Continuity Task

Our Brief
To create a Narrative: a Fairy tale reinvented OR modernised OR Subverted but meeting Film Noir conventions in some way. It also has to include a match on action, an 180 degree rule and the set action: a person opens a door, walks through and across the room, sits and exchanges dialogue with another person.

Planning
My group, me, Chloe Smith and Freya Rudd, quickly came to the decision to use Cinderella as our fairytale as it was one of the few we all knew and felt would be easy to manipulate the original characters around the film noir theme. We planned on using peers in my year as actors, who have free periods whilst we have Media, so they would be available to film in our lessons, also allowing myself, Chloe and Freya to focus on what was asked of us rather than learning lines. From here we wrote down all the characters in Cinderella: Cinderella, the Prince, the Fairy-Godmother, the ugly step-sisters etc. Out of this list we chose who we thought we could use basing it on who was available to act and also thinking about the story and how we could manipulate it around the film noir conventions (e.g who would be the femme fatale?). Once we had decided all of that, we wrote down one to ten on a piece of paper and tried to come up with ten significant points in the story, like a written down story board. We also wrote down possible costume, props and camera angles we could use. After this we shot 'stills' of our ten points to give us an idea of where to film, what camera angles to use, and just to give us more of a realistic idea of what we can do. The stills are below and the written narration I did is on top.

Film Noir Cinderella - Stills from Emily Ventress

What We Did

Roles:
Emily Ventress (me): Camera, editor, costume, narrative and props manager.
Chloe Smith: Director, camera assistant, script writer, costume and narrative.
Freya Rudd: Script writer assistant, costume, narrative and actress (Fairy-Godmother).

We used our lesson time to our advantage by filming most of our footage in them. We used many different parts in school and worked around when other classes had their lessons and where (e.g. worked out when there was a P.E class in the hall and when there wasn't). I think we only used one or two lunch times and a couple of hours in a school holiday for me to record 'Cinderella' doing it the voice over. After we had filmed all the clips I did all the editing. The school does have iMovie on their Macs but we used our lessons to film and so we didn't have time at school to edit. I know how to use iMovie and as I have a MacBook at home it seemed the sensible option for me to just do it all at home. However looking back it did take longer than I thought and I could've invited Chloe or Freya over to show them what to do and let them do a bit, however teaching somebody how to use it would've taken up time we didn't really have and we weren't free many of the same days within the half term holiday we had as some of us have outside jobs and some live far away. 
After receiving feedback from our teachers we attempted to 'dub' the scene where Cinderella is about to shoot The Prince as this is a very echoed and muffled scene, the dubbing went well and I managed to edit it so it did look synced with their lips however it didn't sound like that noise was coming from the room they were in, I tried using the Audio Effects in iMovie of Echo Delay, Medium Room, Large Room and Cathedral but the Echo Delay, Large Room and Cathedral made the speech hard to understand so in the end I settled for Medium Room.

What Went Wrong
I think one of the major issues in our production was sound. During Cinderella and her best friend's scene where they're discussing the The Prince coming to town, about 8 table tennis games were going on in the hall in the next room, this has caused a constant sound of ping pong balls bouncing off the tables, the 'reduce background noise' button on iMovie could not correct this either. The background music (Ofelia's dream off Bensound.com, copyright and royalty free) also overtly going loud of quiet frequently as I tried lowering it whilst people were talking but it just sounds very jumpy and doesn't flow very well. Another issue with our final production is the background clutter in the scene where Cinderella is talking to the Fairy-Godmother. We filmed these scenes in the school's studio. We did notice it was in the background so initially we filmed it so you could only see the Fairy-Godmother but still hear Cinderella however as most of hearing is also lip-reading it became hard to understand Eleanor without seeing her. Then on iMovie I tried putting a picture-in-picture of a black box to cover the background but I couldn't cover off of it without cutting off the Fairy-Godmothers back-of-head. Also focusing more on Mise-en-Scène could've helped as Cinderella seems to have sex with socks on which doesn't really add to the stereotypical sexiness of her and Cinderella seems to scrub the floor with her scarf at one point.

What Went Well
I think the general feel of the film feels right for a film noir. I also think we chose actors and characters really well. I like all of the camera angles we used and made a good attempt on some of those we'd never done before (e.g focus pulls). I think lighting went well as although my teacher said she didn't like the shadows I think some of them are really good with Cinderella and the Prince dancing. Also I think the fact we got the whole thing finished is pretty impressive as apart from all the editing, the voice over and the script writing it was all done within school hours. Posting what we had done on social media made a lot more people see it so that was a good idea, I put it on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. On my Facebook post a lot of people commented saying well done and our Youtube video of our final production stands at 176 views.

Overall

Overall I am happy with our final production and feel it was a success. I am proud of what we achieved in the short time frame and I do think it has improved since our previous (and our first) production being a Sweded version of the Insidious 3: Teaser Trailer. Of course there were things we could've improved on but this will be a good learning curve for the next production we will be asked to produce. 

I enjoyed this activity and hope we get to do similar things in the future (maybe with a little extra time!)



Reflective Comment:
My Reflective comment on the actual video(s) are above however my reflective comment on my evaluation would be that I think I did this well, it's not too long but says all I needed to. I could've written more in my conclusion (Overall) but I would've felt I was repeating myself.