Legal Documents

Before we could start our filming we had to fill in some documents to ensure the safety of everyone working on and filming our opening. These forms contained risk assessments as we would be filming off school sight. We had to write of the suggested risks could be applied to our film as we were filming outside, in winter next to water. Although we believed there was little risk of anything happening to us on our filming day we said that the risks could've been the actors involved getting cold or perhaps being injured near the water.
On this form you can see the names Ellie and Jade, they were who we originally had planned to play the roles of the journalists friends. However, they were unable to make the day of filming so our friends Sophie and Josh stepped in.

Our second document is our shooting schedule. Our plan of shooting that day was to film all the exterior shots, this form showed what order and which shots we planned to film. 

Storyboard

Jess created a storyboard from the screenplay I had written using a website called storyboardthat.

Audience Research

First draft and Feedback

This was our first draft of Raven Calls before we had fully completed our editing We received this feedback from our teacher.

We agreed with a lot of this feedback. The ending of the piece where the blood dripped down the screen did look too 'cartoonish' and made the film look less professional as well as making our opening look more like a trailer. The JAB production logo at the end also made our film look more like a trailer than an opening so we changed this in our final edit by going for something more simple.

We also edited the scene which shows the characters walking from behind the tree to make the scene shorter. We did this, on our teacher's advice, to keep the pacing of the scene and prevent the opening becoming too slow which would make the audience lose interest.

We rerecorded Amy's lines during the scene with the focus pull from Amy's hand to my face. We did this because you can hear the camera focusing which drowns out Amy's line making it hard to hear. We rerecorded the audio of Amy's lines using a voice recorder and layered it over the top of the footage. This was simple to do for Amy's lines as the camera doesn't show her face in this scene.

In our final piece we used a photograph we took of Jess when she had her stage make up on as Raven Black. We used this photo along with a static effect to make her face flash up on the screen during the last few seconds of the opening to bring the tension  of the opening to a close. I believe this worked well and, if the film was to be made, paved a nice way into returning to the action that probably wouldn't be as tense.

Filming Day

The day we went to our location to actually film the exterior shots for our thriller was quite possibly one of the coldest days of the year. But by using our storyboard and screenplay to create a clear plan of what we needed to get done we were able to get our filming done in one day without too many problems.

As our thriller has a horror theme Jess thought it would be a good idea to use Latex costume make up for her character as she plays the ghost.

Here you can see how the process went from nothing to the end result. 

She used liquid latex and tissue to create a ripped skin effect and then painted her face and neck white to give impression she was a ghost. 

She then used red and black to make the wounds looks more realistic and to make her eyes look dead. 

On location for our filming we had to be conscious of where the natural light was coming from as we were surrounded by trees and we filmed at midday. The diegetic sound of the birds can be heard in our footage giving it an eerie sense. We chose to film next to the pond as we thought that water is usually seen as something 'peaceful' and 'tranquil' and setting something scary next to it would make the scenes filmed there seem unsettling. 

We also chose this location as it was close to the school meaning we knew if it would be busy and what the best time to film there would be. On the day of filming the whole area was empty making us the only ones there, this meant we didn't cause any inconvenience to the public.

Looking at the footage we got on the day of filming I believe at the moment there won't be much need for pick ups, we do however, have time to go and film scenes again if needed. 

Our main issue with filming was the weather as it was, as I mentioned, a very cold day. Jess' costume for this scene was a black short sleeved dress meaning every time she had to be in a scene she would be without a coat which meant all our scenes had to be filmed in a very short amount of time to prevent her from being so cold she couldn't move. However, due to planning we had already done we knew exactly what we needed to film and were able to do so efficiently.