'Fishtank' is a British urban drana released in 2009, written and directed by Andrea Arnold focusing on the protagonist Mia Williams who undergoes a series of hardships and trouble which creates rifts between her mother and her. Fishtank was well-recived and went on to win the Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and the 2010 BAFTA for best british film.
There clearly lies a common trend or convention within the choice that directors have when filming for their urban drama, most commonly these were: public parks, council estates, near schools, and around public transport areas and some clubs. Time lapsing is also a sort of reacurring editing theme popular amongst this genre as it is an effectvie way of showing the change in time over a short period. Looking at some urban dramas this is some of the locations they chose in some of the more popular urban dramas.
Anuvahood
'Anuvahood' is a British urban comedy film released worldwide on the 18th of March 2011, it follows the life of a troubled teen named Kennith (or K as he refers to himself) and his ambition of becoming a grime mc (grime which has rose to populatiry recently in the UK). He however finds himself without being able to sell a single copy and resorts to selling illegal drugs (a situation in which many teenagers fund themselves at.). While 'Anuvahood' takes on a very light hearted approach to the subject, it is very close to relaitty when it shows the desperate lengths teens can go too, to get money. The locations in 'Anuvahood' are very simple and basic, they are accessbile and relatable to an everyday British audience. The park for example is a perfect representation of what normally happens, you can see large groups of teens hanging around them during daylight or at night and adds and effect of realism to the film. The norm of also seeing an off-license owner being indian is also a theme common within the Uk and is coined by 'Anuvahood' effectlively in a non-racist comedic way.
We have had to do a third day of filming to make our film opening long enough. We needed 15 seconds of extra footage. We filmed this on 5th February 2017. Unfortunately Angel and Caitlin could not make it on this day but it had to be done this weekend to meet the deadline.
The footage we filmed will fit into our existing footage nicely and extend the length of our piece. We were careful to ensure there were no continuity errors by making sure I wore the same costume and using the same props.
The downside to there being only two of our group present was that in order to film one of the walking shots we could not carry the tripod with us so we had to leave it unattended which led to some people looking at is suspiciously and I think one person almost took it before we returned to it.
Another problem with filming on this day is it is very last minute as our film opening has to be finished by Friday 10th February. So we will have to edit all of the new footage within a week which will be difficult to complete by this time.
However, at least with the extra filming done our film opening will be long enough and be of a good quality.
Having put our footage from the first two filming days together we have realised that our film is too short so we had to arrange a third day of filming.
Originally we were going to film on Friday 13th January but we had to call it off because of the snow. The next day more than one of us was free and the same time was Sunday 5th February. Unfortunately only Natasha and myself could make it to the filming day.
Plan
10:00 - meet at House of Fraser, Fremlin Walk
10:10 - get cup from mcdonalds
10:15 - film shot of cup being kicked over and change falling out.
10:20 - Film bench shot of person walking away from homeless girl who goes to sit next to them on a bench.
10:25 - Film walking in Brenchly House
10:30 - Film walking down week street
11:00 - Film sat inside door of shut down shop
11:30 - Film sat in run down place in Maidstone.
12:00 - Finish filming
This footage should be enough to fill the left over space to make our film long enough.
In most social realism films, editing is very minimal to heighten the realism. So instead of exploring and experimenting with interesting effects, I chose to look at colour grading in films.
From the below videos, I was intrigued by the effects colour has on a film's atmosphere without all the fancy technological special effects:
Research and Planning
I was especially interested in "Fight Club"'s 'grungy and grimy' style which I thought had colour grading suitable for a very 'gritty' urban drama. Although our film lacked the whole violence and night life aspect which would work with the low lighting and fluorescent lights, I really loved the dark, low lighting and cold, greenish tones.
The neon colours idea also prompted me to look at "Trainspotting", which uses vivid colours. In the bar fight scene mentioned earlier, the violence is also represented using dark and exaggerated bright hues like in "Fight Club". Throughout, the vivid colours seems to be used, not only does this represent the time period, but also this night life aspect.
