Preparation shots

In this blog post, we have uploaded all photos we took during the preparation and filming process of our film opening Untamed.

Here is the final look for Caroline Herrington. We decided to draw on wrinkles around the eyes, mouth, neck and forehead to match the skin of a mother (40-50 years old). additionally, we used a dark powder to make the face look slimmer and lose the effect of a young face  

We also sprayed dry shampoo around the hairline to give the effect of grey roots to match the age. Overall, we used makeup to make the actress for Caroline Herrington look "like a mum".

For the protagonist, Aubrey Herrington, her character profile portrayed her to be a wild, reckless and rebellious teenager who had just been out at a party/concert with her other rebellious friends. to create this look, we did a makeup look with a bright lip to reflect her wild personality and black eyeliner to create a more "party time look" to show to the audience where Aubrey had previously been. We decided to smudge the eyeliner and lipstick to portray that she had just been on a big night out.

Furthermore, we made her hair look messy to match the character and the story line. 

 

Above is an image of the preparation process. Here the actor for Caroline Herrington is spraying the dry shampoo in her hair to create the look of grey roots coming through the artificial dye to give the effect of the actor looking older.

 

 

Above is an image of the protagonist having her makeup done during the preparation process.

Here is an image of the final costume and makeup choices for Aubrey and Carol Herrington.

We decided on ripped jeans and checked shirt on top of a tight striped vest top as it is a carefree, teenage look, fitting with the character profile. additionally, it is suitable dress code for the event she was previously at.

For the mother (Carol Herrington) we chose to dress her in pyjamas to emphasise she late hour which she came back home. She is wearing unfitted clothes to show her role of being a mother in her 40s-50s.

Final Titles

A CONNELL PRODUCTION

HOLLY CONNELL

ANNEKA WILLIAMSON

KATIE DUNNING

UNTAMED

JODIE PETERS

CHARLOTTE ELLIS

AARON ELLWOOD

HARRY FOORD

ELISE BECKETT

CASTING BY    OLIVIA TUCKER

MUSIC BY    ISABELLE MCCABE

MUSIC SUPERVISOR    LISA WISEMAN

COSTUME DESIGNER    SHONA EKINS

EDITOR    LUCY HOCART

PRODUCTION DESIGNER   EMILY SPENCER

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY    RICHARD SMITH

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS    NICOLE ROBINSON

SHANE WILLIAMS

PRODUCED BY PETER RODGERS

JORDAN WHITEHEAD

CAROLINE MARDEN

SCREENPLAY BY   MILES PETERSON

LIA MARSHALL

DANA HAROLD

DIRECTED BY    KEITH BRUSSELL

Genre Research

Conventions of a Teen Drama:

• 'Real life' or relatable characters and story line, but mostly exaggerated to make the narrative more interesting.
• Cliques and friendship groups and separation between these cliques - nerds, jocks, cheerleaders, stoners, musical theatre (actors and musicians)
• Most teen drama films are set in the location of a typical American High School - locker rooms, cafeteria, sports field, auditorium.
• Alcohol and drug use- sometimes being peer pressured into these activities, substance use at parties, emphasis of the novelty of the new feeling of being drunk/ high.
• Teen love- usually the main character having a new/ first love, a summer romance - doesn't always work out as planned.

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a teenage drama film, revolving around a 15 year old, mentally ill boy called Charlie, and his friends Patrick and Sam. The film is set in the 1990s (noticeable from the clothing the characters are wearing in the poster above). You are also able to tell it is a teen drama due to the characters being young (teenagers) and the dramatic narrative.
 The background of the poster looks like the wall of a high school gym which provides evidence for the genre being a teen drama.
The colours used include only black against a bright lime green, and a short quote is placed directly in the middle of the poster. The contrast of the two colours creates foreshadowing for the dramatic narrative ahead and the short quote "we are infinite" shows the basis of the film. we implemented these conventions to our own film poster to reflect the teenage drama genre.

