The virgin, the villain, the hero, the whore

1. The virgin, the villain, the hero, the whore Evaluation

2. Target Audience • Our short film is not targeted at anyone specific other than people who have an interest in films that are thought provoking. Age seem irrelevant. The age of the actors ranges from mid teen to middle aged - the nature of the scenes for the 'whore' are at times, sexually explicit and does contain one use of strong language so it would be more appropriate for an audience above the age of 15 but there is no cap on how old the audience should be.

3. GENRE • The film is a drama with the sub category of thought-provoking. We wanted to make a film that instead of leading the viewer like a regular mainstream film seen in almost every cinema, allows the audience to form their own judgement.

4. CHARACTER OVERVIEW • The characters are binary opposites in the most dramatic form, exaggerated for entertainment purposes. Although they are extreme, the characters are relatable.

5. THE VIRGIN The young girl who seems innocent to the extent of naivety but has high hopes for life.

6. THE VILLAIN • the man that has had to do regrettable things in order to get what he wants Money Power Success

7. THE HERO • The boy who bases his own life on the fictional world, taking direction from outside and make-believe influences.

8. THE WHORE • The woman who has had perhaps a rough time in life with a past who now seems bitter as a result.

9. THE PLOT • The plot shows the four characters answering a question, "what are you looking for" in a monologue-style tone.

10. MONOLOGUES • Typical dramatic monologues contain only one character or if they do include other characters, are used as extras for when the monologue is not being performed. We wanted to break this convention and explore more than one character. By doing this, you are allowing the audience to hear more than one answer - instead of typically being guided, more opinions are expressed and these vary dramatically.

11. OTHER MONOLOGUES

12. FILMING • We filmed the whole media product over the space of four days, taking a day to film at each location in order to ensure continuity throughout as we were often filming outside and the weather being typically British and in February was unpredictable.

13. camera • We shot on a cannon and used a tripod, microphone, boom and dead cat, due to filming outside and often on unstable ground.

14. CONTINUOUS MONOLGUE • The first two locations were filmed consecutively due to being in close proximity. The way we wanted to film each monologue continuously made the timings a challenge. We wanted the piece to flow with one actor speaking after another, occasionally being on screen together but as it was not possible to have all of the actors together on all of the four filming days due to their own work commitments, we had to have one of the actors continuously running over the script while the camera was filming, pausing only when the actor for the day had to say their own piece.

15. PROBLEMS WITH THIS • This was difficult but necessary because when one character has said their line, for example the ‘hero’, he still needs to be on screen waiting for the ‘villain’ to say his line before he can move to the next line. Not only did the actor have to remain on screen and in character, but they also had to get the timings as close as possible so there was as little editing as possible to keep it looking natural.

16. HOW WE OVERCAME THIS • We had originally recorded ourselves saying the entire monologue and were then going to play this while filming each monologue and mute it when the actors part was due but muting it proved to be a problem as the actor’s pace was different to that on the recording. I think we managed to overcome this problem well by keeping one actor with us at all times to act out the parts of the characters who weren’t on screen behind the camera because it gave the actor that was on screen the opportunity to have cues and the timings on the whole were a close match.

17. THE EDITING PROCESS • This did entail a fair amount of work during the editing process, taking weeks to change the speed of certain sections of clips in order to get the characters to say their lines without overlapping. • This method caused a problem when editing as each of the four clips had a running dialogue being spoken through out, so when the video was played, all four settings were saying the lines almost in synch. We then had to edit the clips in order to make only one character at a time speak by muting the other three then changing this according to which clip needed sound.

18. OUR NEW IDEA • It no longer was possible to edit this way due to the time constraints we were working under. It had so far taken 20 hours and we were only ¼ of the way through. When we looked back at what we had done so far, it looked messy and unprofessional and not at all how we had imagined. We were happy with out footage – by filming each scene a number of times over just in case, we had enough good footage to restart the editing process and scrap the idea of using tiles. We still wanted to use this tile idea in the film in some way so used it at the end of our film, also for peace of mind that the 20 hours had not been a waste of our time.

