FILM MAKING

Our production company is called Blackjack Studios. We made our logo by first finding a real blackjack board, chips and cards and then started to place the chips over the Blackjack sign. Kai and I then attached a HUE camera to the Apple Mac which allowed us to take photos as we gradually removed the chips to create the imagery of them moving away by themselves. We did not add any extra sound effects to the animation.

To do our table top filming we found many items such as: newspapers, blue prints, images of people, maps, jewellery, post cards, a hat, money, cigarettes, scarf, a business card and top secret files. Oliver held the camera horizontally above the table and moved it around slowly over the items, making sure that nothing but the items on the table could be seen in the video. We wanted the audience to focus on key headings in the newspapers (about the kidnappings), the blueprints, business cards and the top secret files with a police file inside. We paused on these specific items for longer than the others to achieve this effect.

For our live action filming my group and I found a mysterious looking area of the school as the setting for this. Our film consisted of two characters, one of the characters wore a long trench coat and trilby hat and I wore a blazer and a trilby hat. Oliver did the filming and with the camera he followed Luca in the trench coat walking down some concrete stairs then he focused on me with a cigarette leaning against a wall. When Luca reached me we did a transaction: I gave Luca money and he gave me  the business card shown in the table top filming, Oliver continued filming as we walked away and out of the camera shot.

Kai and I edited the film trailer with the production name of Blackjack Studios. We added a song during the table top filming and film opening but paused it during the Blackjack Studios animation to create a dramatic affect. The song chosen was .... we chose this song as we thought this would create an atmosphere of a 1940s thriller and we edited the film into black and white to support this theme. Our film title was No Return, which we thought would be relevant to the table top filming as we focused on the newspaper headlines about kidnapping. Kai and I listed all of our names in the credits: Oliver Max - Camera Man, Toyan Arif - Director, Actor and Editor, Luca Puri - Actor, Kai Wakeford - Editor.  

I think our production went very well, as we achieved our aim of creating a very captivating film opening and we also worked very well together. However, there  were many obstacles that we had to overcome to reach the finished film production. The greatest challenge was that the HUE camera constantly fell off its stand during the filming of the production logo so we had to keep restarting the sequence of photos; another difficulty that we faced was that it was very hard to hold the phone camera straight to do the table top filming. Overall I think that our film opening was a great triumph as we have created a strong film opening reminiscent of a dark 1940s movie which will draw in the audience.