I learned that dark cold tones presented a more depressing feel compared to lighter, warm hues. In our film, this colder feel would work the best.
However, as analysed in my filming evaluation, some shots like the graveyard scene lacked detail and didn't suit the urban, 'gritty' feeling of other shots like the waking up shots by Gala Bingo. In the above video, the narrator explains that a film doesn't just rely on colour grading but also careful planning of set.
Instead, social realism films like "The Selfish Giant", the colour palette of mise-en-scene is muted and creates an almost dawn like feeling with the country locations. Unlike, the warm, light colours, "Shank" has fairly muted colours that use the blue tones and darker colours. Perhaps, like analysed, this is to convey a certain mood as we feel tense when watching "Shank", having to focus on the dark image of the confrontation scene and hence, gripping us. Whereas, "The Selfish Giant" is almost dreamy.
Therefore, I really think that more research should have gone in the tiny details of our film for a professional cinematic approach, but in relation to our story boards the shots we recorded accomplished most of what we had on paper.
Post-production
In After Effects I altered some of the clips filmed in Maidstone. These are documented below in the following clip:
Firstly I started by using the 'Warp Stabilizer' tool to remove the shakiness of the videos.
Then, with the guide of the above video I altered the video's colour curves. In the video, the cinematic feel was supposedly achieved by darkening the shadows and making the highlights lighter and more prominent. I experimented with this idea by altering the white curve on the graph so it appears to have a 'sigmoid function' (in other words an 'S' shape).
I also attempted at altering the hues of the video. In my research, bluer and colder tones presented a depressing feeling which we wish to convey. Consequently, I lowered the red hues and the green hues slightly. This definitely made the tone blue and it appears to blue.
I thought the very cold tone was not helped by the fluorescent blues, so I tried using black paint to remove the blue. This resulted in the below photo. The line of black caused by the hard paint brush meant that it was very obvious.
Consequently, I tried to use the 'Mask' tool and create a black solid layer to put in the fluorescent blue places. With the 'Feather' option, I made the prominent paint line more subtle.
Although this was a lot better, in the next frames the masks covered the actual image. Instead of trying to use 'Track Mask' etc. I just got rid of the attempts to cover the bright turquoise.
After this I tried altering the colours further.
The difference is shown below.
These colour curves and correction was applied to other shots. I felt the below shot was too dark, but the contrasting blue and red creates the effect I wanted.
I tried attempting this with the graveyard seen, however, I felt this was hard to colour correct due to the different lighting, which was more natural and the green hues. Hence, when adding blue and removing red like the previous shots it appeared to cold. I couldn't add green because it turned out more a sickly green blue colour. Hence, I cut this out as this was not successful,
Outcome
Overall the result can be seen below.
Personal Comments
Upon watching this again and talking to my group, the colours were too dark and made the video appear gloomy and almost horror like. I definitely believe that I should have mean more subtle with exaggerating the shadows and highlights.
For our movie opening Cardboard City, we decided that we wanted to accompany the clips with a non-digetic background track alongside the diegetic sounds of the bust traffic. This is because rather then focus directly whats on screen, a good soundtrack could help to set the atmospeare of the movie and intensify emotions within the audience. The problem with finding a good soundtrack is that most songs which are composed to a super high level are copyrighted, prohibiting us from using them within our movie. However sites such as Soundcloud and Youtube contain high levels of selfmade content which can be used through premission.
The soundtrack choice for our movie is going to be a more sad, slow track with piano or slow strings, this is too tie into whats going on screen to intensify the situation and feelings for the main character. A channel known as Mr Suicide Sheep has a great collection of songs dedicated to the slow type feeling.
Soundcloud also contains a range of different songs however a lot of songs contain some copyright material as they're reposts of popular songs.
Lighting is an integral part of anything to do with media, the maniupulation of lighting means that you are able to freely change what you want to portray on screen, to how you want the audience to interpret and react to what you're showing. For example, think about all the horror movies you've seen and all the dark scenes in which all the horror happens. Change all the lighting to make it all light and bright, and what do you get as an end result? Something which completely ruins the atmospheare and fails to scare you, such is the importance of lighting.