The film Juno is a teenage drama film about a 16 year old girl named Juno who is attending high school and falls pregnant with her boyfriend's baby. This film follows the dramatic life of a pregnant teenager and the challenges and journeys she comes across along the way.
This film has the conventions of friendship groups (Juno is in a nerd clique, whilst her boyfriend and best friend are both the sporty type/ group), the typical high school setting and real life characters.
We implemented this research into Untamed by using a real life and relatable character.

The film Mean Girls is a teen drama which follows the new life of Cady Heron, who once lived in Africa and has recently moved to America and starts at a new high school. This film follows the teen genre conventions by having drug and alcohol use, teen love, cliques, real life characters and being set in high school.

Our film opening is the genre of a teen drama.

There are conventions of a teen drama which usually are consistent throughout all films of the genre.
The conventions are:
Drug/ alcohol use
Popularity status/ friendship groups
Dramatic narrative.

As our film was only the opening, we managed to use the conventions of alcohol use (where Aubrey is walking home drunk with a bottle of alcohol in her hand.
Additionally, we used Dramatic narrative to fit with the genre conventions. We did this by the use of argument between Aubrey and her mother, Caroline.

Perks of Being a Wallflower titles

Night time productions presents

A Russell Production

Holly Connell

Anneka Williamson

Katie Dunning

UNTAMED

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casting by
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music by
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music supervisor
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costume designer
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editor
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production designer
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director of photography
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exec producers
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produced by
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screenplay by
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directed by
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New Titles Research

 JUNO Titles 
night time productions presents


An Allen Pictures
A Connell production

An Anderson Film

Untamed

Holly Connell

Anneka Williamson

Dan Thompson

May Beckett

Charlotte Ellis

Aaron Ellwood

Casting by Casey Wood, Emma Turner

Costume Designer Nicole Robinson

Music By Richard Smith
Songs by Shane Williams

Music Supervisors
Peter Rodgers
Jodie Pattinson

Co-Producers
Peter Miles
Jordan Whitehead
Lia Marhsall

Film Editor
Dana Harold

Production Designer
Katie Dunning

Director of Photography
Natalie Steele

Executive Producers
Joe Phillips
Lisa Kinsey
Danny Russo

Prouced by
Martin Russell
Finn Halfon
Gabrielle Dorrington
Harry Tucker


Written By
Keith Brussel

Directed By
Tony Johnson

Untamed Website Planning

 For our UNTAMED Film website we took inspiration from the INTERSTELLAR website as it was eye catching and bold, we took influence from the navigation bar and the overall layout of the website.

Advertisment methods

These are the ways in which we would advertise our film to gain the most publicity.  

Age Certificate

The reason we have chosen to make our film 'Untamed' certificate  15 is because it includes alcohol consumption and mild drug use further on in the film. We did not think that this film would be suitable for views under the age of 15 as the narrative is about a troubled girl dealing with problems that only older teenagers/ young adults would deal with. I researched what the factors are for a certificate and these were the results.

Production Diary

07/11/16 -  Today, in our lesson, we were told that we were going to be producing a film opening that needed to look as professional as possible. We were all put into groups our group included me, Charlotte, Anneka and Holly. We began to brainstorm ideas and decided to present our film opening pitch on a presentation website called Emaze. I set up an account and began to present our ideas, we also discussed what genres we could most successfully portray.

08/11/16- In todays lesson I continued to add more to the Emaze presentation, whilst charlotte focused on shots and locations were going to include, and holly and Anneka researched good film openings and noted down things that made them stand out and seem intriguing. In our Emaze we included our genre, target audience, plot, characters and props/costume. We found it quite difficult to adapt to the software as it was the first time we had used it.  The theme of our film is adolescence, it's about a young 17 year old girl who is quite troubled and rebellious she confesses she is gay to her mother, and is kicked out the house. We chose to do this type of film as it is modern and relatable we also wanted it to stand out from the typical more obvious genres such as Action and horror.

09/11/16- We continued to adapt and add more to our Film pitch presentation, we began to add more detail to our character analysis and include specific locations and shots we wanted to include.  With all of our input, Holly created and designed an institution that we will be using before the film opening. It is called 'night time' Productions and is transitioned on screen with lighting.

10/11/16-  Today, in lesson we continued on the Film pitch we described certain shots in great detail and what was going to happen within them shots .We finished the Emaze presentation by adding the target audience, character profiles and overall plotline. 

11/11/16-  In our lesson today, we presented our film pitch to the class and received feedback which was mostly positive. We also watched and listened to the other groups within our class and gave them back feedback on their film pitches.

14/11/16- Today we worked on creating a script for our film opening, whilst I started creating the storyboard on an Emaze presentation, we made the storyboard quite simple and short as we decided we  would edit it on Premier so that Anneka would speak in the background of the storyboard to add more detail into the specific shots and character analysis . 

15/11/16-  As a group we continued what we was doing yesterday, whilst Charlotte began to do some research into the film titles, she took note of how long they lasted on screen and what order they came up in, as well as considering what font and colour we would like to present in our own film opening. 

16/11/16-  The script got finished, and Anneka started to create a moodboard to portray this type of film opening, whilst we continued to work on the storyboard and develop a detailed background script for Anneka to read out.

17/1 1/16- Today we focused on doing some more blog posts, we looked at the risk assessments and how we would overcome them and what difficulties we would face when filming. We also done a post about props that we would be using including all technical equipment such as the cameras and tripod. Another post was about costume for the characters and how we wanted them to be portrayed.

21/11/16- As a group we went into the green room and started to film the background recording to our storyboard. 

22/11/16- Today we started filming, we went up to Brixton Academy to see Chance the rapper, we filmed a short scene of when Aubrey she is at a concert and is enjoying herself. However we didn't use this video footage as the quality wasn't very good as it was hard to keep the camera steady, as well as this the lighting was to dark.

23/11/16- We decided that we were going to start filming on Friday round Anneka's house we planned to do the opening shots of Aubrey walking home drunk from the party and the inside shots and dialogue of when she is confronted by her strict mother who tells her to leave. We made some quick changes to the script and as a group discussed what we wanted to have achieved by Friday. 

25/11/16- Today we began filming, we firstly began by doing hair makeup and costume for Anneka and Holly who were playing Aubrey and Carol .We managed to get some good shots from different angles and levels, we filmed the scene outside in the dark of Aubrey stumbling home drunk after the party. We used the street lighting, phone light and torches to create the lighting for the camera to use pick up Aubrey, we took lots of clips so that we could choose from the best ones. We also completed all the filming of the indoor dialogue scene. 

28/11/16- Today we began editing, we began by uploading all of Friday's footage to the Mac and watching it back, this was quite time consuming as it took a long time to upload the videos. After we watched the footage we began to select which ones we were going to use and which ones we could delete.

29/11/16- We bagan to edit on premier, Anneka cut out the clips of Aubrey walking that we didn't need and edited them together, she also split the videos up which showed black screens to represent her drunken state.

30/11/16- Today we all went back round Anneka's house to finish the filming. We filmed a scene of Aubrey running away from home and meeting the girl she fancies Riley, all filming was done at night so it was quite difficult to achieve the correct lighting. We changed to finish all the filming we needed for our first film draft of UNTAMED.

02/12/16- Today we uploaded all the footage from last tight and watched it back we then began to add the ones we needed to premier to continue editing.

05/12/16- Continued editing on Premier we edited the clips and shots of Aubrey and her mother talking and then Aubrey running up the stairs and into her bedroom. We also done some music research and used a karaoke backtrack version of the song Naïve by the Kooks for the opening scene of her stumbling home. 

