Unveiling The Cast

Cast Requirements: I needed two characters for my film opening: one male character: 25 year-old man who plays the role of the husband and one female character: 22-year old women who plays the role of the wife. I tried finding them in my social circle as Otherwise I would have to pay them to be a part of my film And I am a broke teenager with 6000 rupee budget so I started to look around and found some male and female friends. I was very lucky to find have the right people as their looks and personality matched the persona of my characters. and Despite of them being extremely awkward and introverts who hates to be in front of the camera they surprisingly both agreed to do the shoot. (Let's not talk about how I bribed them before to be a part of my film but just gave them some good free food in return).

Evidence of correspondence and communication with the cast and crew: 

 

I messaged my male actor on instagram if he can be a part of my project and sent them voice notes explaining the entire story and what his role so they can act accordingly. My actor is in A2 and his mocks were right around the corner so I faced this one problem in deciding the dates of shoot but thankfully, we managed to decide on the dates in which both of us were free.

25 year-old man who plays the role of the husband .

 

Same goes for the female actress- through whatsapp

A 22-year old women who plays the role of the wife.

In short, I found the perfect characters for my film opening. The husband had a beard, looked like a 25 year old and a wife was an elegant lady who looked like a 22 year old. The man’s height was 5’10 and the woman’s  height was 5’6. Both of them had to come in the same frame in some scenes so this height difference was what was needed.  

Shot list

 

 

1.Disclaimer + IHK productions
2. Static Long shot of traffic- sound of cars and horns.

3. Static Mid Shot of a man making Kata-Kat- sound of busy street and Kata Kat

4. Static Low Angle shot of the buildings- sound of people, cars and utensils

5. Static Eye-level shot of the street- sound gets louder

6. Static Long shot focusing on the building's apartments

7. Static Long shot of the interiors of the house- Sound gets lower

8. Static Close-up shot of the water tap- sound of a water drop felling down

9. Static Close-up of the side-table- sound of birds

10. Static Point-of-view shot of fan moving- sound of it moving

11. Camera zooms into the Actor’s face

12. Zooms into the curtains- natural sunlight- background noise

13. Static close-up shot of the Actor

14. Close-ups of curtains 

15. Medium close-up of the actor

16. Parallel cut to a Two-shot of the couple

17. Close-up of cup

18. Match cut to over-the-shoulder shot

19. Two shot of the couple talking

20. Medium Closeup of the actor sleeping

21. Two shot of the couple playing ludo

22. Closeup of ludo- dice sounds

23. Over-the shoulder shot of the actress

24. Two shot of the couple playing ludo

25. Close-up of the actor sleeping

26. Long shot of a park

27. Two shot of the couple in park

28. Point-of-view shot of the actor

29. Closeup of the actor sleeping

30. Medium wide shot of the couple watching cricket

31. Two shot of the couple- cricket playing sounds 

32. Zoom into the tv with cricket playing noise 

33. Medium wide shot of the couple-

34. Closeup of the actor

35. Extreme close-up of clock - clock sound

36. Extreme closeup of actors eyes 

37. Close-up of the ludo 

38. Close up of actors lips 

39. point of view shot of the actor showing fan moving 

40. Closeup of actress drinking tea 

41. Close up of Clock ticking 

42. Close up of actors hands shivering 

43. Close up of actors lips 

44. Close up of actors face 

45. Two shot of the couple in park 

46. Close up of actors eyes 

47. Close up of clock ticking 

48. Static shot of side table 

49. Extreme close up of side table

50. Static shot of tap 

51. Close up of clock ticking 

52. Close up of actors hands shivering 

53. Close up of actors face 

54. Close up of actors lips

55. Mid- close up of actors face 

56. Point of view shot of actor 

57. Low angle shot of the actor 

58. Mid shot from the front 

59. Point of view shot of the actor 

60. Close up of the actor 

61. Showing the movie title 

Narrative Breakdown

I wrote a narrative break down to give myself an idea of how my film will turn out with the shots.

1. Actor is sleeping

2. He presses his eyes

3.He starts dreaming

CUT

4.Comes to give his wife a cup of coffee

5. She takes the cup

6. They both start talking while enjoying the view

CUT

7. He is watching another dream

8. They are playing ludo

9. Actress mixes and throws dice

10. Actress wins- smile on her face

11. Actor loses so he is sad

CUT

12. He titles on the other side

13.  They are watching cricket

14. Their country's team hit a sixer 

15. Show them cheering

CUT

16. Actor is still dreaming

17. Start mixing sound around

18. Start mixing shots around

19. Phone is ringing

20. He wakes up

21. He tries to wake up his wife

22. His wife is dead- Blood scene

Mood boards

 I made two Mood boards, One for the entire bed scene and the other for the one that would be appear after the parallel cuts. This one was for the shots inside the house where the lighing in naturally coming from the curtains and it's morning. I wanted to give a horror effect on this one.

The second one was for all the background scenes and even for the flashbacks. I wanted to shoot all of them in natural day time, and the setting and location that I have in mind also matches the mood board.