Through the use of lighting can allow a scene to transform into something from this.
To this.
As you can see in the orginal picture, the only and primary source of light are the lightbulbds overhead the character, this gives the whole scene a very monotone and 'boring' look as the colours on the wall look washed out and dry. By using stand lights and bouncing the light off the walls to give it a lesser intensity, it adds a more deeper light, for example if the person was to directly point the light at the subject, it could give a shiny outline ruining the atmospheare. Also the use of candles at the background helps to add little more for the audience to look at instead of it just being dark and dull.
Evaluations:
(+) Lighting is an integral part of the video, it can make or break some scenes.
(-) Although it is hard to manipulate, lighting on a low budget mostly comes down to the weather outside.
(+) Using lighting to contrast some colours helps to increase the intensity in some scenes.
As we are including a
time lapse in our final product we had to take a long clip of a stationary
shot, we didn’t complete a proper time lapse as our time in London was limited.
We did the shot on the side of a busy street, the footage we captured then had
to be sped up, we did this by increasing the speed 500X. The speed that we increased the clip was debated on several times as we wished to keep the sound from the original clip and we didn't want to distort is too much that it was unrecognisable and we didn't want to have the clip so slow that it was just a sped up clip of traffic. after several different speeds we decided on 500X. This clip was then
inserted in the correct place in the montage and effectively created a time lapse
like piece of footage.
After making the time lapse like scene we split it in two
and moved it so that we could use it as two clips to help break up the singular
footage of Emma’s character. This was done with a few other clips as well and
we found that it helped the montage keep interest instead of making it boring. we later changed this so that we used a different bit of footage for the time lapse o that we didn't seem as though we were repeating ourselves.
As our clips overlapped the time allocation we were given we
had to cut some shots to make them shorter, we did this with a long shot of our
character leaning against some wooden doors, we found this shot effective yet
as it was a still we had to cut it down to make it a more appropriate length, we later, after consideration, made the shot longer again as it was our best shot so we wanted it to have the most time on screen, we also added a title to the shot so we needed more tine for the title.
We had left a blank space where we wished to insert our
title which will be white text against a black screen, this had to be an
appropriate length as it needs to be establishing yet not be too drawn out
either, this was simple in its execution. when we later added the tile we had the black screen immediately after the shot, before adding the title screen in, we made this seem professional looking by adding a blaring train horn before the title became visible, this was effective.
A lot of the editing process is just re arranging the clips
to get the best out of the footage that we received, by carefully placing clips
in a certain order we could create a montage that would be effective and not
too repetitive. we also needed to be careful with sound as some shots were louder than other, by minding this we were able to get the best out of the footage we had yet it took a while to get the perfect order. The order of clips often changed as we realised that somethings
didn’t fit, or made the sequence seem forced of clunky.
I also did some colour grading on one of the clips, it was the tube station scene as the original footage was really yellow, to counter this I made the shot more blue and downed the contrast ad so the colour seemed more drawn out, this was something we included in all the shots to make our character more devoid of life and happiness. Thisediting of the colour was appropriate and as we made the colour seem drawn out in most of the shots we managed to keep the bright blue of the double doors in our best scene.
As we have decided that the title of our films title will be
‘Cardboard City’ I used Photoshop to experiment with different fonts and
colours. As the running theme of our film is social realism we decided to keep
the title simple and have no extra effects so that it reflects the stripped
mood of the film opening. This choice has also been made by looking at other
film titles like ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘Fish Tank’. Although the font they
use is unavailable to us as a group we did look at similar font before deciding
on ‘Tw Cen MT’, this font resembles the one used for Tube Stations.
I originally completed the colour samples in a different
font, before searching through different fonts to find the one I wanted.
After finding the right one I added another colour samples. I
chose to do shades of blue as our opening scene has some contrasting blue
colours that have a very effective look and I wanted to incorporate this into
our title, the idea of a coloured title was taken from the movie posters at the
top of the page.
