The Actors

Snow White character - Sarah Adams
Male character One - Rich Purvis
Male character Two - Dom Butcher Greg Stride

Micro Element - Editing

Transitions will always be used to go from one shot to the next, to create a dream like pace. Except from the three jump cuts at the end, in which it is revealed that SW has inexplicably come back to life/ is a ghost (mysterriiouuus). At the start and finish, it was always a fade from/to black, connoting a negative atmosphere.

Sound will fade in and out. When overlapping the Prokofiev piece over Thomas Newman, there is no transition, and it just fits in smoothly until suddenly stops as male character two's throat is slit, creating an impact/ shock for the audience.

We want to make the opening as continuous as possible. We will use several techniques such as match on action to ensure this. The feedback about our first draft tells us that some of the clip was a bit confusing.

We will not be including any extensive visual effects in the opening as we feel this is not very realistic. Additionally, if we were to add effects later on in the film (actually after the opening) to delve more into the supernatural, then we would want to keep some mystery during the opening by not revealing what might happen. If we were to have a DVD blurb, trailer or poster then they would not reveal that SW came back to haunt her killer. We did change the colouring in the footage to give the opening a more Burton - esque feel as off colour shots are a convention of his style.

The titles used will not be too flashy, for an extreme example, rainbow coloured text that bounces around the screen. We feel that simple titles would be best for the cast and production team, for example Times New Roman or Georgia. The colours will be red and black, again, black is very simple yet gothic. The apple in the sequence is red as it is iconic and stands out more than green (or those weird speckled apples). We are going to use more elaborate and gothic titles for the fake production company's name (Red Apple Studios) and for the title of the film (Snow White: Poisoned Core). For example;

Original Shotlist

• Long shot of male character one standing at grave side
• Long shot of Snow White (SW) character waiting for male character one (MO)
• Medium shot of SW and MO talking
• Long shot of couple walking, framed through doorway
• Medium shot of couple walking under arch
• Mid shot of MO stood by doorway, SW walks through doorway + MO scares her
• Close up of couple standing face to face smiling, zoom into wall
• Over the shoulder shot looking at SW and male character two (MT) talking. MO turns and walks out of shot
• Medium shot of MT, MO enters frame + kills him
• Close up of knife at neck
• Mid shot of MO handing SW the apple
• Close up of handing SW the apple
• Mid shot of SW putting apple to mouth
• Close up on SW eating apple
• Mid shot of her choking
• Low angle shot of MO looking at SW. He walks out of frame.
• High angle shot of SW led on floor. She drops apple out of her right hand
• Close up of apple rolling away
• Back to long shot of MO at grave side. He walks out of shot on right hand side.
• Sudden medium shot of mysterious figure behind tree
• Another jump, closer to subject but not a close up
• Jump to close up of subject, we can now see it is SW.

Micro Element - Mise en Scene - Lighting and Colour

For lighting, we did not use any lamps or reflective disks as we did not really delve into this area. We used natural lighting, I felt this added to the vermilistude of the piece. Additionally, on the day of re - shoots, it was very gloomy, this contributed to the feeling of melancholy and other negative emotions of the characters. This is likely to have affected the audience's outlook and expectations, or so we hope.

Our Basic Process

1) Watch several film openings and research the conventions of openings and title sequences.
2) Think of an inspiration (In our case - Tim Burton)
3) Recearch Tim Buron, his films and anything else of importance, e.g - music, conventions of genre...
4) Come up with several plots and choose the best one
5) Create a storyboard, characters, a script, a title, a shotlist et. cetera.
6) Organise actors, costume, location and props
7) Organize the date of first shoot and anything accosiated with it, for example, book the camera and tripod.
8) Shoot
9) Upload footage into a new event on IMovie
10) Edit. This included researching sound effects and music.
11) Look at first draft and write down any changes needed
12) Organize re - shoots
13) Upload newer footage and edit
14) Export and hand in :s

Throughout our process, we were also blogging and creating a website for our presentation.

Some Useful Sites

Recently I stumbled upon some great sites for media theory;

http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php
http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/ms20/gloss.html

Schedules

This is our first shoot schedule, it's very brief.

"12:00 - All people involved with costume and make up preparations (you know who you are) arrive at Sarah's house.
1:00 - Arrive at ruins and meet Aimee there
3:00 - Finished filming ruins. Arrive at Clifton after lift up there in parents car
5:30 - Finish filming in Clifton and go home"

Second shoot schedule

"3:00 - All people involved in costume and makeup arrive at Sarah's house
4:00 - Arrive at ruins
5:30 - Finished filming at ruins and now filming in Weston - in - Gordano (WIG for short)
6:30 - Finish filming in WIG and go home"