Main Task Treatment

Title - Obsessed

Genre - Physiological Thriller

Duration – 2 Minutes 7 seconds

Audience – 15 – 25 & 25 - 40

Plot – A mysterious girl follows and stalks a young man documenting and taking photographs of his daily life . The girl becomes enraged as she cannot have her love and ultimately ends up kidnapping the man. She keeps him tied up in an abandoned mill where she performs various different methods of torture upon him to express the pain she feels.

Suggested Elements

· Performance – No dialouge and limited diagetic sound

· Costume – Blood soaked t-shirt and large black coat

· Props - Weapons (screwdriver, large meal pole etc) and a diary

· Key Locations – Abandoned Mill in Ancoats

· Opening credits – Prestige Worldwide Productions in association with colour tech studios, Mark McManus, Jessica Broadbent, Siobhan Ruane & Maria Nicholas.

Recording Days

4^th – 25^th March

Deadlines

Filming deadline – 25^th March

Editing & completion of the blog – 15^th April

Final initial ideas for main task.

After all our ideas and planning into different genres, as a group we have decided we want to do a physcological thriller. Our film will revolve around an obsessed female taking a male who she has been stalking for many months hostage. This idea was mainly influenced by the following films.

Se7en film opening
A 1995 thriller about two detectives trying to solve a case of linked murders done in the theme of the seven deadly sins. We like this film especially at the beginning as it didn't give much as away and kept us the viewer guessing about the real plot of the movie, we would like our film opening to be like this.

Law Abiding Citize film opening
A frustrated widower takes the law into his own hands and tries to get back at the people that took his life. This film has storyline which can be easily followed but makes the viewer think about what is going on, this is exactly how we would like our audience to feel whilst watching our film opening .

Hostel film opening
The film takes place in a abadonned warehouse, where a man is held hostage and tortured. We felt this was extremely gritty and interesting which is a theme we wanted running through our film and as the film used many different camera angles it gave us ideas on what angles to use and how to effectively edit these shots together.

Initial Ideas For Main Task (3)

After further discussing our film opening we felt it was unsuitable to do a comedy based video due to the technical limitations of sound on the cameras, and also due to the lack of different camera angles found in comedy openings. We now had two more concepts which had originated from a team brainstorm. Our first idea was a horror style film opening.

Whilst initially discussing the horror/comedy concept we came up with a collection of different and interesting ideas for the horror element of the video. We decided to recycle some of our more interesting horror ideas from the "Scary movie" style concept and impliment them into our new concept. We decided we were going to have a hostage tied to a chair, who had been tortured and was under some form of questioning. We felt this would be intense and interesting to our audience. We wanted to use a variety of different shots such as an extreame close ups on an eye looking around panicked. We felt this would give a sense of panic.

Se7en film opening
A 1995 thriller about two detectives trying to solve a case of linked murders done in the theme of the seven deadly sins. The film helped especially at the beginning as it didn't give much as away and kept us the viewer guessing about the real plot of the movie.

Our second idea we came up with from the team brainstorm was a physological thriller. We liked this idea as it would allow us to be creative with plot details and to experiment with unusual camera angles. We began to look into "physcological thriller" films as the beginning of these films that didn't include much dialouge and challenged the audience to think. This appealed to us because we didn't want just the "predictable" scary, horror film. The films which appealed to us to match our prefrences were "Shutter Island" and "Law Abiding Citizen". The plot of these two films are complex and very challenging to the mind of the viewer. This influenced us to create an opening sequence of our film to the genre of a "physcological thriller".

Shutter Island film opening
Set in the 1950's set around a mental institution named 'Shutter island' You follow two so called detectives solving what they think is the case of a missing person.

Initial Idea For Main Task (2)

We then came up with a new idea which was a horror combined with comedy. The main reason we came up with this was the inspiration of the 'Scary Move' film. As a group we decided on different roles we could play. We decided we would have 3 characters sat on a sofa having a fun film night, with popcorn and sweets. Then two characters decide to go and get some pillows and blankets from upstairs, while the last character on the sofa receives a frightening text. But the frightening text said 'I am going to grill you', instead of 'kill' creating comedy. The camera then changes from inside the house, to the 'scary' character outside watching in. This character would be dressed in a penguin outfit which would also create the comedy for the audience as a penguin outfit isn't exactly scary. We decided not to do this idea in the end because after watching past work which combined comedy and horror, we felt these were the weaker videos, and we also felt it would be too heavily dialogued.



