Filming.

Filming the self harm story

On Thursday 3rd of November, me and Rabbi planned to go to my brother, Aaron's house to film the 'self harm' story. We went to his house because we wanted him and his partner Lindsey to act in our short film and I thought that the upstairs of their house would be ideal for what we intended to film. We went round and I explained the basic plot line of the story so that she had some context about the film, we then explained it to my brother and told them that we would like them to improvise an argument that is based on the sexuality of the character 'Jade' that i am playing. They stood either side of the dining table, Lindsey stood up and my brother sat down. We practised the argument twice before actually filming so that they could get into it more easily and we could see how they were going to act and if we thought it was okay. Lindsey started off the argument and then they went from there. The argument was better than me and Rabbi had expected and so we set up the camera to film the scene. We start off this scene with Jade just arriving in the house. We had the camera being handheld by me so that the audience gets to see exactly what i am seeing. I shut the door and this is then Aaron and Lindsey's queue to start arguing, with the camera in hand i walked down the hallway slowly and then film the argument for about 10 seconds. In the argument my brother said that he wanted Jade out of the house because of her sexuality and he wanted nothing to do with her, Jade overhears this and so she gets upset and she runs upstairs. The camera was still handheld so that the audience see's everything that Jade does. She runs upstairs and into her bedroom, she is panting ans crying uncontrollably, she goes straight over to the chest of drawers and she gets out a little box. When the audience see this box they will wonder what it is and why she is getting it. They then find out when Jade gets on the bed and opens the box to reveal three blades that she has taken from pencil sharpeners. The audience can then piece together that she intends to cut herself.

We took other shots for running up the stairs so that the shot will switch from my point of view to then a view from the bottom of the stairs. We filmed the rest of it upstairs which basically showed Jade getting angry and upset even more which then drives her to putting a blade to her wrist. She doesn't want to kill herself though so the cut wasn't deep. She harms herself and then to end this story we have her looking up directly at the camera and she then says "I'm okay."

Rabbi is the director of this short film and so other than the hand held part of the story, she was filming. She filmed the same part from different angles so that we can have an invisible editing effect in our film, when out together it will hopefully look quite effective. She had some shots from quite down low and other up high, and we also had one shot where the camera was resting on my leg so that we could see Jade lowering the blade to her wrist. We tried to use a variety of different shots to get everything we needed and when watching everything we filmed we decided that everything went exactly as we wanted it to and we are really happy and relieved that we have got one story done the way we wanted it too.

The only shot that we need now for that story is a shot that shows Jade walking up to the house and then walking in. We were going to do that on Thursday but we got outside and it was very dark and so there wouldn't have been any point because we wanted to to be a bit lighter. We told Lindsey this and she says we can go round anytime we want to film that little bit.

Acting in the story
I was very nervous to be acting in our film because i thought that i would get it wrong and mess the whole film up. The first part that we filmed was the handheld part and for the first take, i walked down the hallway too fast and my filming of Aaron and Lindsey's argument wasn't as good as it could have been, i didn't get them both in all the time and it was a bit shaky. Then was the part where i run up the stairs after seeing the argument and this part went much better, i had to pant and be panicky. I ran up the stairs quite fast which made me pant anyway, and i was nervous about filming it which naturally makes me shake and so the effect that we wanted went perfectly because i was shaking a lot and that is exactly how the character would have been. I had to run up the stairs quite a few times which made me out of breath for most of the time. The second time filming the argument was much better as we got a really good shot of my point of view looking round the door to then witness the argument. The running upstairs was slightly better as well because i added a cry into the sound as well as panting, which really added to the upset effect that we wanted.

I had to be panting for most of the shots and i really had to act as if i was genuinely upset and angry. It took up a lot of energy and by the end of it my mouth was dry and i was so out of breath from it all. I wasn't expecting to be that worn out from it, but i really did put all my effort in so that we got exactly the shots we needed. When we had finally finished Rabbi went to get me a drink of water, and i couldn't physically move my body, i was lying on the bed and found it hard to get back up. I felt like i was going to faint.