06/12/16- Continued editing on Premier we edited the scene of Aubrey packing her bag, this consisted of lots of different shots and camera angles. We also created the UNTAMED film poster on fireworks and Photoshop.

07/12/16- We spent the lesson finishing the first draft, we finished all the video footage and began to add the titles. Once our first draft was finished we exported the video. 

08/12/16- Today we watched everyone's first film opening drafts and filled out feedback sheets to give constructive criticism and to give advice on what went well.

09/12/16- As a group we read all our feeback sheets and talked about what we needed to change and what we could include to improve it. We then done a blog post about the Feedback summarising what people generally said.

12/12/16- Today we continued blogging about the film opening and began the process of making improvements based on our feeback sheets. We also made sure we were up to date with everything.

13/12/16- We changed our titles on premier as we had some names that were repeated through out. We also done some research into film certificates and what makes our film a 15. Holly began to create a website for our film to gain more publicity and variation in advertisement. 

14/12/16- In today's lesson we continued to re do the titles for the opening, this involved doing some research into other film opening titles, we looked at Juno and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower and wrote down what order they came in. Holly and Charlotte continued to create the UNTAMED website and we decided that we would make a social media account.

15/12/16- Today we continued to edit for our final UNTAMED film opening, we finished doing the new corrected titles and just made a few edits to some of the clips. We also continued to do the website and uploaded our film opening to one of the website pages.

Film Opening Feedback

Today we received feedback for the first draft of our film opening 'Untamed'. Looking at our feedback sheets we got a mixture of positive and negative comments. An example of the positive comments are "The music choice works well with the changes in scenes and a good variety of camera shots." this shows that we do not need to improve our camera work because the audience believes that it was appropriate for the genre of film we created. An example of a comment that showed constructive criticism was one that said "lighting/ colour correction could be improved". This is helpful because this is something that can be improved in our work to make the film opening more successful. We asked our class who put forward their comments and it came to light that most of the girls' comments were more positive than the boys. This means that our film would be more appealing to females over than males, which helps us when developing our advertisement etc. because it helps us in imagining our target audience more vividly.

Factors which could be improved

This is a list of factors which we need to do in order to improve our film sequence:

- Put a colour filter over the moving opening
- Alter the lighting in some scenes to make it more consistent
- Edit the titles so they show up for the same amount of time

Untamed First Draft

Untamed Film Poster

Music Research

These are a few of the songs we were considering when choosing the background music for our opening sequence. We took music inspiration from films similar to the one which we were trying to achieve such as: Endless Love, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Spectacular Now. All of these films possess an indie music genre with songs that are heard of but not always acknowledged.

We wanted the songs that would be featured on our film to have a strong use of the guitar as we all felt that it created a chaotic mood and foreshadows that the main character, Aubrey wants to create trouble. We ended up choosing the songs: 'Naive' by The Kooks and 'I Kissed a Girl' by Katy Perry as they were both up beat and fairly modern songs which reflected the atmosphere perfectly. We used the instrumemtal versions because if we used the normal versions then our video would get copyrighted.

Here are the following songs we were considering: 

Moodboard

This is our mood board, this is a collection of photos from movies which are in our genre (teenage movies). These images are inspirational for how we would like our cinematography to look.

Title Sequence Untamed

NIGHTTIME PRODUCTIONS presents

A Connell production

A Williamson film

Lead cast-Holly Connell

                 Anneka Williamson

Supporting cast- Joe Mogarff  

Casting director- Geri Allen

Music composer- Isabelle Mccabe

Costume designer- Lucy Hocart

Associate producer- Harry Foord

Editor- Anneka Williamson

Production designer- Lisa Wiseman 

Director of photography- Katie Dunning

Executive producer- Shona Ekins 

Producer- Aaron Ellwood

Writers -Charlie Crews
            -Anneka Williamson

            -Charlotte Ellis
            -Katie Dunning

Director-Dan Thompson

'Untamed' .

