Evaluation Part 1

"You have been approached by Film 4 to make a new British Social Realist film aimed at British 16-24 year olds. To give Film 4 and idea of how your film will develop they have asked you to produce the first two minutes of the film, providing a clear sense of the graphical, editing and music style your film will use. To protect Film 4's reputation as a leader in British cinema the film must conform to the conventions of Social Realist genre, and meet all audience expectations for this type of film.  Finally, to keep costs low, all visual and audio material used in the film must be entirely original, with thee exception of stock sound effects."

The title of our film is 'Faith', having a short title like this is a typical convention of BSR films as it is short and it foreshadows what the plot of the film is going to be about. Faith foreshadows that a large aspect of the film is going to feature people's religion or race.

In my opening we see some establishing shots which follows a typical convention of BSR films as many use establishing shots in the opening like in Ill manors. After that we see some shots with parallel editing showing the 2 boys doing similar things, connoting that their lives are intertwined in some way. After that we see those 2 boys meet, when Usama walks into the same place that Joe and his groups are friends are and we see a fight between them due to Usama's colour.

The main themes my film explores are racism as we have a Muslim characters and a group of white boys who are racist to this character and become aggressive to him purely because of his race and religion. From the screenshot below we can see that in my research I covered how racism is explored in BSR films. I used it in a slightly different way in my film as it was towards Asian people not black.

Another theme we covered was poverty which we can see from the shots in the opening montage denoting a run down poor area this connotes that the characters in this film are living in poverty.

We can see in my research that I discussed poverty and talked about how I could use it in my film and I stuck to what I said as I did use a run down area for the shots.

Childhood and corruption of youth was another theme of my film as we had young adolescent characters and it was about them and for the white boys it was their hateful attitude towards Muslims connoting that a theme was corruption of youth.

Production Log 17

This week while editing my film we were nearly finished the last thing we had to do was make sure the sound was good. I feel that in our film it was particularly difficult because the way the fight scene was set out we needed audio of bobby beating up usama so that the scene felt as if it flowed flawlessly, to do this I asked bobby to meet up with me so we could record just audio of him and put that in the fight scene, we included audio of him being verbally aggressive using racist comments and the sound of him kicking.

What was difficult about this is because in iMovie you could only cut down the audio by a minimum of 0.2 seconds so when we needed it to be cut down further we couldn't. Another issue that we came across was that there was a constant sound of wind blowing in the background which detracted from the film to overcome this we recorded some background noise to put over the existing audio

Production Log 16

This week we made our production logo and we chose a logo from the internet of a compass and then traced it in fireworks and put the text compass films around it. We chose a compass for our company as it suggests that we tell it how it is just as a compass does.supporting the realism view of the BSR genre

Also this week we had to change some of our graphics as some of the people originally intended to be in the film were not and we had to change the names in their to give credit to who was actually in the film.

This week we showed our draft version to the teachers and after some constructive criticism like to reduce the amount of content in it and to refilm certain scenes we went out over the weekend and did just that. There are still a few more shots needed to film but those are to be done by the 03/02/15 and will keep in mind some of the advice given to us while filming.

When our teachers watched the fight scene in our film we were told to make it more violent,aggressive and give a clear understanding of the characters. There were also some shots that did not have any continuity so we made sure all the shots did this time. Another piece of advice given to us was that we unintentionally created a theme of homosexuality within the piece so we changed the layout of the opening to try and avoid as much dialogue as possible.

Production Log 15

This week we finished all of our filming, although over the past few weeks there have been some issues as when people can meet up and especially the scene where the fight happens as it had a lot of actors in it, another issue was lighting as the days we chose to film contrasted in how sunny it was and this means our film loses continuity, another issue was that when filming I did not realize by standing there I was creating a shadow that could be seen on screen. I'm hoping that some of these issues can be fixed in editing and if not may have to be filmed again. The date list was not very helpful as people sometimes had last minute plans on the days that were agreed to film on and it just became a race to film whenever we could.


Also this week we found the music for our title from the copyright free website, this was not the original music I had hoped and originally wanted it to be a prayer song but due to copyright infringement that was not going to happen. The song we chose in the end was called slow mo and I assume was originally intended for scenes of slow motion but I feel it works in our piece too. We found it by clicking on the website and choosing the list of cinematic songs they had

There is no lyrics in this song which concerns me as sometimes in BSR the lyrics help to establish the story and we may lose out on marks because of this.

This week in editing we found that one of the most difficult scenes was the fight scene as sometimes the punches and kicks looked too fake, a way in which we solved this was to have just the sound of Usama being kicked play over a close up we recorded of Joe looking guilty. This worked excellently and may even be better than if we had recorded the fight scene correctly, this particular type of shot is common in a lot of BSR films and to use this came across my mind before but I decided in the shooting script to show the actual fight as it would have more strongly connoted the theme of violence.

Production Log 12,13,14

This week we have been making our graphics and for our film we are using super imposed graphics. The first step we took was a simple introduction to it by our teacher and taught us the basics. Then we had to choose what font we wanted and we did this by going to dafont.com and typed in 'Arab' fonts as it would suit one of theme in our film, it was quite difficult to find a font that would not be difficult due to the all the curls that we found were common in that font.

When we were making our font we wanted it to be white so we then had to add a dark outline so that we can see it in our final film. We chose to use super imposed graphics so we can have it on screen while our scenes are playing so as to not bore the audience by forcing them to look at credits.

From researching BSR films we found it was a convention to have white super imposed graphics that in some way match a theme like in This is England which had quite rough graphics which matched a theme of crime.

Also this week we filmed some more shots for our film and edited them in Imovie

Production 12

Over the half term break me and Niamh filmed our establishing montage shots which were filmed at the iron bridge overlooking the estate and another one overlooking the traintracks.

 We chose this location because it looks very run down helping us establish the theme of poverty. We filmed one of the road as it shows how busy the area is helping us connote that it is in East London. We also used the alleyway as it also shows poverty due to the graffiti and litter. As well as that we also filmed the football scene and was planning to film the fighting scene but one of our actors didn't show so we weren't able to. After filming that scene I made a documentation of the costume and props used so we could use them again to keep continuity in our film. The costumes used were things to help connote the poverty but also the white supremacy so for example we had Joe wear a union jack jumper.

Production Scheldule