and it did not take long because we did not have restrictions such as a time limit.

There are some obvious negatives that I can point out. Two of the shots (5 and 11) were shot sideways, which was very inconvenient because we did not find this out until we started editing and by then it was too late. Not all of the match on action shots were edited smoothly and that was due to not paying enough attention to small detail.

Within this sequence we represented the themes of injustice and violence clearly through the villain’s actions against “wigman.” The use of the character “death” was a last minute decision to show the dead character more explicitly and to add some humour, which was anchored by the sitcom laughter in the soundtrack. This film was shown to not be totally serious.

This task was simple and we managed to get through the problems of technology we were not used to quickly and ended with a simple but efficiently effective composition.