Music Inspiration

The theme music for 'The Borrowers' is a use of non diegetic sounds built to make a fantasy soundtrack, which is suitable for a family audience. This gave me inspiration for the music we would me going to create for our film. Their is one main resembalance between our film and this film, and that is the use of the 'small' protagonists. When our protagonist shrunk, we had to create sound effects for the bigger things around her, which would sound different to when she was normal size.

I took inspiration for the sound effects from the film, at 2 minutes 12 seconds, we see the over exagerated sound used for the effect of the ice cubes falling, i took examples from this and used it in our film, for example when our protagonist was petting the rabbit, we used non diegetic sound to create the effect of the rabbit making noises, when in reality they are very quiet animals. The way the soundtrack is presented through 'The Borrowers' as well as the diegetic speech, and non diegetic sound effects, creates a good effect, as it builds the scene. I decided to repeat the same piece of music throughout our film as it set the scene of Christmas.

Our Progress

We have just started the process of editing our film (23/02/10)

Problems while filming

We did face some problems during filming, mainly during shooting the green screen. These included not being able to fit everything in the screen that we needed. So we did have some shots that weren't completely covered by the blue screen, but we should be able to fix this during editing. Another problem we had is that we didn't have as much space as we required. This resulted in possible problems of the film not being realistic because the character couldn't move about as much as the film required. Another problem that we had was because of the limited amount of space, the movement that was in the green screen might not match what we need it to in the background. This is because there was a lot more space in the background than in the green screen so for example, when the character walks into the shot, she may seem to appear out of nowhere. However this problem should also be solved during editing.

Blue and green Screen Issues

We were originally planning on using the college green screen building, however due to unsafe difficulties we were unable to do so. We were left with a sheet of green fabric, which wasn't large enough for the activities we wanted to film, so we had to come up with another alternative, for this we used the colleges blue screen, which is much like the green one, because it is least like a skin tone colour.
The blue screen turned out to be an appropriate size and it worked well with the tasks we needed to do. We attached the screen to the wall, and secured the camera in a stable position, ready for the protagonist to film.

Props & Costume

As our film will be showing the protagonist getting smaller, we will be using various props that she will encounter when small. Our original idea was to make large props, for example, a large coin, or sweet wrapper; everyday objects in which you could possibliy come across down the side of the sofa.

However, as we are know longer using the idea of the sofa, but using other parts of the house instead to film, we will not need to make large props. Whilst filming today, we used various probs, inwhich the protagonist will come across whilst small. We filmed, Christmas decoration houses, and we will use the green screen, to merge the images creating the effect of the character being inside.

We also shot different angles of cabinets and floors, so we can show the character just walking along these while small.

We used Christmas decorations, such as beads, an advent calander, crackers, a snowman ornament and party poppers, to set the time of year.
Instead of pulling the cracker alone to turn her small, we used a party popper instead. This worked well because the inside of the party popper burst towards the camera, creating the illusion of a bang, causing the character to change height.

Costume
* Our character wore simple clothing, a jumper and leggings
* She wore a Christmas hat

Storyboard idea

I drew up a story board to create a rough story for our short film, I listed a range of camera angles and created a rough story which we could possibly use in our film. I thought as an idea, that we could use the time of year 'Christmas', as this would portray the characters lonliness, another way to show this would be by using other props, for example a phone and the protagonists having no messages. To set the scene of Christmas, we will use decorations to create the time of year.

In this story board, i created an opening and a dilema that the protagonist would face. We could open the scene showing the character being by themselves, using non diegetic sounds to show the audience what time of year it is, using an extreme close up shot would work well as when zooming out, it will show the characters sense of lonliness and set the scene and loacation.

In this particular idea, the character just suddenly got smaller, which was the dilema in the scene. This story would show the protagonist getting smaller and sinking into the sofa, finding another land and finding everyday objects being much larger than herself. To portray the 'land' in the sofa, we would darken the lighting, and use soft objects, such as pillows and duvets to create the effect of being inside or down the side of the sofa.

I thought that using a sweet wrapper for the character to get stuck in would create a sense of tension during the middle of the film, and would also be interesting for the audience to watch.

This was just an idea for our film, we may take ideas from this to use in our final 4 minute film.

Doodlebug

We watched the short film Doodlebug (Christopher Nolan) and found that this influenced what film idea we had. This is a film that gave us our idea for having somebody shrink from lifesize form. We combined this idea with other fantasy films such as Alice and Wonderland (as shown previously in the blog) to give it more of a Fantasy genre.