Mary – Overview

Brief

Create the opening sequence of  film, focusing on shots to develop the character, narrative and atmosphere. We must not use any voiceover, dialog, or subtitles. The last 5s must be the title of the film.

Initial idea

We’ve settled on the idea of a dream world scene. The main character is trapped in a dream state, which they begin to explore and begin to see a sinister and scary side to it, in the form of masked men.

Rough story line

.Character wakes up on the bridge

.One masked man following her that she doesn’t notice

.Character moves location to the park

.Masked man is behind her

.Sees him and runs

.Falls down

.More masked men surround character

These are the shot list and storyboard that we were going to use, however after reflection we realised that we had gone too far off brief and decided to go for a completely different idea.

New Idea

In this idea we’ve tried to focus more on character development using various shots. The story itself is about a woman visiting a graveyard and leaving a letter on one of the graves.

In shot one we want to use the hedge and gate into the cemetery as a barrier to represent the separation they have from the person they’re visiting, also the imagery of life and death.

we thought the chapel would be a good symbol for help and guidance. By having a wide shot of them walking towards it we want to show that they believe in something, not necessarily religion but something that guides them through life.

Another shot we would like to use is of them walking along a path between graves stones to signify the death that surrounds them in their life.

By having our character move along the graves taking note of them we hope to convey the idea that they’ve lost someone and are trying to find them.

Evaluation

Overall I’m quite pleased with how this film turned out, we tried to make use of how we laid out our shots to represent certain ideas and develop character.

The first shot is of her going through the gate into the cemetery, I thought this was a good symbol to represent how seperated she is from her loved one. Also I feel that it helps to show the dividing line between life and death and how easy it is for her to cross over to the side of death.

The second shot of her walking down the path I think reflects that she’s surrounded by death because of the gravestones either side, but also how she’s guided by something in her life because of the church, not necessarily religion but some kind of moral and appreciation that this is all bigger than her.

The third shot of the film is of her stopping and looking up at the church. I think this can show that she’s a respectful and thoughtful person, by the fact that she’s taken time out of what is very important to her to stop and think.

The shot of the soaked branches swaying and drooping under the weight of the water I think is a nice metaphor of how burdened and sad she feels. This I think contrasts nicely with the a previous shot of the grave because of how solid it is, hopefully portraying that she has had a difficult past with a lot of bad memories yet she is remaining strong.

In the tracking shot of her looking at the gravestones we wanted to show that she’s completely lost this person now and how disconnected they are now.

The two close ups, one of the envelope the other of her face looking at it, I wanted to convey the idea that whatever is inside this envelope is of great significance to her.

I wanted the overall tone and colour of the images to be quite dark to reflect what she’s going through at the moment and the world she’s in. From shot to shot I think the colours match fairly well although they’re not as consistent as i’d of liked them to be, this is because I ran into some difficulties while doing colour correction. The lighting of most of the shots was fairly consistent so wasn’t to hard to adjust, others were particularly dark so look like they’re lacking colour. Also as she got closer to the grave the shots became a lot greener, I found this hard to change without making the shots look odd. To solve this we need to think more carefully about what settings we use on the camera and pay attention to how this effects the lighting of each shot. However this was difficult to do on the day of filming as we were extremely limited for time and didn’t want to damage the camera by being out in the rain for too long.

I’m really pleased with the audio of this film, even though it’s quite simple I think it works well. The song I chose was ‘Pyramid’ by radiohead, I think this was a good choice as it’s got a very sad and dreamy feel to it, while avoiding being too much of a cliche. The sound effect of the rain I ended up changing to a lighter one after Simon pointed out how it didn’t match with the rain we were seeing, i’m happy with this decision as it seems to work much better being more subtle.

Simon also pointed out how he didn’t think the title font matched the feel of the film, I then changed it to what it is now and think it works much better. The typeface I used is quite similar to the writing you would expect to find of a gravestone and also the little heart I added helped to tie it in with the writing on the envelope.