As we will have our title on a black screen I decided to
complete the samples with an accurate presentation.
The colour samples shown may not be used in our final
product but they are a baseline as to what we want. I also did a sample using pink but I decided that it would not accurately reflect the toe of the film.
A feeling of isolation from
society, feeling as though you are in a fish tank suggests that you are seeing
the world through glass and not fully connecting to your surroundings, that you
are alone. This title relates to how the protagonist feels throughout the film.
As a representation of a teenager, Mia is conforming to the ‘misunderstood’ and
‘rebellious’ characteristics that are commonly shown. The tile is shown as
separate words in white on an all-black background. The font is shown in all capitals
and is narrow in appearance, this is common for this genre as it is also featured
in Trainspotting and The Selfish Giant.
The Selfish Giant
Named after the Oscar Wilde story
of the same name, ‘The Selfish Giant’ shares little similarities with the original
story although the moral presented is the same; the idea that selfishness is
the main obstacle between humans and happiness. This idea of selfishness is
portrayed in the film as it s commonly associated with young teenagers, like
the two boys in the film. This parallels with he title and it relates
throughout. Like ‘Fish Tank’ the title for this film is all white capitals on a
prominently black background. The text in the title screen is spread out over
the width of the screen, the typography similar to the one used in ‘The
Imitation Game’. This is possibly due to the fact that the film can be found
under the drama genre.
Submarine
Much like ‘Fish Tank’, ‘Submarine’
is about a teenager in a coming of age plot. The use of the word submarine for
the title indicated that the protagonist feels under water at some point in the
film, this is basically a metaphor for the emotional placement of the
character. By feeling underwater, the protagonist is feeling cut off from the
outside world much like everything around him is not connecting to him. This is
relative to the film as it features a teenager and in film teens are often
presented as cut off from other with their emotions, often feeling isolated and
alone. By calling the film submarine it effectively symbolises his isolation as
well as fitting in with the theme of water, which is presented throughout the
film. The title is bold white text separated into three letters at a time so
that the word takes up the whole screen. The previous scene is visible behind
the typography. The text can be mistaken for being handwritten, this is
commonly found in teen dramas, this film can sit comfortably in that genre.
Shifty
Shifty is a word often used for
characters that are untrustworthy and deceitful, often evasive. By just looking
at the title you can get a slight understanding about the film. As an urban drama,
the film has the common conventions of drug use and a run-down location. The
title is also the name of one of the characters in the film, although it doesn’t
belong to the main protagonist it does belong to secondary character seen who
is also the character that drives the plotline. The text, much like ‘The
Selfish Giants’ is spaced out but not in capitals, instead it features an all lowercase title, white typography against the
image of one of the characters who is, at that point, unnamed.
Evaluation
In my previous inspiration post on the small area in London called 'Cardboard City' I have decided that this title will be beneficial to our film opening, by giving enough context through the title of the project it also relates to the content that we will be portraying. By then having the all capitals white text over a black background it will be conventional to our chosen genre of social realism.
The original Cardboard City was located near waterloo station in London, populated by an average of 200 homeless people in the mid-eighties, the site was seen as a symbol of how our society had failed
to eradicate issues surrounding homelessness as well as homelessness itself. By 1998 the majority of the residents had been evicted and moved to housing by the London borough of Lambeth, although there was speculation as to how they would respond to housed life.
Through interviews with the residents when the site was being evited it was found that some residents had been in the underground pass for up to 30
years and were reluctant to leave. The whole site was like a community, each person having friends and neighbours as well as their allotted plot.
The site is now occupied by the London IMAX theatre.
The idea that hundreds of people migrated to this one
location due to the fact that they had no here else to go is a powerful image
and I feel as though it is a real-life situation that we can incorporate into
our film opening. By naming our film opening after the famous location we can incorporate
the symbolism that it posed through the eighties and nineties, I believe that
this will lead to a subtly effective message that we will portray.
At the beginning of our film opening we need a short clip for a major production company and an independent production company, choosing from those we have made ourselves.