The Process of filming

On Friday 25th November, myself, Holly and Anneka went to Anneka's house and filmed the first scene of our opening sequence. We made Anneka look like an older woman by adding dry shampoo to her hair so it turned grey, drew on wrinkles and she wore pyjamas. For Holly, we used black eyeliner to make her eyes stand out more and she wore her hair down and curly. We started filming Holly walking down a dark street near Anneka's house that has street lights. The only source of light we had was the torch on Anneka's phone and the street lights. At first, we found it quite difficult to get the lighting on her face right though since we did not want it to look too light.

Untamed script

UNTAMED SCRIPT

Aubrey is walking home from a party where the girl who she likes (Riley) just was. She seems absent minded due to being drunk still from the previous events but with a slight smile as she is reminiscing the enjoyable night she just experienced. Aubrey is seen stumbling and kicking puddles distractedly.

(Aubrey arrives home and drunkenly stumbles into the house)

Mum: Where have you been? 

Aubrey: (drunkenly puts her hand over her head and sways whilst she speaks. Speaks slowly and stammers slightly. Says aggressively) I told you were I was. You know I had a party.

Mum: (speaks with an overall disappointed tone) I told you 11 at the latest. It’s 2am for goodness sake, what were you even doing?! (long silence, begins to speak slowly and sternly) You were with that Riley girl again, weren’t you?

Aubrey: who cares who I was with

Mum: I know whatever this is, is not just friends and I do not in the slightest approve of it. You are a child of God

Aubrey (Looks straight at mum, begins to answer but then gets cut off) it’s not what you think… and even if it was like that, I don’t see what’s wrong with it.

Mum: (tears in her eyes, straight face and stern voice) I’m sick of looking at you. Get out of my sight now.

(Aubrey storms up to her room. A short clip is shown of her packing her bag and slamming the front door.)

(Aubrey runs towards a field, wiping tears from her eyes)

(Upon arrival at the field, she slumps down to the floor and puts her head in her hands for 5 seconds. She then looks around in a distressed manner; she spots Riley walking towards her from the distance- long shot)

(Riley caringly approaches Aubrey, sits down next to her and grabs her hand – emphasis on this moment -)

Riley: (quiet and lovingly) I heard you slam the door.

Aubrey: (wipes tears from her face) Its nothing. My mum just doesn’t understand

(Riley lights a cigarette and has a puff, then passes the cigarette to Aubrey)

Riley: I understand, my dad doesn’t approve either 

(long silence and stare longingly at eachother, background music builds up and gets louder, then stops all at once. Black screen with title shows (untamed))

Shooting Schedule 2

Filming went well. We ran into very little issues, only lighting issues and the camera battery dying - which was easily fixed. The filming process was very swift (overall, filming took 6 hours over the two evenings), mainly due to sufficient planning, such as scripting and having this shooting schedule.Although, it could have gone better due to Katie being absent in the first filming day (25/11/16) due to a last minute inconvenience, therefore we had less help which prolonged the filming. Additionally, as it was our first time filming to a professional standard, it took us some time to figure out how to make the camera work as good as possible (lighting, settings, lens, zoom, panning, shots).

Risk Assessment

Untamed story board

This is a storyboard which our group have created using 'Emaze' and have added a voiceover explaining in detail each shot and scene we are trying to achieve in our film opening. This helped us in getting our thoughts for the opening scene in order to see whether our overall desired effect would be possible.

Girls Can't Play Prelim

Our finished prelim, called 'Girls Can't Play'.

