Due to the unfortunate event of our original location being boarded up we were forced to change our narrative.
The new one is as follows:

starting with the characters who are chasing our main character, i am looking for the ideal code of dress. my image of these dark, mysterious, shady people would be a long black coat kind of look, to create an element of ghostly aura. Hard to explain exactly what I'm talking about, but i think it would be great to really capture that kind of character as hard as it would be. i think this kind of black and almost "invisible" kind of colour and formless clothes would give an untouchable feeling to the characters, make m seem like they have no history and don't communicate, they just hunt their target. It could also make them seem very intimidating and powerful. i looked at the matrix for inspiration for this, but didn't find what i was looking for. I then looked at Blade, a film my younger brother seems to obssess over. i remember watching one of them with him, and despite the film being appalling, i think the outfit blade wears might be what I'm looking for, despite the fact that the target audience for our film will be severely different, i would like to take the same kind of character for the enemy and put him into a different narrative. He looks extremely intimidating, and the image just gives a "don't mess about with me" kind of impression, an almost indestructible kind of target, and that would show what our protagonist is really up against. The outfit makes his shoulders look much more broad and adds to the intimidating effect he has. The quite original looking sun glasses make him look slightly mysterious and almost adds some sort of robot element to his persona. However, the practicality of getting our hands on a costume like this would be difficult, let alone getting hold of 2-3 of them, and therefore, we may need to improvise for this. i have a leather jacket we could use and i am sure we can get hold of some black trousers and sunglasses. the only problem is the part underneath the jacket. it would be nice to use something like that to make them stand out on the chest pads he wears are really distinct, which is something i relay like.

i have consulted alex on her thoughts about basing our chasing characters on Blade's outfit, and she agrees with what i have said. the only problem now is getting hold of the clothes in time for our Tuesday filming session, which could be a challenge.

Next is to find the main characters look. i have been looking at things i could take inspiration from various media i have seen in the past. i have looked at films with characters i think would give the correct effect. one thing in particular has stood out to me quite significantly. the inspiration actually came from a PlayStation 3 game i recently played, with a character who appears quite "roughed up", and quite desperate, quite clearly out of his depth but determined and still fighting on. The game i took this from is the Uncharted series, and a character named Nathan drake. my brother brought me the game for Christmas. the characters name is Nathan. i like the looked up look he has about him. The picture is some concept art of the character in the game. i would love to try and capture his characteristics in our character despite how hard this will be. think we could do this by giving our character torn up clothes, maybe some fake blood. a plain tee shirt with some dirt on it would work, because it would make him look like he had been surviving without luxuries of fresh clothes, washing etc. like he is on the very edge of his ability to avoid his families killers, whoever they are.

this a shot of an alley way that i discussed using with Alex for a running scene

this is a car park area i really liked that we could experiment with running around and jumping about

this is the same car park, i liked the skip because me and my friends used to climb on it when we were younger, so we could do something similar if were careful not to make it look bad


boarded up house

i am writing a character profile for an idea of a main character. there are some aspects of the chacater that me and alexx have come to make definite, however there are some variable concepts and values about the character that are still to be made definite. i would like to in someway capture the essence of a young character who is out of his depth, but has the determination to fight and always seems to servive by the skin of his teeth. an example of this that i like despite the very different narrative is the character of Harry Potter. Not in his bodily traits or the way he talks or looks, but the way that he seems to be out of his depth but have some form of fighting chance really creates character in my opinion.

Me and Reece took some test shots today for we had the idea of focussing in and out of an object. This is taken from the Billy Talent - Surrender video (the first 8 seconds).
We decided to use the manual focus on the camera, after a few attempts of trying to focus on a pen we managed to get the style how we wanted.


We worked out that in order to focus in on the background then focus back onto the object we would have to keep the camera still and zoom in on the item, this makes the focus change more obvious.

This is our storyboard (reads left to right :))

Our initial idea was to use an abandoned house for we thought it would give the effect of the character revisiting somewhere that he used to know. We were going to do this by using close-ups of different objects much like the opening to the surrender video by Billy Talent. This, however, may have to change for Reece went to go and take pictures of the location which he had visited previously and he found that the house we were going to use had been boarded up.
We're now re-thinking our location and we're trying to find somewhere with the similar feel to our original choice.
If this fails we're going to have to rethink our location idea and use somewhere public (may still be abandoned) or an inhabited house.

i like the action in this scene and the determination of James bond is something i would like to try and capture in our character, in a scenario that seems without hope, for him to be continuing to try creates a really great quality for me

By next monday's lesson!:

1. Make script for our film.
2. Take location shots. (See http://alexreecelcascw.blogspot.com/2010/01/location.html)
3. Make a storyboard.
4. Create animatic of storyboard.
5. Make the pitch better.
6. Character Profile
7. Update research so it's good.
8. Maybe research other things e.g. costumes or fonts.
9. audience profile

After considering our feedback from our pitch we have decided to try and appeal to a wider audience.
The class said they thought our Sherlock Holmes style appealed more towards the older generation thus making it boring, they also suggested a younger character and to get a clearer idea on flashbacks. We have decided to change our narrative as follows:

A boy has lost his father. He is 18ish and is searching frantically throughout his old abandoned house. As he sees something he gets a flashback to earlier in his life with his father (before he died). He then carries on searching throughout the house, goes upstairs and finds a body with a tattoo on it. He gets out an old piece of paper, compares markings and the door burst open. The boy picks up a knife. Blackout/

For the name of our film we were thinking conspiracy.
This is going to be a working title in case we find something more fitting later on :)

since the project is now going to be based on a mystery drama, i want to do some research into the kind of charectors which might show up in these kinds of films, particularly the detective. typically a detective wears a long, brown jacket and a hat, maybe glasses. They are varying heights and dont usually appear as muscular aggressive people but more intelligent and iterlectually talented. i havent discussed with alex yet but tommorow i can share these ideas with her. i personally would like the detective to be a steryotypical cartoon styled detective, carrying the traits i earlier mentioned. here are a few pictures i found which more or less represent the kind of look i would like for the detective. like i said, these are yet to be discussed with alex and shee may want a more realistic kind of character.

Old house. Orphan. Flashbacks. Memento meets Da Vinci Code. Mystery.

 This is a target market mood board.
It shows all the different things that our target audience might like. This is going to help us in knowing what our target audience likes.

having spoken to my teachers about the narratives that me and Alex have discussed, most have told me that despite stop motion and after effects etc. would be great for an abstract style, the practicality of creating a project like this would be much more difficult and require much more skill to create with any success. It looks like the best option to take is the idea we both liked about the detective in the "who done it?" situation. for this i am going to start creating a feasibility assessment for locations, props, characters etc.