Locations
Despite our unanimous group decision that a train station would be an ideal setting for our thriller opening, upon further investigation during our initial shooting at Norwich train station we quickly fell upon many difficult filming obstacles which hindered our filming progress at the location. For example, duely to the fact that at all times of the day at which all of our cast and crew were readily available to film, the station itself was exceptionally busy and heaving with real life businessmen and passengers! In an ideal world this would not be an immediate problem in terms of filming, however the amount of curious people walking past who were blatantly looking at the camera rather ruined the whole ambiance of the shot! Aswell as this, i shall admit that we appeared initially to be rather ambitious with the range of shots we had interpreted achieving. For example, we felt a very low angle shot of Joules' foot stepping off of the train onto the platform from the underside, between the gap of the carriage and platform, would be an ideal opening on which we could also show titles (not too dissimilar to this picture). However we soon realised that mainly due to health and safety reasons that we would obviously not be able to get the camera in an appropriate position to shoot the footage, therefore decided against many important shots like these located at the train station. In conclusion, due to this large array of set-backs we eventually decided against using the train station as the location of our opening sequence, and instead decided upon an alternative setting.
Narrative
Our initial narrative idea, as shown below in earlier posts, involved the exchange of two briefcases between two notorious gangsters, Christian and Joules, for money in return for incriminating evidence, with Christian's deceitful daughter, Isabella, intercepting the money via the murder of Joules with the intention of taking the money to run off to start a new life; eventually getting caught by her father! Confusing, isn't it? Yes, we thought so too... Upon great reflection of our plot, even though we all believed that it had the makings of a decent film narrative as a larger part of a film (spread over 20 minutes or so), however the numerous breifcases, exchanges and betrayals that occurred in our plot would have been far too confusing/overwhelming for any audience to take in and fully understand what is going on in such the short space of time we had to work with (2 minutes). Having realised this, we reconsidered our narrative and came up with one that we feel to be far less confusing, and fits much more neatly into the two minute gap! This final plot is described in greater detail under the seperate post of 'Revised Narrative'.
Actors
As you will have been able to see if you looked closely enough at our notes under our initial narrative idea, you will notice that the actor which we had initially chosen to play Joules has changed. We were originally going to be using the older brother of one of the members of our group, James King (older brother of Elizabeth King), as our Joules character as we felt he fitted the criteria to be able to play the character well in the sense that he was in his early 20's, of average height and daark hair (looked a believable character once dressed up in a suit). However, due to difficulty in availability of James for filming because of his full time work, we instead decided to improvise by recruiting our friend Harry Ewing to fill the role. This was far more appropriate as he is of our age which means he was not working full time and was therefore readily available to film more frequently, yet in appearance looks much older than his actual age of 16, meaning he did not look out of place acting as a suit-blown gangster in his early 20's! We were very grateful of his cooperation to fill in and believe he did an excellent job in filming, doing Joules' character great justice!
No comments:
Post a Comment