Thursday, 11 February 2016

Production Crews: Roles & Responsibilities

Writer
They writer can turn a book into a film through taking the main parts of the book and transferring it into a screenplay to suit a film. They have to take into account that, unlike a book, the words aren't just sentences but have to express character development and personality. Also the fact that the words will be performed as dialogue and so have to convey the story to the audience through what the characters are going to say and do. However if the producer has hired the writer to write the film the producer can ask for rewrites, they my even ask other writers if they don't feel the script is working which happens a lot in big hollywood films. 


Composer 
A composer writes and produces the music for the film but also helps to pick out the non diegetic sounds. For example the bangs and crashes. Their job has a big impact on the emotions in the film as they can control the amount of tension, relaxation, excitement (etc) in scenes. Composers have some responsibility for how the film flows and therefore have to work with the directors in order to place the music in the correct scenes of the film. Finally the composer has to carefully select a team of musicians and editors to put together the different tracks.

Director
The main person in charge of the creativity of the film and how it will be presented to the audience.
During pre production the director casts actors and is able to make changes to the script to suit their personal preference and visions. They will storyboard the shots and choose locations, colour schemes, costumes etc. During production they are in charge of the set and work with the actors and other crew members to ensure their creative ideas are presented in the correct way. 

Head of casting 
They have knowledge of what makes a good actor/actress and what skills are needed, as a result they work with the director to help select the cast members. They look at participants skills, ability and past experience in order to make sure that the perfect people are selected for each role. They are responsible for interviewing and coming up with a fee to offer each cast member.

Producer
They are in charge of co-ordinating the shoot and be responsible for getting anything the film needs to make it happen such as cameras, locations and props. However they don't decide what these things are as the DOB will decide what cameras are needed and the director will decide on the location and the producer just finds these things and negotiate a price.

Camera Operator
They are in charge of filming all the shots in the film and therefore works alongside the director in order to select the correct camera angles, lenses and type of camera. They will have to ensure that all shots are finalised to perfection ensuring the shots take in the full effect of the locations, backdrops and background extras. As a result of this the camera operator also has to work with the director and props crew to make sure the background and props are able to be picked up through a camera.

Studio Logos; Similarities and Differences

Similarities

All  the logos I looked at used few colours in order to keep it simple, for example the film 4 logo only uses red and white. This is effective because although the logo is effective, it doesn't overwhelm the audience and as a result allows the studio to be recognisable. All these logos also show profession as they are edited and designed to perfection in order to make the studio unique and stand out. You are able to see that they have all been planned and developed through soft wear and when on screen they all come with some form of animation.

Differences

However it is clear that there're different codes and conventions that studios go by in order to create. For example a lot are inspired by mythical creatures for example Dreamworks 'the man on the moon' and Tristars 'Pegasus' . However others are inspired by monuments such as the statue of liberty. This can show us another difference as some logos don't reflect anything about the films that are produced however logos such as Disney (the castle) portray what the film is going to be about which in this case is Prince and Princesses. Another difference in the studio logos is the way in which the animation is done. For example Tristars has a simple zoom out animation as the wings of the Pegasus spread out however other studios have a more detailed animation for example Disney. This shows a castle with lights shining upwards, a flag waving in the wind and multiple fireworks going off in the background. This may also be linked to the idea of some studios designing their logo based on the genre of their films and other choosing not to. 



Monday, 1 February 2016

Christian Metz; Model of genre development

In 1974, Metz wrote a book named "Language and Cinema". The book looked at different genre trends and how it develops. He mentions how genre goes through different stages in order to progress.:
  1. The Experimental
  2. The Classic
  3. The Parody
  4. The Reconstruction 
Experimental 
 This is where the genre is established and different scenarios are experimented with. An example of this is in the late 70’s and early 80’s this stage began to employ psychological origins to the thriller genre. For example 'Scream'. 

Classic
An original piece of work which is developing the initial codes and conventions of the genre. For example in 1926 the Thriller movie genre was established  with silent thriller film. Alfred Hitcock (an amateur director) defined the thriller genre with his suspense thrillers with the success of  films such as ‘Rebecca’ (1940). Hitchock explored instrumental ideas whilst establishing the thriller movie genre which still has a major influence today. A classic example of thriller movies experimenting with sound, acting and visuals is 'Psycho'. 

Parody 
 In the 90's the development stage reached a point at which thriller scenes and movies used comedic effects which watered down expectations of the stereotypical film genre. A good example of this is the "scary movie" series. 

Deconstruction
The thriller has now fused with several other genres creating sub categories the most established being sci-fi/thriller or horror/thriller. This has allowed the thriller genre to evolve creating more variety within the genre field. 



Monday, 4 January 2016

My Studio logo development process


                                  
                                    

                                      We started with an image that we had in mind 
                                             which in this case was a crystal ball


We then added text of our studio name with a 
colour that went with the colours all ready existing on the image  in order to stick to the codes and conventions of studio logos 

We then played with the colours as we felt the brighter ones didn't portray the horror opening we were planning to create.

Finally we continued to play with the colours and darken them down till we were satisfied with our 
finished logo.

Saturday, 2 January 2016

Fllm Synopsis; My Friend Charlie

The film is based on a girl (played by Lily Grace Butler). It begins by showing a psychiatric interview session in place with the girl as an adolescent. Here it allows us to see that there was evidence to show her prediction of events that happened later (9/11, ISIS etc). As the story unfolds we see a flashback of a situation mentioned as evidence in the interview, showing her as a young girl with a baby sitter. The young girl gives of strange vibes from the start with blank facial expression, lack of response to questions and the fact she is home alone when the babysitter arrives at such a young age. The base of this flashback is the girl writing her own story, however this book appeared to be chillingly accurate, as the main character in this book is the babysitter. Going back to the interview after seeing this event we are able to understand that perhaps it wasn't the girl that thought of these ideas, but something telling her. Charlie.


Statistical Analysis of Film

From this table we are able to see that in the year 2013 64 thriller films were released and only 37 Horror (24 less). However Horror gained 5% of the total box office and Thriller only gained 2.5% showing that even though there were more thriller films than horror it didn't mean that thriller would be more popular with the public. We can also see the Horror earned 57.5 million and thriller only earned 29.1 million, this tells us that even though more thriller films are release horror films are much more profitable. However Animation had the highest % at the box office at 21.4%. This was Despicable Me 2 which means it could have been because the first movie was popular and the public wanted to watch the follow up, however it's most likely that the genre is Animation. This is because this genre can cater to all ages and not just adults (like horror) but children and the elderly as well. 


In this table we can see the amount of cinemas each genre of film was shown at. We can see that SciFi was shown at the most cinemas (422), which allows us to conclude that this genre has a higher demand from the public. Therefore this genre is shown at more places due to it gaining box offices more money, this could be because these films have now become more life like and special effects have advanced to make SciFi more exciting for audiences as it's something beyond our world. However war films are shown at the least amount of cinemas (14) which could be because they are the opposite to SciFi- unpopular and therefore not profitable for box offices.  It could also be because war films are boring as war is everywhere in the media and therefore war doesn't seem as interesting to watch.