Scary Movie 3 film opening
We felt this was still funny and would also allow us to experiment with mise en scene. We also felt we could get many different camera angles out of this. The film 'Scary Movie 3' is presented about scary events that happen in a house, with humor involved. But we felt we couldn't get the comedy and horror effectively into the piece in the two minutes available, this finalized our decision to change genre.

Initial Ideas For Main Task (1)

Our initial idea was a comedy revolving around two young entrepreneurs. We thought of the idea that, the characters could be pitching a new style of Mp3 player named the "Podi" a deliberate spoof of an"ipod". During the pitch there was going to be a series of disasters. Instead of 'cool' background music playing from a CD player "Tragedy" by the pop-band "Steps" was going to accidently play. However, after going through our ideas we felt this idea would be too heavily dialouge based. We also felt that it didn't feel like a film opening, but rather a later scene in a film. We therefore decided we were not going to use this idea, but were still keen to do a comedy.

Step Brothers film opening
This concept was heavily influenced by the film "Step Brothers". The film revolves around two brothers who are extreamly immature and flawed. In one scene Brennan and Dale take job interviews, for which they perform very poorly, being rude to their two potential employers, they also produce a business pitch which goes awfully wrong. We felt it was extreamly funny and interesting. However we noticed that there wasnt a great deal of different camera angles. This contributed to the final decision not to produce this idea. We noticed that on most openings to comedies there isn't initially much humour.

Analysis of preliminery

We learnt to do variety of different things while completing the preliminary; which all helped us immensely. Learning to use the tripod was crucial to the preliminery task, and will be for the main task. The tripod has helped us achieve a number of different shots that without the tripod we would of found it very difficult to achieve, for example a pan shot. We then were able to create all of our shot list shots using the tripod. I feel this task has improved ourselves and will benifit our film opening when we next use the equipment. Most importantly we learnt how to work in a group productively, we collectively had many ideas and we had to ensure we compromised, and that everyone's idea was given a fair chance. We then took the ideas we thought were best, to create our piece as a group

Camera Shots

We used a variety of different camera angles throughout the filming of are preliminary task. For example: “ Medium pan shot”, we had trouble filming this shot at first, as we had to time the camera to the pace of the actors walk. However we were then able to film the shot by slowing the actors walk down. We also included an “Extreme close up” of a hand opening a door handle to break up the shots and to make it a lot more interesting to the viewer. Another shot we included was the “Shot reverse shot” we stuck to the 180 degree line however we found the shot reverse challenging as we only had one camera so to solve this we filmed the sequence a number of times from both angles.

Sound
All our sound on the preliminary task was “Diagetic” or “Ambient” sound. This includes footsteps and the creek of the door. We also had “Stichomythic” dialog between the student and the teacher. This shows the viewer the plot of the piece. On final cut pro we used the sound of other scene (footsteps) and pasted it over another scene which had background noise of people talking, this also helped to link one shot to another shot; the footsteps acted as a “Sound bridge”.

Editing
We linked all our different camera angles together to create fast cut seamless editing to help make the sequence flow and create tension. We added “Parallel” editing of the student hands nervously twitching in the classroom. On final cut pro we used the sound of other scene (footsteps) and pasted it over another scene which had background noise of people talking, this also helped to link one shot to another shot; the footsteps acted as a “Sound bridge”.

Mise-en-scene
As we had to film in the college we decide to correlate the story of the piece to the college. This included: Classrooms, long corridors, desks, student and a teacher.

Preliminary Task SHOT LIST

Camera Shots

1. Establishing shot of the corridor
2. Long shot of "Mark"
3. Close up on "Mark's" feet
4. Medium tracking shot
   
5. Close up (Parrell Editing) On hands
6. Long shot from behind
7. close up on door handel
8. Medium tracking shot
9. Close up on hands
10. Pan tilt shot
11. Meduim shot reverse shot

The Preliminary Task Video !

Our premiminary task had a very simple narrative which involved a teacher telling off a pupil for not doing her coursework. We included a variety of different shots some of which included a close-up of the pupils hands, a shot reverse shot between both the teacher and pupil and a long shot of the teacher walking up the corridor.

Throughout the task we ensured we stuck to the 180 degree rule; this meant we only filmed on one half of an imaginary line as to ensure there was no confusion to the audience as to which side each actor was sat at.

We learned alot from this task as we were able to shoot a variety of different shots effectively. We also gained an understanding of "Final Cut Pro" the editing software which we used to piece are footage together.