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This year I have made a psychological-thriller based in Gothic-Victorian England. It is a new idea that has not been thoroughly investigated before. I intended, from the very beginning, to make this a new thing that has not been done before.

The Film

The final film of 'The Raven'

This is the final cut of the opening scene to 'The Raven'. It is a Gothic-phsychological-thriller and I hope it is tantalisingly scary. 

What I Realised

At this stage we’ve realized how many different aspects of filmmaking there are.  I think Paris and I have worked well together as a team but we’ve also had to pull in quite a few other people to help us.  The majority of these people I’ve worked with before on other projects but a few more hands on specific expertise would have helped to take some aspects to a higher level e.g. website design, twitter expertise and the like.

My Work

I am pleased with what I produced overall. However there are things that I would have like to have improved, such as, the control of the lighting. I found it very hard to have a good balance between light and dark. The main problem was when I wanted a scene to look like it was lit by candle light. This caused difficulties because when I used artificial light it made it look fake and too brightly lit because the lighting was in the wrong place. The main thing I learnt through doing this project is that setting lighting up often takes up to an hour, sometimes two. Next time I make a film I will take this into account and allow for extra light setup time so that I can get a better effect.

Future Film Ideas

The Raven
A complete remake, set in the modern day, of the film I just finished.

The Distance (The Thief) (The Good Thief)
A boy's brother passes away and he works to help his mother by becoming a thief.

The Wolff Inside (Lykanthropie)
A story following Fredrich Koffer, and his trust in his friend Heinrich Wolff, an SS agent who betrays him.

Number 10 (Hunted)
A remake of Hunted, reimagined as a political thriller and a man who exposes the government.

The Gunslinger (The Pistoleer)
A story following a man seemingly out of time. A western style hero in a modern town.

Swords in Sunlight (Yin and Yang)
A story of dark vs light. A film centred around sword fighting and battles.

Tarot
A film based on Tarot cards, full of magic and unexplained mysteries in a world similar to ours.

Production: Website

https://julian-deane.squarespace.com

This is the final web design for our film. 

Production: Lightning

This is the light setup that we used to create the lightning in the second shot. It was to send light through the skylight to create a lightning effect in the opening scene. Although this shot looks as if it was difficult to access it was easy to get to if you know how our school is laid out. I think the shot was successful because there is enough light to see what is going on but dark enough to keep the mysterious theme.

Production: Blender Render

I decided to do a test render of the Mansion to make sure there were no faults with the animation. Unfortunately I did find a few flaws with the lightning and reflective surfaces in the actual animation.

(Above we see the Blender image and below it the mansion I was trying to recreate)

Editing: Title 3

This was the first moment we see 'The Raven' written anywhere. In this particular shot I decided to frame it inside the mural frame. I also made it only visible when there was a flash of lightning, to add an uncertainty about it.

Production: Blender

In this shot we can see my first attempt at setting the light levels for the Mansion using Blender, a 3D modelling generator. I decided it was probably a good idea to adjust the lighting levels using mono-phasic angling (making the light point one direction) and by changing the colour of the light source from white, to an off white beige.

Although taking a long time to create, I believe that the spectacle shot that this created was such that it would make all who saw the film be drawn into it.

Production: Twitter

To publicise ourselves to a wider audience we have created a twitter account where we will put info about the film and behind the scenes news.

Editing: Title 2

In this shot I had Harry Normanton's name appear behind him. However, I wanted to make it seem more natural so I decided to rotoscope around Harry creating a multi-dimensional effect for the final denouement. 

I had worried that the name would not be in shot for long enough, but after testing on 5 different people whether they could read the name or not, I felt satisfied it was ok.

Editing: Titles 1

This title is the name of 'Bob Robertson'. What we did here was we wanted to create a depth of field effect to follow the depth of field change with the camera so we simply changed the blurriness of the name frame by frame. This meant that we had to look at the focal point of the lens of the real 'live' film and follow it with the text.

Planning: Sound Effects

We have been looking at music to go with our opening but as the opening is set during a storm we think the sound effects of lighting fit better with the theme. I used rain and thunder to set the entire mood of the film and fire to create a warmer room during the conversation. 

Planning: Website

This is a photo taken of us planning our website out on paper. We have looked at the websites of films from a similar genre to aid us. This was taken in the early stage of planning.

Planning: Website

In the lesson today we started creating our outline for a website on adobe photo-shop. 

Planning: Victorian Clothes

After researching Victorian costumes we decided that The Narrator should be in evening wear with a cloak. We would have liked John Abamire to wear  pyjamas and dressing gown as if he is just about to retire for the night but found it hard to find a Victorian style of dressing gown.  We therefore dressed him more casually with open neck shirt and cravatte as a gentleman of the time may have worn relaxing at home.

Planning: The Poem

The original poem was phrased as a single narration and is quite lengthy running at approximately 10minutes.  We’ve transformed this into a two person dialogue to enable us to explain the story more comprehensively to an audience in a short opening clip.  We’re adding the device of “a mysterious wooden box”  to engage the audience in questioning what is really going on adding to the “unseen” quality we want.  As we now have a cast of two I can play The Narrator and we’re fortunate that a classmate is a good actor and he has volunteered to be play John Abamire.

Production: Film Release Dates

We decided that the 25th would be a good day to open as it is the week before Halloween. Halloween is a time or year when many people enjoy a spooky atmosphere, particularly in America, and increasingly in England. To take advantage of this, horror/thriller type films are released and above you can see the research we have done on releases in October 2013. As our film, fits into the Horror/psychological thriller category, we feel that this is the best time of year for it to open.

Planning: Storyboard

Research: Thriller films and Victorians

Today we learnt how to use a new website called scoop.it which is an electronic noticeboard that allows us to collect all research and certain topics and show it together. Also today in our lesson we researched films that have similar themes to our intended film opening and put our research on the website scoop.it If you wish to see my associate's research into thriller films CLICK HERE  My associate also did research into how Victorians dressed as that is when our piece is set, to see this research CLICK HERE.

Production: Narrator

It took a lot of practice to get the timing of the The Narrator right.  We were worried that because The Narrator had to speak quickly to fit it in with the time available that he would be difficult to understand but the audience we checked it with thought it was OK.