But i think it was all worth it because me and rabbi had such a great time filming the story and we were incredibly proud of what we managed to film and it made up optimistic about the rest of our short film.

Poster Designs

I started to try and design what our film poster will look like, i came up with this:

When looking at this (if it were to be part of the poster) the first thing you notice is the "I'm Okay." This is because those words are written the largest and so they are the words that stand out the most. I decided to keep the "I'm Okay" in the blank area on the page and have the not in amongst the darker background so that it is less visible, just like the true feelings of our characters are less visible to their friends. I then included the tag line underneath which leaves the audience with a question to ask themselves. The shape that the title is in is crooked and looks like broken glass which reflects the slightly broken lives of our characters. 

I also did these designs for the poster. Right at the top next to the original logo, i drew a montage of all three of our main characters all sat looking sad and telling themselves that they are okay. Then i drew a girl looking down and crouched on her bed, after being upset, and in the background the 'I'm okay' is there to represent what she is telling herself. I then tried to draw something for the self harm story, in my head i imagined the word 'okay' being reflected in the blade, but then i scrapped that idea as i decided it was harder than i first thought. Rabbi then told me what idea she has for the poster. she said that she imagine all of the characters faces merged together and then underneath would be the title, tag line and the production company logo and information. so i attempted to draw what i imagined she was trying to tell me. She said she liked what i drew so that could be our starting point for the poster. I then had an idea to have the three main characters covering their faces with an 'im okay' sign, to show that they are hiding what they truly feel, and then underneath their faces are revealed and they are in fact very sad and upset. 

Designing the new logo

Now that you have seen what the new logo looks like, i will go through the designing process that the first logo didn't really have. The first logo was just rushed and done quite quickly so that we could have a logo, but this new one has had a lot more thought gone into it. The first design for the logo looked like this:

The top two designs were the new ideas for the logo and the bottom two were designs similar to the logo that we had already. The first top design was what the new logo was going to be, it has the T Z and V visible in it's design and it is quite simple and fits well together. I liked how it was in a 'rectangular' shape and also looked a bit like an arrow going downwards. But then the 2nd top design was thought of and drawn and i instantly preferred it to the other new design. I like that it is in a circle, because to me that makes it more 'logo like' and so i decided that it would be the new logo. 

After deciding on that i thought i would draw it a few more times on another piece of paper to see if i came up with anything else to add to it or any other ways of drawing it. This is what i did:

When I started to redraw the logo, Rabbi said that she thought the T in the design looked like an umbrella and so i experimented to see if we could do anything with that idea.I drew an umbrella design on the T and then drew the Z in a shape to a lightning bolt underneath the 'umbrella T'. I then drew a more simple version of the 'umbrella style' logo but i didn't really like the way it turned out. I preferred the original design. So then i drew the original design for the new logo out just so i could see it on the page and work out if there was anything that i needed to change on it. I decided that it was fine just how it was, but i had the idea to try and draw it in block letters just to see how it looked, and so i did that at the bottom of the page, but i didn't like that either, it was too big and wasn't simple enough like the original design for it. So i stuck with the normal version of the logo and decided to try and so simple drawings of the logo on certain products. I drew what it would look like on a TV screen just before the film is about to play. I tried writing the T Z V Productions in all capital letters to see how it looked compared to doing both upper case and lower case letters. I think 'T Z V Productions' is how it will appear on all products. I did a colour version just so show where the different letters appear in the logo, as a kind of 'colour letter key' for the T Z V. Rabbi then said that she liked the colour version, but I think having colour as part of the actual logo wouldn't look right; i think the plain black is how the logo should be.

