Birds Trailer - Storyboard/production day

With Team Reem not being able to get hold of our location until tomorrow. we took the opportunity to complete paperwork and make sure the script is polished. Our action plan for the day was...

• Go over the script and complete it.
• storyboard
• look for music and sounds
• complete paperwork (Location and Actors release forms.)
• complete titles
• production journal for today

We also created a shooting schedule, now we know and have booked our location.

Tuesday the First Of May, we will be filming in K Block all day.

Thursday, we will be reviewing footage and recording 

The following is our storyboard...

this scene is a close up of a hospital gurney going down a corridor, it has to be a close up to avoid showing that we are clearly not using a gurney. We are using a trolley and throwing a white sheet on it.












The next is two nurses walking down the corridor, we tried this in various different ways (side angle etc) but we went with the two nurses walking towards camera and then stepping over.

The next is a slow zoom down a long, bleached white corridor.

Originally we was going with a close up of merchandise, represented by this shot of my notebook signed. But we then thought of a better shot, a shot of Alex sat in a empty corridor waiting to see if Jean is okay.

We have various scenes in which the camera pans along the hospital bed and Jean, these few are examples of them. The mid shot of Jean...

The close up of Jean's face...

...we experimented with this shot which makes for an interesting panning shot from her foot to her face.

This is a close up of a hand checking the drip, we wanted to have Jean in the shot as well for realism but didn't want the drip in the rest of the shots due to it having to be lifted up by one of us each time.

These are close up's of Jean's face, we took them from each different angles. We also did this for another similar shot in which we have a close up of Jean as her eyes open.

This is one of the "death" scenes, a slow pan of a window as a bloody hand hits the glass and slowly slides down it.

This is a shot of Alex barricading the room. We tried various shots such as close up's and long shots.

And this is our final shot, of Jean's eyes opening up.

Birds Remake Production Journal - Day 4

So then the last day of planning came, and it turns out I only needed a little time away to recharge because when I came in, I managed to form the makings of our trailer, with a quick conversation between two unseen charcters we had the basis of our new draft two trailer. And with Cannon researching and creating his own titles, he managed to come up with the perfect titles for us...

This is one of the quick ones that Cannon did while researching and practising and experimenting with Motion (cannon printed out the rest), this is the title with a simple light running through it.

...Cannon created a heart monitor style in Motion to act as our titles. He draws a crude outline of the "blips" like this...

...he straightened them out and then began to create the titles and production names.

As for our new ideas, the premise is that the trailer is told through the mouths of two nurses working in a hospital that our main character Jean has been admitted too after having the car crash, instead of showing the obsession, and the crash etc, we tell it through these women. We began by researching the hospital enviroment, and started creating a props list of items we will have to bring in to create out very own "hospital" room, college already has those long white corridors that you find in hospitals, with a few white sheets and a make shift gurney we shall have a room in which Jean is lying unconcious.

We are right back on track with our trailer now, luckily. Katie is getting her hands on most of the props needed, Cannon has our trailer, and we have our location, the only thing to do before filming is the music.

Bird Trailer - Day 3

I almost don't even want to comment on today, but here it goes. Planning was going perfectly, we was even a little cocky and looking into titles to have pre-hand before we came to editing. I was filling out all the paperwork, such as risk assessment forms etc. Then when it came to a sit down with Janine, she told us that she was worried we haven't planned the green screen moments. We was then encouraged to film around that crash, which resulted in the big red "reset" button being pressed on our trailer. This was in the last hour an half of the day, so we left that day with zero new ideas and the planning week coming ever closer to being over.

Birds Remake Production Journal - Day Two

Team Reem's action plan for the 24th of April goes as the following


Action Plan
Planning what goes into our trailer for the first half of the day.
Katie will then storyboard the trailer
Danny will script the dialogue
Cannon will work with Motion to begin creating Titles, ETC.


All of this was accomplished and all in all, today was a pretty productive day, we now have quite a clear idea of what is going to go into the trailer and what it will look like. The difficult shots, such as the car crash has been discussed and a great solution has been found, I mentioned the tricks of trailers in my research, one being dialogue being dubbed over another scene, and the camera cutting away from the action early to make the audience want more, this is what we do with our car crash, cut from the action and have sound effects etc play over.


I also made a list of the Assets that will need to be done by the end of this brief and have been using them as a checklist for our team.


Assets
Mind Maps (This was done in the first day, not sure if I mentioned it in my Journal but it will be handed in on paper.)
Pre Production Logbook
Identifying Resources
Finance and Legal Issues
Casting (This was again sorted on the first day of planning, I will be playing Alex, and Katie will be playing Jean. We came to the decision of including the little sibling today as well, this came about when story boarding. Cannon will be playing the part of the little brother.)
Location Decisions (We discussed this the first day and knew we would need a car and a homely environment, during the 2nd day we also talked a lot more about the dream sequences, particularly one were Jean is in a hospital bed, the room we use as a bedroom can double up as this with a simple change of sheet and a costume.)
Script (The script has come along nicely and has been completed.)
Camera Script
Storyboard (Katie completed this whilst the Script was being written.)
Permission Forms
Risk Assessments
Copyright Clearances
Shooting Schedules.

