We got into groups and started planning our initial ideas for the genre. we agreed on a genre of doing a school drama and this would be easier to make our final product look more realistic because we have everything in college such as props and location. We carried out research on television shows such as Waterloo Road, Hollyoaks and Grange Hill to help us with the audience and storylines. All of these shows relate to a UK audience but Waterloo Road was the best example because it focuses around teachers and students but the other two focus mainly on students.
I was pleased with my group because straight away we had good organisation, time management and worked well as a group. Even though i'm the scriptwriter i wrote up the SWOT which is where i had to identify our weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and threats within the group. Our weaknesses were finding actors who looked the right age to play the parts and learning how to film which we was worried about but could develop this for the main exercise. We are filming in college so we had a threat of noise outside the room. We decided to film after college so less people would be around but this made another threat which was the time of day. We are doing a school drama so we want it to be light outside and make it seem like the middle of the day, but we're going to use key lighting. We made a pre-production schedule to decide what we we're going to do in each lesson so we were more organised.
After we had to decide our roles:
Andy James - Editor
Sarah Blues - Director
Naomi Kelly - Camera
I am the scriptwriter but we all got involved on creating our draft script. I was worried about doing the script because i had to write down all the right shots, camera angles and dialogue. Film scripts are different from television scripts so i didn't really know what to do but now i have done it i can develop it further because i have a wider understanding for the main exercise. Following are brief we decided to have a pupil who had been bullying another pupil to wait outside the classroom, walk in, sit down in front of her teacher and exchange a few lines of dialogue. We used an anti-bullying poster at the start and zoomed into it. We did this so straight away you knew what the short film was about and so it looked like it was from the actors point of view and she was looking at the poster. We also had to produce a detailed storyboard of shot numbers, shots sizes, duration, camera angles and sound. I used the storyboard to help me later on produce a final script with more detail of what was going to go on in each shot.
We all decided to use L005 because it looks like a classroom and props were available. We're also going to use the corridor outside L005 where we will do our first shot. We took photographs and produced a location recce of the classroom and corridor showing what it looks like and what was on location.
Next we did our risk assessment which had to be done in case any equipment was damaged or lost but as were doing it in college it's a low risk. Finally we had to do our call sheets. We had to provide information of where we're filming, the times, the dates and who is involved.
