Mockumentary - Props / Costume List & Itinary

As a group it was most convenient for us to have all our filming completed in one day. We therefore decided it would be best to complete all our filming at school. Unfortunately we only decided on a date as we drew very near to our deadline for footage submission, in hindsight it would probably have been more productive to plan out our itinery with lots of time to spare in case we encountered any hiccups. 

As we decided to complete all our filming in school time we had no choice but to film our cast in the clothes they happened to be wearing on that day. However, in some ways this was convenient as in a school environment out cast members were wearing what would be expected of then. For example with Fionna and her friends wearing their usual sixth form clothes it made it more believeable that this was their natural environment. As Mr Savage was in his usual PE kit it was believeable that he is a teacher, also, using a real adult makes the mockumentary somewhat more proffesional.

We decided not to use any props as we did not think they would benefit the mockumentary any further. If, for example, we had been given the other group's task of 'Chairboy', the prop of a chair would have been important. But based on the theme and title of our mockumentary they were not necessary

Mockumentary - Cast List

 CHARACTER PROFILES

Fionna - Fionna is a young girl of 17 who on the outside seems just like an ordinary teenage girl, but Fionna has a life consuming condition which causes her to burst out laughing at random intervals.

Friends - Joe and Luke are two of Fionna's friends that have been interviewed alongside Fionna, despite her presence both of the boys outwardly express their frustration towards having to deal with Fionna's condition.

Mr Savage - Fionna's teacher Mr Savage finds her condition sometimes difficult to deal with. He struggles to teach alongside her laughter and has noticed that pupils in classes with Fionna sturggle to focus, he notes that her laughter is contagious and often others end up laughing alongside her. Despite this, Mr Savage recognises that Fionna has the same rights and need to learn regardless of her conditions. 

Parents - Fionna's parents portray an almost 'good cop, bad cop' type of relationship. With her mother as a sympathetic, caring character and her father as an unsympathetic, intolerant counterpart.

ACTOR PROFILES

Fionna - Fionna is a highly experienced actress and has featured in several on stage and student made productions, making her highly suitable to play the main character in our mockmentary.

Friends - Joe is also an experienced actor and has featured alongside Fionna in several productions, making him the perfect actor to act alongside her. Luke is hivhly confident and happy to appear on camera. Luke also knows Fionna and so is therefore more comfortable to be in a short film alongside her.

Mr Savage - Mr Savage is a real life teacher at the school which Fionna attends, he is willing to help students when they are in need of him. He is sympathetic and accepting of all pupils as a teacher should be, making him ideal to play to role of a sympathetic teahcer.

Parents - Anna is playing Fionna's mother. Although she is not an experienced actress she was eager to be on camera, as she is such a caring person we thought she was ideal to play a sympathetic mother. Ronny is playing Fionna's father. Ronny has been involved in performances with the Young Farmers theatre group and was happy to be on camera, making him a good cast member to play an intolerant father.

Stop-Motion animation

In our last few lessons we have been exploring the concept of stop-motion animation. Stop-motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique used to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small fractions between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.
To begin with we watched some examples of famous stop motion films:

This animation is called 'Lunch' by Jan Švankmajer. Most of Švankmajer's work includes some elements of stop-motion. This animation has been created completely with stop-motion.

After looking at some examples of stop motion created by others, we were set the task to create our own short stop motion animation using resources in the media room. The main resource we used was play dough. We created both our setting and 'characters' in this medium. We decided to show some ducks swimming around in a pond, the pond is then engulfed by purple slime and the ducks disappear into the slime. We made this visual by taking photos of the ducks in different positions around the pond and then adding small parts of slime in each shot to show it moving across the pond. This is our finished product 'Ducks':

Using stop motion had positive and negative outcomes. Stop-motion is highly time consuming and intricate work as each shot needs to be altered only slightly to make it appear different to the last one, these alterations must be tiny and almost unnoticeable which means that a mere 6 second production took almost an hour to create and put together. However, the use of stop-motion is very effective as it can be used to display slow motion events. After experiencing the process of creating a stop-motion project I have decided that I will not be including it in my two minute opening sequence. This is because it would be too time consuming and put me at risk of not meeting the coursework deadline. Also, intricate planning and extensive storyboarding would be required in order to make the work look professional enough to submit. Due to this it is not appropriate for me to include stop-motion in my final 2 minute film opening.

Film Review - The Fault in Our Stars

As our first homework piece we were set the task of creating a film review in the form of a page of a media magazine. I chose to review The Fault in Our Stars as since it's release I have heard and seen many mixed opinions of it. Having already seen the film and read the novel upon which it was based, I had no trouble in writing the review, but creating it in the correct format was challenging to begin with. I chose to create the layout on Microsoft Powerpoint as at the time I had more understanding of this program than I did photoshop. This is the finished product: