Poster/leading roleee

Over the past week, as well as generating ideas and carrying out research, we thought it be the right time to start looking for an actor to take on the lead role to our film. We were meant to go MBC and present our ideas to the performing arts students and find someone to feature in it but found that we needed to set a proper storyline first and be more prepared. Jess produced a poster and had given me 5 to distribute around local youth theatres and drama groups. I'd put on up at where i work in Tesco on the community notices board and have already had people come in to ask.

The requirements of the actor we are looking for are quite specific just because of our vision in our head of a zombie, they are

-need to be from the ages of 16-20 slim built      
-travel quite a bit to the different shooting locations 
-and must be willing to wear stage make-up (zombie)      

We made an email address which we all can access. And i have also started looking at amateur drama groups to email on this website. Youth Theatre Groups in Birmingham researching the different documentaries

2nd project meeting

In this meeting we discussed what was achieved, what progress had been made and enhanced on our production ideas. I feel we have worked very well this week and have accomplished what needed to be done which was of

•           Researching documentaries
•           Looking for our potential lead role
•           Collection on money (for props)
•           Introduction to zombie styled makeup

In the meeting a number of topics were raised in terms of scripts, filming locations and focus groups. We decided for the script, 2 will be created one by me and one by amy. The group will then take aspects of each script to form one. We also discussed styles of scripts and how it will be written.
Regarding the locations of filming, we talked about what areas we want to film and where is best suited. So sometime next week we will be visiting these sites to make sure that’s where we want and for location reconnaissance. 

Questionnaire

Yesterday we printed off 50 copies of a questionnaire i typed up. we thought of questions which would give us an understanding as to what our potential audience might be and moreover what they expect from what we create, we came up with questions of asking them their;'

• favourite genres of films
• how they watch them
• what newspaper they read
• their interests and hobbies
• how often they watch documentaries/films 

We distributed them to some of the people in our class as we are all in the same age and have all gone away with 5 copies to give them to people outside of our class/age range to give us a diverse collection of results to work with when analysing.

Researching existing documentaries

Since our last project meeting, I as the chairperson asked everyone to go away and so some study on some short films and documentaries to enlighten ourselves with the techniques and conventions consumed. Over the weekend, I’d got onto the 4oD website and looked at generally the introductions and endings to some documentaries. I watched one of the ‘body shock’ series where a girl was born with two heads. Whilst focusing on the introduction to gain ideas on how we could possibly start off our documentary I found that they had slow music played at the start to the set the emotion and scene with personal home videos. There was a voice over introducing the main character and starting what is wrong with them along with statistical information explaining how they might be the only person in the world living this extraordinary life. The voice over then went onto saying, ‘this film tells the incredible story of (name)’s life’ I found this quite effective and could be something we consider to use in our film in terms of techniques.

5 minutes into the documentary it then cut to interview scenes with family members and the doctors where the background was blurred, another convention used in most documentaries whilst interviews are taking place and again we could use this sort of technique for our documentary.

Most documentary/films acquire the same types of conventions essentially in introductions and ending. The ending shots for this documentary were of typical home shots reflection back to the beginning. Clips of the family being happy were being shown and in this case it was the mother of the girl who was born with the two heads playing with her leaving it on a positive note. The closing scenes were of the credits scrolling down slowly with slow music.

Even though what we will be creating will be something completely different in terms of content the techniques and conventions are what will inspire us.

New brief :)

The brief for project management was distributed to us on Wednesday 14^th sept. Ian and Pete had gone through with us the fundamental aspects of managing a creative production project along with the different tasks and criteria’s. After I then had an idea of sort of project  I wanted to work on, which was creating a short film, we all then got into groups with others who were interested in the same sort of image. My group consists of 5 people, myself, Mala, Amy, Jess and Phil. Once we got together Ian had given us some time to correspond with each other and have some sort of inkling as what to have a short film about. We mostly all came to a decision of having our film based on just one person due to previous constraints in projects like creating a music video where it became difficult accommodating everyone involved also we believe it can be managed more easily. From having it based on one person we then all came to an understanding of making a documentary/sketch which acquires a purpose to it and is going to be about a fictitious character of a zombie starting university. Since then we have had project meetings whereby we discussed job roles and progressed on our ideas and enhanced them. In terms of job roles, we have Amy as our director, Jessica as our producer, I on script writing and on camera, Mala as location manager and set design and Phil on vision mixing and editing. I thought it would be essential for us all to carry out effective research to familiarise ourselves and so we are considering things together. Since, we have created agendas for our project meetings where I am chairperson with Mala who will be noting down the minutes. In our most recent project meeting we discussed what research needs to be carried out, pre-production work, resources, confirming job roles, filming locations, and what things we hope to have accomplished for our next project meeting.
I personally will be carrying out research and taking note of different documentaries and their conventions, sketches, start looking for available actors who can feature in our film and potentially gather props.