Story board

 

I made a storyboard of total 57 Scenes, I wrote the time duration,the shot type and angles that would help me in the production process as I would know exactly which shot to take and then it would also help me in the editing process as I have also mentioned the sound under it. Moreover, I would also know which shot comes after which one during editing making it easier for me.

Outline of Film opening ideas

After my whole idea was finalized, I made a presentation of my planning including everything from shot list to the location(everything would be included in the posts from now on-wards as I give you an overview of my planning.

Presented my overall Idea to the entire class:

 

Will be posting bits of the presentation in the planning section explaining them like I explained it to the class. 

I did make some changes to my idea as it was not very clear to my classmates and teacher, so I decided to add a blood scene in the complete end as having a shot after that might confuse the audience like it confused my class. This also might make the audience want to watch the entire film in interest of knowing who killed the girl.

Identifying your target audience

As someone who herself has finds murder mysteries very interesting as you have to finish the whole movie to find out who was the murderer and what is the whole story behind it. My target audience would be the people who likes to be on the edge of the seat throughout the movie and loves the twists that murder mysteries offer. 

My target Audience would be mostly adults, 18+ individuals as my film opening is already depicting how the film will have blood, violence and psychological elements that would only be suitable for adults. The film might have disturbing content or even language that might be inappropriate for children.

The people who likes to be engaged throughout the film and likes suspense would be attracted to the film. From looking at my film opening, these people might want to explore my complex characters and solve the mystery puzzle along with the film.

People who enjoy psychological drama would also be looking forward to watching the whole film. The complex issues I will be targeting in the film like mental illness would also decide my target audience.

These are definitely be the key factors for my audience and I was confident that my thought-provoking story line will attract audiences.

Idea Development

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Now was the time to plan what type of film opening I want to make. Initially, I wanted to make a film opening that would fall in to 'romantic comedy' which would consist of quirky characters along with a heartwarming love story. I also wanted to add some jokes in it, But As I started writing a comedy script, I realized just because my younger brother laughs at my jokes does not mean I am extremely funny and I would write a great comedy script. So Brain really was like Thank you, Next? 

Then I thought of making an action film opening that would involve cars. I had a whole image in my mind including the characters, location, shots and even sounds that would be at the background. I think my idea was pretty cool and I got really excited before realizing I didn't have the budget for it actually. As someone one said, "When hope shatters, it leaves behind the fragments of a dream." This emotional and broke teenager decided to think of another idea now.

As I was trying to sleep at 3am, thinking about very random stuff which was not letting me sleep, My imagination took an unexpected turn.

And I thought of making a thriller, murder mystery type of a film opening that would involve blood. This time it was important to think of something that would be possible to film keeping in mind the resources I have and my budget. I wrote everything down and made a mind map to see if this idea was worth being my final idea.

In this thriller narrative, I thought of adding two characters, a husband who has multiple personality disorder and his wife. His identities control his behavior several times and forces him to do things he does not intend to do. But this idea was for the whole film, and our task was just to make the opening so I thought of showing flashbacks of the man's life to show his married life before.

The couple had a strong feeling of affection and concern towards each other. The couple loved each other unconditionally and was living a happy life before that one day when he wakes up to his dead wife covered in blood. The story is a murder mystery to find out if someone murdered her or was it a suicide. 

The unexpected twists that were constantly coming to my mind, made the opening more interesting and I decided to now stick with this idea.

I even wrote down the shots that were coming to my mind with what sound would I use in them to create effect.

I finalized my film opening: 

Movie Title: CONVICTED (which literally means finding someone guilty of a crime so in this case I used it to analyze on the murder/suicide showed at the end)

Production name: IHK productions - (IHK is the abbreviation of my name Iqra Hassan Khan)

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Log line- A common man’s life transformed after a disturbing incident that took place in his house. A series of shocking twists revealed as the movie moves forward.

One Team, One Player?

First step to starting my final film opening project was to plan weather I want to work alone or with a team. There was actually no delegation of tasks amongst team members as I decided to do my film opening alone, without any team members. Aah makes me sound like a loner; which I am though. Basically what happened was that my Preliminary Task partner and I knew we wouldn't be doing our final project together as we both realized that our creative visions and state of mind were different. We parted our ways right after that task and I couldn't find a new partner, as said previously 'Loner'. Well Thanks to my can-do attitude, but no thanks to my ADHD. Nonetheless, doing my project alone did allow me to fully explore and express my individual idea and style. Stay tuned to find out how I did it all alone and how it turned out to be. also Wish me Luck :)

Final Preliminary Task

I hope the video, Eliza and Iqra have worked so tirelessly on for weeks on end would be loved by everyone. Now the questions remains: were we really proud of it? Eliza was sort of, only in some parts but I believed it have been better and My group mate agreed with me. Even on student level it could have been much better. However, at the end of the day it WAS a practice task and for that, at least, We feel like we’ve done pretty well. 

Here is final Premilinary Task Video:

Youtube Link to the video: https://youtu.be/K0nMPzSgHZE

Premilinary task in progress...

