Pre-production report and documentation

'JAMS', my media group for this coursework task chose to base our opening sequences on the thriller genre, other than the reasoning for chosing this genre previosuly explained in my blog 'Group meeting' we chose to use this genre because certain members of our group including myself had previous experience in creating media products of this genre. Also as previously mentioned in my blog 'Group meetings' we researched and then used codes and conventions of other thrillers styles to create our coursework piece, our main influence was 'The Blair Witch Project'.

'The Blair Witch Project': The narrative is presented as a documentary pieced together from amateur footage, filmed in real time. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project

In our opening sequence there will only be two characters, the main focus is on 'Rory' (Anthony Johnson), the characters will be established in a range of shots including tracking and panning shots. There will be no dialogue in our film as the two characters only briefly 'meet' on their seperate walks through 'the woods', we believe that this lack of dialogue makes the opening sequence seem more realistic and gives it an overal more eerie atmosphere. Due to the lack of talking that will be feature in our product during the editing process we will focus especailly on enhancing the background noises and adding in music that will create the correct match-on-action. We have now proceeded to watch several 'thriller' films to make sure that all of our decisions match the conventions of a typical 'thriller', we found that 'The Silence Of The Lambs, 1991 follows a lot of the same conventions as our piece.

opening title of 'The Silence Of The Lambs'.

We started our pre-production work off with the writing of our treatment of which I did the majority of the work due to the fact that I had previous experience in writing treatments and was confident in doing the work. Despite myself doing the majoirty of the work, the rest of the group sat with me whilst I did so in order to give me verbal information and support incase I missed anything out and also to further their knowledge on writing treatments for next year. The next task we set out to complete was the 'shot list', this has to be done next as we needed the shot list to proceed in our task and to know exactly what we were going to film and how long for. The task of creating the 'shot list' was attributed mainly to David, although we left him to do this task, we stumbled across a problem when we got to the stages of filming, so the shot-list did had to be completely re-created, also due to fact that we had to film in the original time slot we had to shoot and then adapt the next part of the shot list ready for filming, this whole process because of this took us an elongated two weeks when infact we could have been filmed within a week.

The next step in our pre-production was to create our cast, crew, costume and equipment list which was by far the easiest part of all of the pre-production work as all it entailed was the creation of a list of the protagonists in the film (their character name and actual name), who did what in terms of filming, 'the filming crew' and the equiptment that what we needed make the film happen, including props. We did this piece of work as a group as it was easier for us all to have an input whilst one person types as this piece of work took the least work and research.
Our risk assessment was next to be created, this was done by myself and Sam as he was confident in identifying and how best to solve the risks. Due to the fact that we were filming in woods near our school there were a lot of risks to identify. Once we had completed the risk assessment we looked over it as a group and added in and changed accoridng to other members of the groups ideas. We have no script in our pre-preduction as there was no dialogue and therefore no need for a script.

The penultimate part of our pre-production work was the location reccees, this part possibly took the most time and patience, it involved taking photos from one point to the next of an area, the photos were then edited and placed ontop of eachother to create one image. We then had to write about power sources and lighting.

The final part of our pre-production task was to get the correct permission from the correct people to film on Kings Langley common on the desired days. In order to do this we rang watford police station and explained in detail what our fiming task would involve, they then accepted out filming dates and gave us a refrence number, URN 180 incase we had any troubled or were asked in future if we had permission due to the content of our film. We also then rung Kings Langley council and followed the same routine, they also agreed and gave us permission in the form of an email.