Storyboard

Film Logo Research

Since we have started production on our film, we had to take into consideration on how our official film logo and company name is going to look like and how it is going to be presented. So we begun to do some research on different logos and names for different companies.

Companies' Names

The first step of making a film company a household name is to give it a memorable name. Usually a lot of older film company names are named after their founders or creators, companies like Warner Bros. or 20th Century Fox, since they feel that they need name recognition and seems logical. But a lot of companies now use singular words for their companies, like Syncopy or Paramount, to make it more memorable for the viewer and usually to associate them to a certain image, e.g. syncopy is a temporary form of unconsciousness making the company associated to the mind and dreams. Some companies like to make their title humorous by having a unconventional name,  like working title studios which is a reference to a prototype name being called a working title. We need to think about how our title is going to be memorable and what images and impressions the people get when they hear it.

Companies' Logo
The companies' logo is probably the most important thing in marketing since you need to establish your identity to your audience and make them remember you. Otherwise you'll just be forgettable and obscure. Most logos that you see or remember are iconic and stand on there own without the need of text to tell you what the company is, a good example is working title which has a film reel logo to relate itself to film-making while still looking iconic. Some companies also use the name within the logo design, like Warner bros. and probably the most famous 20th Century Fox which is just basically a text as a giant sculpture. To make the logo iconic we need to make sure that just by an outline you can tell who it is and even try to incorporate our name within the logo to cement image further in the audiences minds.

Media Practical Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Since we are going for a techno-thriller, the most obvious focus of the movie is on technology like iPhone's and hacking since this is probably the most obvious feature of a techno-thriller because the title even features the word technology in its genre name. A trope of techno-thrillers is to have a mysterious organisation in the background, which we have included, called “The Phantoms”, so we can follow our genre’s most apparent tropes. Our movie has a theme of computers and hacking to go along with technological theme of our chosen genre by featuring a protagonist who has a career in computers and security nets and the suggested main villains of the movie are going to be hackers. It features elements of sci-fi found common in most techno thrillers by having one of the characters, Scherbius, to have supernatural abilities like time manipulation and teleportation which are suggested to be caused by advanced technology. A trope of the techno thriller genre is that they have a mysterious mentor e.g. Morpheus from The Matrix.

They are here to primarily guide the protagonist into the world of technology and give important exposition about the technology and the world. Scherbius is one of these characters, and guides our protagonist through the story, and is inspired by the Morpheus character in The Matrix e.g. His dressed differently, he is always cool, and has deep knowledge of what is happening around him. Another point of inspiration from the matrix is the opening titles.

Ours also features green typed text, has a green filter over the top of the movie, and the theme of the opening is both mysterious and epic in its instrumentation.

 Techno thrillers also have the abundance to contain symbolism to make the movie and story deeper; this can range from Morpheus’ name being the name of the Greek god of dreams or Ghost in the Shell’s constant use of visual and audial metaphors. We also have some symbolism by having the name of our protagonist being made up of several famous computer engineers and even having Scherbius’ being named after Arthur Scherbius who created the enigma machine.

We also wanted to develop are movie from the techno thriller to make it more unique and separate from others in the genre. So what we did was combine both the techno thriller and the psychological thriller so that they had elements from both genres but have an identity of its own. We did it by having our protagonist doing double-takes on both himself and others and making it more open to the interpretation of the audience and the protagonist being both crazy. The settings of techno thrillers can be quite varied and creative from being a cyberpunk setting (Ghost in the Shell) to the centre of a modern city (The Matrix).

We tried something not seen in most techno thrillers by going for a suburban setting in modern day, specifically Tamworth as it is today.

The reason we chose this setting was because we don’t see many techno thrillers go for something other than a futuristic city or dystopian setting. As said before we named our characters after famous names in computing, this is a bit different since most techno thrillers go for more religious or ancient legend references rather than names of real famous people.

Of course to try and take a short production to a new level, we challenged the genre as a whole by having certain limitations to our production and the main context of the movie. One of our main limitations of our production was have a very limited or to the extreme no budget for our picture so that we would have to improvise our own sources and draw a focus to writing and characters. We used our own clothes as costumes (which was pretty simple since its set in modern times), used the technology that we had on our person and used the college centre as our main setting for the movie. Another limitation that we set up links with the budget limitation; we didn’t use CGI or complex effects in our editing of the footage so that we would have improvise with more traditional effects like overlapping footage to make characters appear to come out of nowhere.And also stopping and starting the film to place someone or something out of view to suddenly appear as if from nowhere.