As most of our pre-production work was done through text messages with no formal documents due to the lack for the need of scripting, budget, auditioned casting, lighting etc. Whereas, the production process was rather hectic and the opening was filmed quickly on one fateful day where Laiba, our actor was available. For the same reason and for lack of better term, I’ll say that we were unable to take a rest and shot continuously for four hours that day.

Our location was pretty straightforward, all we needed was a bedroom with a bathroom attached to it, hopefully with a lot of free space to aid the shooting angles.

The location we choose was my house; my room as it was the exact place as described before. All my bedroom has is essentially a single bed, a desk, a wardrobe and a bathroom attached to it. This aided for us to have a lot of grey area in the room where we could shoot from multiple angles without getting caught up in unnecessary furniture. I sent Eliza, my group mate a video of my room showing the different corners of my room especially featuring the areas we need to highlight in our video. The exact video has not been shared on the grounds that it is rather informal. 

 

Production:

We decided to shoot on 3pm on a Sunday at my house so Eliza was on time. We adjusted my room's settings accordingly, we didn’t require a lot of props as the ones mentioned in my prop list. Once we decided that we will not be using a male character as our main lead, there was essentially no need for a suit and the simple ring I had previously mentioned in our prop list in the presentation. The ring was originally meant to be an indication of our main character being married but I doubt that applied in the new setting so we had no need of that prop. 

The hardest thing to find was the vintage alarm that would wake up the actress. It was quite an outdated clock and both, Eliza and I had small alarm clocks in our house but the problem was that none of those would work which sort of defeated the purpose. In the end we made do with Eliza's broken alarm clock and added the alarm sound in the editing process. 

 Laibah, our actor was a little wait so we had to wait for her for some time. She almost came dressed so there were minor changes had to be done to her look. After everything was ready, we began the shoot. We took the starting shots first and then came the scene of the washroom. 

 

A problem that we faced was our actor who immediately expressed her displeasure at the thought of brushing her teeth on camera (even if fake) and demanded that we at least get her a good brand new tooth brush and as it was a highly crucial prop in our production process, I asked my brother to walk to the market nearby and bring us a new brush. We had to complete the shoot that day so We couldn't go ourselves to bring it, that would waste a lot of our time. Anyways, I gave her some extra money for his snacks and he was ready to go then(Siblings Tingz). Meanwhile we took the shots that could be taken without the brush and shot the washroom scenes afterwards.

Then I had to order pizza for them because they were at my house and we were working for 4 hours straight so I had to feed them too. So This was our only budget, I spent Rs.1000 in pizza and Rs.50 on the toothbrush.

Extra Shots:

The extra shots we took were mainly because particularly this scene was to be edited in slow motion and we wanted to take multiple shots from different angles to get a vast variety and to compensate for our scene if the slowed down portion of the song became longer than we intended. I really commend Laiba for not cursing at us throughout the process of us continuously telling her to do ‘one more’.

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Editing Process:

Eliza, My group mate took over most of the editing part. We primarily used Eliza's phone to record the shots so We decided it's better se edit it on her phone first and we wanted to make sure the quality does not get ruined. My phone was used to capture sound which I sent to Eliza so she could add to the video.

She kept updating me about the editing, she tried editing the shots on three different softwares in the span on two days before ranting to me about how her laptop never works she shifted over to an iPad and edited some part of the video on that. She told me that the app she is editing on does not have some of the effects we need so we decided to edit it together in school as It's computer has Premier Pro. We edited the video on it, eliza had the voice over on her phone which she recorded at her house so we attached everything together and we were done.

Premelinary Task Outline

Planning our premelinary task:

Eliza and I communicated through whatsapp and made this presentation in which we mentioned all our planning: from the technical codes to to symbolic codes. The images below speak for my planning:

 

 There were some changes we made to the idea when making the final task. A voice-over was added we cut the 16 year old dead girl that we wanted to show in the end was also cut. In addition, instead of a 25 year-old man, a 20 year old girl acted in our preliminary task.

6 minute Idea Exercise

 The 6 minute idea exercise we did in class was for our premilinary task. 

First we made groups of 2 to then sir asked us to give random words of: characters, objects and place. Our teacher made some chits and One chit from each respective group would be drawn and a plot was to be made out from those prompts. Now Our teacher never told us what we were about to do so We just randomly threw words and my group got:

• Character: Dead Girl
• Place: Under the Bed
• Object: Guillotine 

Now We had 6 minutes to make a story out of it. I was very excited at this point actually because according to me, we could make the perfect horror movie out of these. My group mate and I told the whole class what we have thought in these 6 minutes and listened to my other class mates who got other words and had other ideas.

It was time for round 2 of making the chits and think of another idea. Thus My group mate, Eliza Masud was expecting that our next trial would go better even though my I was pretty motivated on going with the first. Anyways, this time was got:

• Character: Man-baby
• Place: Boot of a Car
• Object: Oranges 

Ah, after receiving these we just looked at each other and started laughing. We did manage to think of a movie's idea in 6 minutes. Nevertheless, my group mate wanted to go with the second idea and make up a comedic sort of opening in which a man and his wife argue over his lack of cooperation and help while somehow oranges are featured. But this idea was not making sense to me so I managed to convince her to go with the first on.