Pitching to Matt and Luke

We pitched our initial to Matt and Luke adapted with Mike criticisms and they didn’t appreciated as much, as we had lots of negative feedbacks.

The story was considered to simple, but too complicated to film, as we wanted to do it in a maze. They didn’t like the idea of filming a scene with the mirror, as it would be too complicated for inexperienced students working with professional cameras for the first time to realise. They dislike the lantern idea to show even more the dream feeling as it does not look realistic, the audience won’t know watching the opening scene that we are talking about at dream as we didn’t what to show her waking up.

Overall they saw our idea as a horror so the advise us to restart and coming up with something much simpler and more realist to the Hurtwood standard, as our first film I believe we were aiming to high.

It was hard for something and us to leave the maze idea and think completely new that will still be innovative and creative and we obviously we disappointed for all the work we put into this idea to make it work and end up with a failure.

For this pitch we prepared our self as group creating a power point including a mood board, possible casting and we looked in detailed at the location so we called them and got all the contacts and we came up with a backup idea in case of future problems or incomes (taking out an element and the story will still work, for example taking out the maze).

We also thought about costumes and we did research for a mirror so that we were aware to pitch them and resolve any problems they could think off.

Next we will discuss as a group about potential new ideas and we will watch few trailer of famous classic thriller to get inspired by them and get a clear base for a thriller. Then we are going to look at the news to be updated of what is happening around us nowadays and be creative being inspired by some of the tragedies or stories and hopefully we will come up with a new effective idea that Matt and Luke would like, to develop further more in details for out final thriller media film.

Test shoot

We did a test shoot during our lesson to start experiment around our initial idea. We found it was really difficult to find a place that could be similar a maze so after a while we gave up with the rules of continuity and we just started shooting around school to play around using different shoots and perspectives. We filmed mainly in the three different locations around school, for us a group to see variety in location and see the best shots that could possibly work for the actual thriller. We trying filming outdoor as well as indoor to experiment even with the uses of props for example the mirror and have an vague idea of how difficult would it be to film mirrors and give the right angle. Obviously we didn’t the test shoot as serious as we should have done as we used different locations and the cast wasn’t what were planning onto use. We used a soundtrack to give a more dramatic and thrill effect to the sequence.

We didn’t use a professional editing app so the final results is not what we where expected but as group I still think that as a test shoot is a good start to analyse our the next steps.

Pitching

We presented our final initial idea; we received positive feedback from Mike, as he liked our idea. He said that the idea is effective as innovative, nobody came up with the idea of filming in a maze in Hurtwood before, so that will add something to our portfolio. Mike also appreciated the idea for costumes as we planned in detailed what the main character and the antagonist should wear (night suite with slipper and a total black suite with posh shoes and a hat). Our idea is seen as well thought in detailed wise and different. The only issues we found were the fact of filming at night time as it will give us less time to film, finding the location, the maze, that is near by or a back up location that could give the same effect in the case the maze won’t work as a possibility. Also filming at night is much more complicated than at daylight, as we won’t have professional lighting to give us enough brightness to show clearly the movements and face expression of the characters.

The positive aspects of our idea are hat is well planned and original, but still need farther development.

After Mike pitch we decided to look in details to some possible mazes where we could film the thriller and we started contacting them to make sure we were aware of all the possible problems and have enough information in case to give to the school. While we were looking we found that mazes are too far away from where we live so we came out with the idea of a vineyard, finding one closer and we decided to contact them and they reply positively that we could film at theirs with no problems. We also looked at mirrors that could have bought for a cheap prise and choose the perfect one, that we could possibly carry around and be full length. Finally we looked at possible casting for the thriller, as we wanted to have everything ready for Matt and Luke pitch the next couple of days.