In this lesson we reflected of what went wrong in our prelim.  To improve our movie we could have analysed our shots more, we should have uploaded the videos straight away.  The reason why we do not have great deal of different shots is because we ran out of time and had to use the ones we had.  Over the few days shooting we all wore different clothes and that could easily confuse the audience, also we should have used better use of our time and create a more detailed plan.  When we filmed on separate days there was completely different weather in the
background for example at the beginning the sky was quite grey then at the end of the video, the sky was a shade of blue, this  made it obvious we filmed at different times of the day.  Because we found it quite difficult to get the same lighting in every shot we could have filmed it all in the main basketball hall, as we had previously planned.  Finally the last part which I believe could be changed is the issues we faced with our equipment, for example some parts we filmed included quite a shaky frame we could have improved this if we had used the tripod for all the shooting.

Props- Film Opening

Props- Film Opening

The following items are going to be featured in our film opening to make the sequence seem realistic and give the best effect:

- Beer bottle
- Cigarette
- Phone 
- Dry shampoo
- Wine glass
- Rucksack 
- Clothes to put in the bag
- Lighter

Costume -Film opening

Costume -Film opening

 

The following costumes will be used in our film opening to portray the different characters realistically and make it clear to the audience what type of person they are:

- Denim shorts
- Plaid shirt
- Cropped top
- Superstars
- Dressing gown
- Slippers

Shooting schedule

Shooting schedule

This is our groups shooting schedule for our final film task. We have drawn out a table to show where we have time to film and where our commitments are. We will stick to the schedule as well as creating an imessage group chat to arrange any other filming dates and last minute arrangements.

Individual Film Pitch

As a group we discussed movie opening ideas, we decided on the idea of a teen drama film as we felt this was relatable and would, therefore, know our target audience very well.
We looked at other films such as Perks of being a wallflower and Fault in our stars for inspiration. 
Here are our individual film pitches for the film opening... 

Katie's film pitch: Young teenage girl struggles to fit into high school life and soon realises that her close friends are not who they say are. A film about lies and mystery. A mystery/ thriller/ teen drama.

Charlotte's film pitch: Teenage girl fancies most popular boy in school, however, he is also dating the most popular girl, little does she know he is gay and feels he's living a huge lie.

Holly's film pitch: Young rebellious girl runs away from home and experiences a life with no rules or a society to fit into. 

Anneka's film pitch: A young smart girl gets in with the wrong crowd at school she begins drinking and taking drugs it ends up with huge life changing consequences. 

After hearing all of our initial ideas and feedback, we came up with a film opening that almost combined our ideas. For example, we used a young teenage girl and incorporated the theme of rebellion with drinking/alcohol we also worked on the basis that our main character would feel excluded from society as she would be gay and feel the tension and hatred within her family home life.

Film Opening Pitch

This is our emaze presentation we pitched to the class.

Feedback we received
For our film pitch we got many mixed reviews in the different categories. For the category 'clear genre, themes and messages?' we got 6 positive reviews and 1 negative. The majority of the statements said that the film had a clear narrative and was vey relatable to the target audience but the one negative comment stated that there is not much enigma to the story line.
The next category was 'interesting characters?' which we received 10 positive comments saying 'interesting and can relate to reality' and main character had an interesting back story and 3 negative comments stating 'not original and traditional characters' which means that the film opening could be seen as predictable to the audience.
 For the third category, 'is the target audience suitable' all 13 pieces of feedback were positive saying things such as 'the target audience is perfect for this film' and 'will relate to the target audience because it relates to teens. Overall, our film pitch received mainly positive feedback with a view negative comments. I believe that this is mainly down to the relatable narrative and characters.

Titles

In this lesson we analysed different programme and film titles.  The reason for this is to research variety of techniques we could possibly use for when we create our film opening.

The Walking Dead (Season 3)

00:02- Cable channel

00:04- Actor 1

00:05- Actor 2

00:06- Actor 3

00:07- Actor 4

00:09- Actor 5

00:11- Actor 6

00:12- Actor 7

00:14- Actor 8

00:17- Executive producer 1

00:21- Executive producer 2

00:23- Executive producer 3

00:27- Developer            

00:30- ‘Based on the series Graphic Novels’

00:33- ‘THE WALKING DEAD’




Captain America - Civil War