 We also wrote are story so that it would be less action based and rely heavily on plot and characters that makes it different from other thrillers since they usually have a lot of action focus since they appeal to a mostly male demographic.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our movie mostly represents young people within an age range of about 16-18 years old. We do this by having actors around that age range and writing them as typical examples of their age groups. We also used costumes to differentiate between the two characters and define their personalities, for example Scott, the protagonist, is above-average intelligent 18-year old working as police security net coder so we gave him smart-casual clothes so we implicate his intelligence and job but also show the fact he is still young. For Scherbius we dressed him a sharp suit so that it contrasted with his age appearance and to reflect his mentor-like, mysterious demeanor, like he doesn't belong.

To reference Scott’s job in the IT business we made sure to give him references to his it background like including a written CV that tells all of his achievements and qualifications that he earned as someone who is into an IT career. We also referenced hackers and white-hats in Scherbius’ and Scott’s dialogue to give it a level of authenticity to the themes of our short movie, being the internet, hacking and overall the advancement of digital technology. Hackers are portrayed as nuisances, through the hacking of Scott’s protection ware for the police and the fact that Scherbius says they have “no direction, no cause, and no effect”. White-hats (good hackers) are portrayed in a positive light since they are referenced as an example of a group that has “morals” to what they do.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product? 

The sort of institution that would most likely produce and distribute our movie would be Syncopy and Warner Bros. since they like to produce a lot of thrillers and a lot of innovative productions. The budget would probably be small so it would most likely be an independent picture from Syncopy and a partnership between Warner Bros. wouldn't be necessary unless it’s for a huge marketing campaign, maybe if we try to extend the budget to have better effects but will probably won’t need to syncopate.

Syncopy has had a reputation to produce movies like Inception and The Prestige which were all thrillers with a twist so this type of production would be best suited for the this type of film company. This could be a side project alongside a bigger production like Man of Steel reusing locations to film it and even using left over props.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The gender group that would most likely watch our movie would mostly be males, since most of the male demographic go for thrillers since they want to see action and to, as in the title of the genre, be thrilled. I also think it would attract a male audience is because it features a male protagonist which they will relate more than a female protagonist. The age group that it should aim for is people between the age ranges of 16-20 which is who we interviewed for our questionnaires. It can appeal to them because it’s about a student/young person trying to stay attached to their job which is a issue for the modern teenager and the fact that all of the actors are played by 16-20 year olds which adds more believability.

In theory though it can appeal to a wider range of people out of the target audience since it would be technically be rated lower than a 15 maybe even a 12 so it still opens itself up to a lot potential fans or audiences but as it stands it mostly appeals towards the age range that I mentioned before.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We attracted our audience by following the research that we did on our chosen genre and tried our best to create something that would appeal to a 16-20 year old male teenager. we first off made sure that our movie would not be rated higher then a 18 since that would alienate the audience that we are trying to appeal to and would be useful if any other audiences wanted to watch it other then our selected group so we kept our rating to the equivalent of a 12 and up. We also focused on a male cast and made our protagonist a male 18 year old IT technician to reflect the teenagers pursuit for a job and the fact that we could relate to the computer world so that it would appeal even more to the modern audience.

The way we wrote our story was to enact the fantasy of complete dominant control over one's life, investigating into how technology can evolve, and becoming a agent to a mysterious organization going things for the greater good of humanity. These qualities and tropes in the story is what a lot of teenagers and people into technology fantasize about because teenagers go through phases where they fell they have no control over their life and what the technology of the future might do is what person in technology is always thinking about. Plus, the genre is a techno/psychological thriller which is known to appeal to a male market since they like big action and freaky scares. The music we have selected has a very epic but ominous feel to it so that it fits the genre and doesn't feel appropriate when you hear the soundtrack in the movie.