19. FILMING DEVELOPMENT FROM AS TO A2 • We had approximately 110 minutes of footage. We decided to film more than one take, even when the scenes went well just in case we had any problems. Last year in my AS project, I made an introduction to a film, which was shot outside. When it came to editing, I did not realise that the microphone had picked up the sounds of a car. As the genre was horror, I had waited until it was raining outside and shot near a church but when I found out I would have to film it again, the weather had become much milder which did not work as well as it had done previously. We took this into consideration this year and made sure we had a multitude of clips to choose from.

20. ON LOCATION • We took the storyboard and script with us to each location and kept to the same script (apart from the actor playing the ‘villain’ who negotiated substitute phrases and words). As we wanted to keep all of the shots the same (mid range shots) there were no mistakes when filming. We wanted to use the same shots so the video flowed. As we wanted more than one clip on the screen at one time, to have different shots being used would look too jumbled and visually confusing so we wanted to keep it simple.

21. RESEARCHING SHORT FILMS • To prepare for the making of our short film, we used the website 40D to look at other examples of short films. We also used the video sharing website, YouTube to access monologues such as the Talking Heads series. From researching other short films, we noticed conventions such as the small amount of characters. • he narrative almost always focuses on one protagonist, such as in the short film ‘About a Girl’.

22. CHARACTERS • As we had already decided to use four characters in order to create the binary opposites, we decided to have no extras. Even as the interviewers, we had no actual screen time. The low number of characters is necessary with short films as with too many sub plots in such a short space of film would cause confusion and also lack of development with each character.

23. ACTORS • When it came to deciding actors, we used to social networking site Facebook. There is a ‘group’ with actors of varying ages, some as young as ten, some as old as seventy. We told them our proposed idea to see if we could gain any interest with the actors and luckily had a choice between a few. As with any short and/or independent film, they are often low budget just as ours is so we had to warn them that it would be unpaid work.

24. HOLLYWOOD VS. INDEPENDENT • With stars such as Brad Pitt being paid an estimated $20 million dollars for each of his film roles, the range in wages for actors is phenomenal. Instead of paying our actors, we would give them a chance to perform in front of a camera, as they were mainly theatre and stage actors this appealed a lot to them for the experience. The film ‘About a Girl’

25. ‘About a girl’ Brian PERCIVAL

26. Our actors • We chose the actors with our target audience in mind, this being to appeal to any age group. Although the majority of characters are below the age of twenty, we chose Chris Linnat-Scott, a middle aged, talented actor to appeal to an older generation of film fans.

27. Cost of equipment • An addition to not having to pay the actors, we also did not have to buy any equipment as our college provide a facility where we can hire out equipment. The camera we filmed on costs around £400 with a lens included. With tripods costing around £30, booms are £120 on Amazon.co.uk, a microphone is roughly £150 (depending on quality) and the dead cat costing £10 the total soon amounts to £650 for just the equipment.

28. Cost of props • We did have to buy our own costumes and props which did not amount to much – we bought a costume for the virgin (dress, cardigan), a robe for the Whore (£20 from TK MAXX) and some props for the Whore’s location (such as a selection of condoms and dressing up outfits). A lot of the props we made ourselves such as posters, a bed, and a hanger.

29. Filming for AS • Last year during my AS level, I shot my introduction to a film on a Canon XHA1 and from doing this, learnt how to use the camera to a basic level then how to edit using Final Cut Pro. On this program we learnt how to cut up footage into sections and order them into a sequence. We also changed the colours in the film to make them look darker as we made a horror film. In some of our shots, I feel like we could have made them more consistent as some shots were filmed outside and looked effective when made darker but some footage on a train journey could not be lightened too much due to the lighting on board the carriage.

30. AS TO A2 • We applied this knowledge to our film this year as we made sure we shot at the appropriate times. When filming the Villain, we waited until it grew dark and filmed near some lampposts in order to gain enough light to make him visible. The shadows cover his face through a lot of the scenes that we aimed to look like typical film noir lighting. We did not have any problems with continuity as we filmed every character continuously with no pauses.