Our Blog

Welcome to Parmiss, Yussra, Marwa and Shamaila's blog. We will be using this blog to upload our thoughts, ideas and progress throughout the making of our opening sequence to a chick flick film.

Unfortunate Lee - Final Opening Sequence

Our main actor.

The main actor : Ibby Mirza, showed alot of dedication whilst fiming and was always willing to try new ideas out to help advance our production. Throughout the rain and cold he did as we asked, especially when it came to the stop motion which we had to do a total 3 times in order to get it perfect. Waking up at 4am in order to get to Southbank at the required time seemed hard however he still turned up .. sometimes half asleep however we managed to do what needed to be done without too many complications on his behalf :)

We appreciate his help and even though sometimes the group would have to push him, he is very much appreciated not just by us but our teachers for taking part in the film, and we think his hard work paid off as our final production clearly shows.





So from all of the team .. THANKYOU =]

Voiceover or Quotation?!?!

We had finished fully editing our film and our initial idea was to have a voiceover although, the music had blended in so well with our shots that it almost hurt us to think about the audience not being able to hear the music well. We then thought of having a quotation instead which, could express the same feelings in a lot less words and with a lot less focus and concentration from the audience. We went on many websites to try and find the quotation and, finally we came across the perfect one which actually envisaged our plot aswell by, Vincent Van Gogh-''One may have a blazing hearth in one soul, yet no one comes to sit by it''. This foreshadowed the idea of Lee wanting someone to come and sit by him but, no one did even though the audience knew his character was someone who was open to loving someone yet no one came to him ignoring his ''blazing hearth'' in his soul. :(

By using a Vincent Van Gogh quote we are targetting an audience who would be quite art oriented making our film a niche product-something that is more for sundance or cannes film festival. When we tried to think of a film that also used this technique of a quote to set an emotional feeling with the audience we couldnt however, we did think of films that had narrative explanations at the beggining of films such as the star wars beginning or schindler's list. We subverted the technique and allowed our film to explore their emotions and Lee's emotions by using a genuine feel quote.

Editing part one

Today we began to edit our complete shots which were not fuzzy, too light, or too dark! We began with the opening sequence of Ibby walking along London Southbank this is when we faced our first editing decision. When we filmed we used a stick to identify how far away Ibby should walk away from the camera just so that he wasnt much closer or much further in the next shot as we thought this would break versimilitude with the audience. We were not sure whether to make Ibby walk through the whole shot or to split the shots in half so that he is walking in front of graffiti and then in front of Southbank buildings. We decided to let Ibby walk completely through the frame so that we did not break focus between the audience and scenery. We then began to edit the shot where Ibby was sitting on the bench. We edited the shot so that we had a match on action when Ibby opened the lunchbox which, signified the importance of the lunch box in our plot-an metonymic shot of his loneliness. We began to play around with the sound of the atmosphere. We copied the sound and pasted it over as much film we had so, the atmosphere sound was equal and we didnt have car horns and trucks driving past or the bells from buskers which, was especially annoying!!

Filming our opening sequence take 3

We arrived in london at 5pm because all we needed to film were the dark shots of ibby leaving the bench at night to show how long he had been waiting for his date as we previously the out of focus shots. We waited until it was fully dark so that we could film Lee, giving up, eating his sandwich and, leaving. It became dark and we were all anxious to film our last shots..little did we know, there was no battery in the camera. There was no way we could film and we needed to get the shots done in order to finish editing the opening sequence in time for the deadline. We had however a stills camera. We decided that we would shoot all of the last shots in stop motion as we had no other option and the lighting looked amazing through the camera so we decided to go ahead with the other option. We took pictures of Ibby opening his lunchbox, eating his lunch and, walking away from the bench he had waited at for so long. We are happy we thought of the stop motion idea seeing, as we had done so much research into stop motion and it did in fact come in handy!

Naming our movie???

We thought long and hard to think of a name. It was one of the very last things we finished, and it quickly became clear that we had to find an appropriate name which would fit of the image of our character. We thought that he looked like a jonathon, although when trying to incoporate that into a name we came up with the adventures of Jonathon and the adventures of Cyril.
We soon realised that it had to be cheesy but not to much that it was just off putting.
We talked long and hard and soon came up with the word unfortunate, yet still we had to think of a name for our chracter.
Bang just like that with a bit of help from sir it came to us. "LEE"
Unfortunate Lee.

It was perfect.