What have you learn't about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

What I learn't from using the Mini HD Cameras is that having the camera completely still all the time is not necessary and it is good to experiment with different techniques in filming like using cuts to make Scherbius appear to come out of nowhere or layering clips on top of each other to achieve a similar effect. We have learn't that adjusting how tall the tripod is gives us a better variation of camera angles, like making Scherbius more intimidating by using a over-the-shoulder shot at a low angle. The Apple Macs have been a great help in putting our project together because it was quite easy to separate footage, sfx, and music into separate folders which helped with our organization of our work. Premier, our primary editing software was really useful because it had a easy to learn interface, abundance of various special effects, and it allowed us to easily to edit the text on the opening credits.

To help with our design of our main characters we used a in-browser software called pickaface.net. By using this software we were able to get better realization of how our characters are going to look and what they would be wearing. We used the website incompetech to get some royalty-free music for our movie which was useful since its hard to find any good royalty-free music. However it was a shame that we couldn't get any previews of the music through the website but i guess that was more of a fault with the computer rather then the website. Finally this website, blogger, has been a great help of tracking our progress of our production through blog posts and is great because you can put film onto the blog so we can actually show our film rather then talk about it.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

One of the main problems with our first preliminary task was the lack of organization that caused a bit of tension between the group and overall wasted time in filming our product. I have evolved from this by having a better and more understandable plan about how we are going to execute things in our production through a production plan which overall put us on tighter working pace and there wasn't as much tension between group members unlike last time. Another lesson from doing the preliminary task was how to keep continuity between every shot which was praised in the preliminary task. So we did a similar approach but more of a in depth one by even watching the little set of character movements for example head turning and where the juxtaposition of our characters are in the shot. As a result the movements between shots feel natural and flowing. Another thing we learnt from our preliminary task was the 180 degree rule, which dictates how we must place a camera in a certain area to avoid confusion. We used this in our production to make sure that what was happening on screen was understandable and not confusing.

 Another problem for us in the original task was that we tend to film things out of order of when they would appear in the movie. As a result it took us longer to sort out our footage and made editing a bit harder for us since we had to find our footage from a jumbled lot of clips. So this time we made sure to film things in order of when they would appear in the movie so that it made sorting out the movie clips a lot easier for us. What we had to learn from the preliminary task that if something is not practical or possible at the moment in time you need to adapt your movie around e.g. in our task we had change our script a bit so that it would suit the footage that was shown. We had to do this in our main production by moving setting from in the middle of our town to our college. The last thing that we learn't was how to dub audio when the original is not usable for the main production, we did this over some clips of Scherbius and Scott talking since the wind overshadowed the dialogue which was simple enough to do thanks to practicing it in our preliminary task. 

Planning Session 4

Here is the table of our pre-production plan for the filming process and what we need to achieve in these secession's.  The schedule can be found here.

Planning Session 3

Here is the final draft of the script for our final production.

Script

The film opens with our main character, Scott, walking down a street. Scott is wearing smart but casual clothing, and should be wearing a backpack with a few items inside. The opening titles play over the top, with text appearing in a green, computerised font (similar to http://www.dafont.com/ds-digital.font), before the title of the film appears over the top of the footage.

Scott eventually comes to stop at a bench, and begins to remove items from his backpack; a newspaper, a cluster of papers (CVs) and a laptop/netbook of some sort. He opens the newspaper and studies the front page for a second - “Hackers Access Local Police Security Database”.

Scott: Again?

Scherbius: *suddenly appearing beside Scott* Nasty things, hackers.

Scott: Uh, yeah, I guess- sorry, who are you?

Scherbius: They have no direction, no cause and no effect. It’s amazing they get as far as they do. *slight pause* And then there are those who do have direction, those with a moral to what they do.

Scott: You mean like... white hats?

Scherbius: *smirking* Something like that. *pauses* You know, I used to have this idea - it’s kinda silly, really - what if people could hack in real life? Twist reality to their whim? Y’know, like, just a press of a button and all their problems are gone *laughing slightly, then pauses* I guess it’s just another impossible dream of mine.

Scott: *sighs* Yeah... That sounds great and all but I don’t see-

Camera changes angle, shows Scott from the side. Scherbius is suddenly sitting on the other side of Scott.

Scherbius: Who says people can’t? *Scott jumps*

Scott: How did you-? *Scott starts quickly putting things back into his bag, leaving the CVs, and begins to walk away. Scherbius follows* I need to go, something...weird is going on here.