Birds Remake Trailer - Production Journal - Day One

Today was the first day of our trailer brief. We all got put into groups and took a vote on which of the Birds Remake that was pitched the week before gets the trailer treatment, Wingad's, Jack's, Manuel's, Nathan's and My idea was selected. I was put into a team with Katie and Cannon to work on Jack's adaptation. We started the day in a quiet room looking through the treatment Jack had written for us, we broke this down bit by bit discussing the areas we would have to avoid to fit the requirements, this is how that breakdown/meeting went.


The Trailer will be...

• 1 minute in length.
• Contain at least 4 lines of dialogue
• Contain no more than three people.
• Contain voice overs
• Contain text/graphics on screen.
• Contain no more than three shots of birds.
• It can contain visual references to birds (such as feathers.

Breakdown Of Script: - Set in Cape Hock

• Can't use scene of her being fired

This is due to us coming to the decision that we shouldn't waste the third character on a small character, such as the boss, or the hotel owner (which is mentioned in a little while.)

• Car Accident - KEY SCENE! This is also our first use of birds.
• Scrap the hotel bit. Instead, have it were she wakes up at Alexander's house

This is also due to the fact that this will add another location to our schedule.

• Asked to hang out by Eva.

We still aren't sure whether to include this part in the trailer, it involves making the little sister (Eva) as our third character.

• Jean is desperate to stay around and hang out with Alex
• Attack on the school

With scenes like this, I do think of how we would go about shooting, this is something we will have to discuss as a team at a further date, my first thoughts are to make the trailer more of a romantic comedy, so to avoid casting a lot of people and "big" scenes, such as the attacks.

• Suspicion towards Jean after the attack
• Jean and Eva head to Alexanders house
• Jean begins to hallucinate believing that the birds are her family, she lets them inside the house.
• While Jean is being attacked, she hallucinates that she is in hospital bed.

We ran with the idea of hallucinations a lot during the first day of plan, it is a key componant to this adaptation, and will be touched upon and worked on at later dates.

What We Are Going To Include In Our Trailer

• Voice Over

This is imperative, and will be scripted at a later date, I will talk about this in my research.

• Establish that she is an obsessive fan

I touch upon this in my mindmap. It is difficult to establish this without showing the character to be a bit of a unsympathetic, unnerving character.

• Car Accident (First Bird Scene)
• Jean Meeting Alex
• Dream Sequence - Hospital Bed

                                      - Hallucinations

Research
For research, I will be predominantly talking about what I saw in The Dark Knight Rises trailer but note that I found this is a lot, if not, all trailers I watched.

Trailers always tend to start with something like this, indicating a age rate on the following footage.

It will then cut to shots of companies...

...and more companies...

...I counted, it was 10 seconds of companies and logos hitting the screen before I saw anything from the actually movie. This is to credit companies that worked on it, and in the case of The Dark Knight Rises, show the company that owns the franchise.

It then cut to scenes, and footage from the movie. I found that trailers have a trick, in which they dub over dialogue with another scene, in DKR's case, it is establishing shots off Gotham City, I feel like this is to get away from just showing a scene from a movie, it is showing a snippet, plus, it also gives the editor of the trailer permission to use another characters reaction shot to dialogue from another scene to build on what is being said.

Trailers also show big names attached to it, we can clearly see the actors who are involved from the footage we are shown, but directors also get shown, as well does sentences such as "from the Producers of Transformers". Again, this is entice people to go out and watch it.

As for the footage itself, trailers I watched tended to follow a bit of a formula. Start with story, showing snippets of that story, maybe with text or dialogue to help, then build the action, tension, with a build up of music and fast paced shots, again with text hitting the screen to help. This defiantly has to be something we look into more and work on when it comes to our own work.

Trailers also give a release date, they always seem to be vague "This Winter" "Next Summer" tends to get used quite a lot. T.V trailers tend to be the ones that give a release date as they are released nearer to the date.

One final bit of text I found myself seeing a lot is this one, again it gives a vague release date but also informs whether it will be released in 3D etc, in some cases, I found a tag-line to finish of the trailer.

The Birds Remake - Cafe Scene - Draft One

Over the last few days, we have been script writing (all my scripts are on Adobe Story, I have printed most out, ask for the others.) Today, one of our tasks was to rewrite a scene from the Birds, it was the cafe scene, meaning there was going to be a lot of characters, and a lot of dialogue. At first, the concept of using my very own idea and characters from my remake of the birds pitch never even crossed my mind, meaning that I have two drafts of this rewrote scene.
The following is an audio file of myself, Wingad and Whitehead, reading through my first draft (the best we could) hopefully we will get round to recording my 2nd draft.