CLC Sound Workshop

For a trip on Wednesday, we went to the City Learn Centre in Clapham where we focused on sound in movie making. This included looking at different types of microphones (which each have different functions and work differently

 Some of the equipments which we had the chance to experiment with included:

BOOM MIC

A boom microphone is a directional microphone mounted or attached to a pole or arm. It is mainly used in film and television, a boom microphone frees the hands of actors or reporters while allowing them to enjoy the amplified audio of a traditional microphone.

using this specific instrument, we as a group acknowledged the fact that Boom mics were best used when there was a group of people talking - the sound quality was clear on the head phones and it also reduces the stress of having wires all over you.

Merantz

Another equipment which we used at the CLC was the Merantz. This was another piece of equipment which we found would be very useful for our own personal films -  it enables you to connect a microphone to one of the ports as well as inserting your headphones so you are able to record and hear sound clearly.

After carefully going through a variety of various sound equipment at the CLC - we as a group established that these two were the ones we found most appropriate for our film. We believe a Boom Mic would be suitable for our film as their are many actor and most of the shots are group shots therefore should be able to record the discussion much clearer.

Questionaire

In order to find out what people thought about certain types of films, i created this questionnaire.
We plan to ask a minimum of twenty people, as we think there will be sufficient people, so we can compare results. Any less than twenty participants may not give us an accurate result.

We plan to upload the results of the questionnaire in due course. 

I decided to create a moodboard consisting of various films that I felt had relevant themes. The films within this mood board I found to be particularly interesting and I felt our group could use it as a stimulus for our idea.

I also conducted a focus group with eight people of similar ages to the characters within our film . i found that after compiling the notes i had  made during the focus group, most people felt they could relate to the characters myself and Adeel had created. Members felt very strongly about the character 'Parham' a member of the group added " everyone knows a someone like that". This information made us feel comfortable in the knowledge that we would not have to alter any of our characters. The plot was also very popular with the focus group members felt that it was definently something they would enjoy watching and it was an interesting concept in the portrayel of isolation. Noone withn our focus group had seen a short film and or knew where they could go to watch one. six out of eight members strongly expressed there love for comedy as there preffered genre. 

Genre Research-Drama

Our short film is going to be a genre-based one which will be drama. We thought that doing drama will be good as it focuses on emotional characters and the situations which they come across.


Drama is mostly based on realism within the world. This could deal with everyday character struggles and are can usually cover a negative portrayal of today's society. But how is ours a film drama, and not a thriller or even a comedy? This is because we do not have any humorous parts, or moments where we want the audience to feel frightened. There are no special effects used in our film as we are aiming purely for realism.


Some famous drama films are the Shawshank Redemption which is about a banker's struggles throughout his two decades in prison, Brokeback Mountain which is about a relationship between two men, Wall Street and Slumdog Millionaire which is a romance with dramatic elements in it. The similarities between all of these films is that they are all about struggles within either a society or a small group of people. Our film is going to be about a problem within one person only. 

Film Idea & Inspirations

We have finally decided on our idea. It's going to be about a teenager who at first appears to be yet another average boy living in London. He is reasonably popular which is shown by his three friends who are constantly surrounding him throughout the film. However, we then find out through flashbacks towards the end that these people aren't real, but instead are completely imaginary. It's going to be ambiguous to the audience so there's no exposition of why he sees/imagines these people. Possible reasons could be:

• Multiple Personality Disorder
• Schizophrenia
• His conscious thoughts

One of the main influences for our film is Inside directed by Trevor Sands. This short film is about a man who has a multiple personality disorder which is represented by various actors surrounding him. As they speak, he speaks along with them which is the film's way of showing his disorder to the audience. The twist is then revealed; a psychiatrist who was first thought to be a real person is then revealed as another character in his head. We liked the idea of those people surrounding the character.

Another influence was Fight Club starring Edward Norton & Brad Pitt. All the way through the film Norton is shown engaging with Pitt such as fighting with him in the street and arguing with him, however after a series of flashbacks from a different perspective we realise that he's actually shouting and beating up himself due to his insomnia causing these imaginations. Although the reasoning behind his imagination is different in this film to ours, we still think that it's similar to ours as we want to show same events from a diffferent point of view.

Photo & Mindmap

For our media coursework, we had to do a short film which could be either fictional or documentary-based on a photograph. The untitled photograph was the winner of the 2009 World Press Photo and this was our main basic influence on what our film would be like. This image depicts a middle eastern woman as she stands on a rooftop, and she seems to be calling out for someone. After a few lessons of deciding exactly what we should do a film about, we chose to use isolation as our main theme.

We started by making a mind map. Some of the words we initially came up with were fear, dystopia, gritty urban area, imprisonment, poverty, entrapment, war and religion. Although these all had connections to the photo, these were also all main issues happening in the world at the moment. We chose isolation because we felt this word was very diverse.

After deciding to do the theme of isolation, we then had to think of basic but interesting narratives. At first we were set on doing a documentary but then we turned to fictional narratives as we found that making a documentary might be harder, such as with the fact that we had to use real people who actually had experiences involving some sort of isolation.