Project Log 5:

What has been the key issues for your pre production this week?

One of the key issues my partners and I had to tackle was where the location of our opening sequence would take place and how many locations we would have. We had to take into consideration if the location was free to film in, the times we could film and the distance of the location from where we live. Once we had made the decision of using a car park as one of our location, we came to another issue of the fact that we may need a car parked in a specific position. Other issues we tackled was the actual whole narrative of our British Social Realism movie. Even though the opening sequence is only 2 minutes long, we still had to decide on The Exposition, Agents of Change, Conflict Complication, Elaboration, Climax & Resolution and Coda. This took us a bit of time to figure out as we also had to figure out what exactly we were going to fit in the opening sequence. Another issue I had was figuring out the shooting script. This was because every element of the script had to spot on and had to be within the time limit.

What decisions did you make about the issues and why?

We decided that the best place to have our locations was in the Chadwell Heath Academy basement (interior) and the exterior of the basement which is the car park. We decided to resolve this issue by looking at what location would fit our narrative the most and we decided that the basement meets this. The basement is apart of the school which makes it easy to travel there, we can get permission from the caretakers and I have also filmed there before which makes it easier as a whole as I know what it looks like and how we can best take props inside to make the best opening sequence we possibly can. It also fits the narrative as the basement is  quite and dark - much like British Social Realism locations, which makes it ideal as a drug dealing frame will take place there in there. The car park is also ideal as we need to see the protagonist being arrested from the outside. We managed to come to a decision on the narrative structure by splitting it three ways, Exposition and Agents of Change would be my duty, Conflict complication and elaboration would be the partners duty, with Climax and Resolution and Coda being the other partners duty meaning we could each focus on more detail and thoughts going into each section and once we had finished we all read over it together so we could make any changed if necessary. We also then figured out which parts of the narrative structure would go into our opening sequence and pinpointed exactly what will take place in the opening sequence. To resolve the issue of the shooting script, I had to spend a lot of time on writing the script with my peers in the group and we had to keep checking over every single shot we included to make sure it was the best we could make it and also if we could shoot the particular shot and the total duration of the shots and also visualize what it would look like in our heads.  Overall I think we tackled the issues well and came up with good and appropriate decisions.