Look Back On First Day and First Ideas

Today was the first day back at college after the Christmas holidays, however, were promptly greeted with the spring terms project a film trailer. We were first shown some examples of past years trailers followed by discussing key project dates for example, when it’s all due in, the production folder is due in on the 13th of February and our personal websites are due in on Wednesday the 27th. After this we were put into teams, I am with Joe Payne, Taryn and Kes. I believe we can do well as a team as Kes and I are both really into our cameras and filming. So, I quickly realised, it was possible that we could discuss about say cameras, audio, locations etc… I decided to take on a more organised role being the producer. My job is to make sure the planning stage runs smoothly, make sure my team members are meeting the deadlines I set for research and help our director Taryn plan shots, as I will also be the DoP. Kes will be on the lighting and sound while Joe will oversee research and be the camera B operator using my 2nd GH4 when we are filming. I believe we are all happy with our roles and we can all definitely make a Stella final piece.

We had 2 main ideas and we have chosen as a group to take the 2nd option forward which is a trailer for a film. Below is the description of the film.

Girl grows up with a box that her mother left when she died. When 18 years old she receives a letter detailing the nature of the box and what's in it. on specific dates, she opens the box but realises it's layered and, on each layer, there is a clue she must figure out before moving onto the next layer. In the end, the last layer reveals a secret her mother had.

Below, was our first idea.

Final parent dies, 3 children realise how much money would be left to them and that they would inherit it. The children all have different personalities which is where the conflict between them unfolds and the story begins from here.

I personally believe both ideas have their strong points and their weaknesses, for example, I focus more on beauty shots in my filming and I would find it hard to incorporate this skill of mine in the first option with a film about an inheritance. The shots I think would be duller compared to the second idea we had but don’t get me wrong I think given more time and thinking we could make a good trailer for this first idea as we would have only needed 3 locations, whereas the second idea would need five or possibly six. This is its downside, I believe we are going to have to try hard to make a good trailer for the second option that makes sense, but we all wanted a challenge and decided to go for option 2. We did this as it would allow me to capture more beauty shots and also make the most of filming in possibly 6 locations.

Below is some planning work we had completed in our lesson.

Below are some location we had come up with in the lesson. (This picture also has our recce plan on as its from a future post).