New Logo

The original logo for TZV Productions was:

I liked this logo because it included the T the Z and the V in a very simple way, but there was still a part of me that felt it didn't really look like much of a logo. Logo's have to be instantly recognisable and effective in getting your audeinces attention and i don't think that this logo does that. It is very plain and not really noticeable, even though it had three different colours to it. The logo isn't blod enough to stand out and grab peoples attention. It is to basic to be an effective logo for our company. I was thinking about how i wasn't content with the logo we had and so i wanted to design a new one but i wasn't sure how to go about it, but after some help from a friend, we came up with this:

First of all, the logo is round, in a circle, which i instantly think makes a good logo, because it reminds me of a stamp and so that means that we can easily 'stamp' our logo on all of our products. This logo is bloder that the original one aswell so it immediatly stands out a bit more. The T Z and V are all in there as well but in a more subtle way, and the way they are positioned creates a nice look for the logo within the circle. The plain black also adds to the boldness and the standing out of the logo, i think that this logo would be more effective in getting our audiences attention and having them recognise that a product is from our production company.

Title of our short film

I'm not okay

In the design of the title we will have the word ‘not’ with a strike through, which then leaves ‘I’m Okay’. We are doing this because a theme in our film is that all of the main characters have problems in their lives and they hide their true feelings by appearing as if they are okay when really they are not.

For example, a character will be asked "Are you okay?" and they say that they are okay and that they are fine, when deep down they know that they are not okay. This is an issue that a lot of people face in their everyday lives, hiding what they truly feel. It is so easy to just say to someone that you are completely fine so as not to worry or involve them in your problem, but sometimes that would be the better choice to take. Our characters have yet to discover that telling someone about their problems and having someone to talk to about them would benefit them in so many ways.

I was thinking if we had the "I'm okay." in a different colour than the not then it would make the "I'm okay." stand out more as that being what the person is actually saying, and then the point that we want to get across with this title will be easier to visualise. I first thought of having blue as the colour to stand out, purely because I like blue and sometimes the colour blue can connote sadness, when someone is 'feeling blue'.

My friend then looked over at the screen and at my design and said that she thought it was really good and that she liked it, so this proves that it does draw attention, and the colour standing out works. She suggested trying black and red instead of having black and blue, so i did this version and then she said that she preferred my original blue version better. So I will show this to Rabbi and see what she thinks of it and how we could improve it for the film poster.

It would be good if we could take a photograph and edit the title on to look something similar to this image. It is simple but i think it is very effective. The way the writing has been done on this could represent how angry the person is feeling inside. So me and Rabbi might experiment with different photographs that we take and see if we can come up with something similar to this, just so we can get an idea of how we might want to design our film poster.

There are many images and little phrases such as this on the Internet that relate to the theme and idea of our short film, the fact that this issue is so relatable for many people is really what we would like to capture within our film. I think that when the audience watch the film, even if they haven't been through the issues expressed and focuses on in the film specifically, they will still be able to think of a time when they might have said they were okay if when they weren't. With this phrase that i have found i think it could represent what is going through the persons mind. They are in denial of their pain and convincing themselves that they are going to be okay and put on a happy front just so they can try and get through each day. Underneath the black text, the same phrase is written in white text, and you can hardly tell it is there, that is the same for the emotions of our characters, they have this sadness but because they hide it (like the white text is hidden) people can't tell it is there. We have to look a little closer to see how the person is really feeling, and this is what our short film does, we get to see behind the face that the characters out on, we get to see what is really going on.

These two apples are a simple representation of what our film is about. The sad apple appears happy to the other apple, but we see howe he is really feeling. I just searched on google "hiding emotions" because that is what all of our characters are doing. The audience get to follow the charcaters instead of being convincxed that the people are okay. At first they might think as the friend of the characters would, by passivly hearing the character say "I'm fine" or "I'm okay" and then later on they realise what the character is really going through, and then when they hear another character say they are fine or okay, the audience know that they are lying and they know that something is wrong, whereas the friend in the short film does not know. This might start the audience to place themselves in this position, as either the friend or the troubled character. They might think twice when thier friend tells them that they are okay. This short film will hopefully make the audience think about hidden emotions.