Major Production Company
For the major production company we have chosen to use 'film 4' because they tend to produce films in the genre of social realism more than more common major production companies such as Warner Brothers. This is the most recent logo clip from 'film 4' that we will put at the beginning of our film opening.
Independent Production Company
We named our production company 'CANE productions' as it involves all of our initials (Caitlin, Angel, Natasha and Emma). We then all made a short clip for our production company. Having watched all of the clips we decided the most appropriate for our film was Natasha's. This is what she created.
Editing
I am going to show how I put these videos into our film opening. Starting by downloading the videos from YouTube. I did this using a mp4 converter and saving it to a file in my videos.
Next I imported them into Final Cut Pro so it was with the rest of our footage.
I then dragged the clip for 'CANE productions' into the front of our footage and cut off the introductory part of the video by dragging the end of the video in.
Next I dragged the clip for 'film 4' in front of the clip for 'CANE productions'.
I am going to decide what titles go in and at what times throughout our film opening. These titles will include our names, the name of our film, the name of the production company and some other names we have made up to fill up the spaces and make it look professional because otherwise our names would keep repeating which becomes boring.
1. 'A CANE productions film...'
The first title say 'A CANE productions film...' as most films have the name of the production company mentioned in the titles. In this shot there is a large empty space in the bottom left corner so I have decided to put this text in this shot. The time in the video is 0:08 - 0:14 as the character sits up from lying down. The text will fade in and then out again with enough time for our audience to read what it says.
2. 'Cardboard City'
The second title has the name of our film 'Cardboard City'. This text was originally going on a plain black screen but having watched a rough edit of our film opening it would not suit the mood of the film so we are going to put it in the top right corner where the wall and door is. The time in the video is 0:16 - 0:18. This is also going to fade in and out again similar to the last shot.
3. 'Emma Fuller'
Our names are in order of appearance so the first one is 'Emma Fuller' this will swipe in onto the door as Caitlin walks past the camera it will then disappear as Natasha and Angel cross over in front of the camera. The time in the video is 0:36 - 0:40.
4. 'Caitlin Willis'
The second name is 'Caitlin Willis' which will appear in the shot of money being dropped into the cup in the blank space up in the top right corner. This text will fade in and out again and the time in the video is 0:45 - 0:47.
5. 'Natasha Russell'
The next name is 'Natasha Russell' this will appear on the tarmac in the playground in the bottom right corner of the screen. Once again the text will fade in and out at the time of 0:50 - 0:55.
6. 'Angel Limbu'
'Angel Limbu' will fade in and out at 0:59 - 1:04 as the girl walks away from the camera in the empty space next to her.
7. 'Ryan Murray, Grant Newman, Harper Bolton'
The next title is the first of our made up names which we have grouped together the first three are 'Ryan Murray, Grant Newman and Harper Bolton' these names will fade in in the bottom right corner next to the homeless girl in a list format. They then swipe away as Caitlin walks past the camera again at the times of 1:09 - 1:11.
8. 'Rupert Gunsson, Hannah Abbot, Matthew Young'
This is another group of names made up of Rupert Gunsson, Hannah Abbot and Matthew Young. This will fade in and out on top of this shot showing the homeless girl sat on a park bench in the format of a list. The timing for this will be 1:11 - 1:12 plus time for the fade.
9. 'Sarah Turner, Jessica Brown, Kevin Reed'
The next title is another list of made up names which are Sarah Turner, Jessica Brown and Kevin Reed which will fade in and out in the bottom right corner of the train shot at 1:14 - 1:16 as there is lots of empty space on the edge of the platform that can be filled with this text as a list.
10. 'Amelia Bones, Cole Dawson, Hadley Ryley, Brian Spears'
The final title is four names, Amelia Bones, Cole Dawson, Hadley Ryley and Brian Spears. This will be once again in list format on the tarmac in front of the park bench that the girl is lying on. It will fade in and out in the bottom left corner at the times of 1:21 - 1:22 plus time for the fade as long as it stays on this shot and does not spread into the next one.