*Scherbius begins to fall behind Scott, who hurries away. Suddenly, Scherbius comes round the corner in front of him. Scott stops*

Scott: *startled* Okay, I don’t know how you’re doing that, but you need to stop. I don’t know what you want from me-

Scherbius: What I want, Scott, is your co-operation.

Scott: Look... whoever you are? I-

Scherbius: Please call me Scherbius. I represent a group of, you could say, hackers known as the Phantoms-

Scott: *slightly angry* -and you want me for what, exactly?

Scherbius: We want you to come work for us. *pause* As you may have gathered, we’re not any ordinary group of hackers, but with your background-

Scott: Scherbius... I think you have the wrong guy, I don’t know anything about hackers-

Scherbius: But what about your papers? *holds out CV*

Scott: What papers- How did you-?

Scherbius: Experience with computers, Graduate of the top percent, made your first breakthrough at sixteen with the Police-

Scott: Yeah, and look how that worked out *sigh* I don’t want your job.

Scherbius: Shame, I thought you had potential and we have so much to offer you.

Scott: Oh really? What can you “Phantoms” do?

Scherbius: Time manipulation.

Scott: Yeah right *Scherbius snaps his fingers* Oh really? What can... *stops, looks confused*

Scherbius: Time manipulation. Deja vu?

*They pause. Scott sighs*

Scott: So what happens if I say no?

Scherbius: Not much - You walk away, you never see me again and you never find out what happens next.

Scott: And if I say yes?

Scherbius: Your training begins tomorrow, but know this - there are those who will work against you - and there is no turning back.

Scott: *sighs, pauses* Alright, sign me up, I guess.

Scherbius: Perfect, I will meet you tomorrow morning. Until then, you may prepare yourself for the upcoming hardships.

Scott: *turning* But what if- *sees Scherbius is gone*

*Scott pauses, before turning and walking back the way he came. Suddenly, his phone buzzes. He pulls it out to see a single text, reading “S: I’ll be in touch” cuts to black*

END

Here is also are character profiles for the two characters featured in our production.

Characters

Scott Chase - The main protagonist. A young adult (late teens), dressed in smart but casual wear. A trainee computer technician, Scott is looking for work when he is confronted by Scherbius.

Scherbius (subject to change)- The head of the “Phantoms” group. A mysterious figure - not a lot is actually given about his character, apart from his role as the leader of the Phantoms and his distaste for street magicians.

Planning Session 2

In today's session we have managed to finally agree on a finalized plot line and have begun writing the script. 

Here is the plot below:

Plot [draft]

The film opens with Scott Chase walking down the street - he should be rushing a bit, and his expression should look quite down. While this is happening, the opening theme should play, with titles appearing on top of the footage as if it is being typed in over the text. Scott eventually comes to a stop at a bench, and begins to read a newspaper article about hackers. Suddenly, Scherbius appears sitting beside the main character and starts talking about hackers, joking about the subject about “hacking reality”. The camera changes angle to show that suddenly Scherbius is sitting on the other side of Scott, as if he suddenly teleported, and talking about it as if it’s a real thing. As Scott tries to walk away, Scherbius follows him, telling him about a league of people who can hack real life, known as “Phantoms”, and starts demonstrating different abilities, which Scott shrugs off as “street magic”. Finally, Scott confronts Scherbius about his intentions, who then reveals he is looking to recruit Scott as a Phantom. Scott, slightly reluctant at first, eventually agrees to join Scherbius. Scherbius welcomes Scott, before the scene cuts back to Scott sitting on the bench, as he was earlier in the film.

Planning Session 1

• The genre of our short movie is a psychological thriller with sci-fi themes.
• Our themes will be exploring technology, like computers and the internet. We will also be exploring the people known as hackers and themes of insanity, conspiracy and secret organizations.
• Our main protagonist will be someone you can empathize with but also has flaws of his own. He will have a dead-end career/education and will most likely have a interest or occupation in technology.
• The hacker character, who will be a sort of g-man, will be a mysterious character who will be offering a job for our main protagonist which won't be clearly outlined but will become more apparent as the plot develops.
• The costume of our main character will be casual wear to make him more appealing and relatable to our audience.
• The costume of our hacker character needs to be unsuspecting in a crowd but also has to have a iconic look so that people recognize him within the context of the movie.
• A load of our props will consist of technological advances like computers, laptops and smart phones.