Character Research

For our film trailer, we have decided to create a romantic drama, which focuses a lot on the aesthetic elements.  We drew inspiration from super 8 footage and examples from Lana Del Rey and films such as 'Like Crazy' and 'Love Rosie'.  We wanted to create old styled footage with new technology, embracing new and early cinema, and also showing that the past, present and future don't have to be separate, but can work together.

The trailer focuses on the secret love affair of a girl and her boyfriends brother, unbeknownst to the audience until half way through the trailer.  We cast myself as the girl as I also do theatre studies, so would be able to embrace the role.  In order to develop the groups and my own understanding of the character I have made a mood board selecting different elements on which to base my character.

The mood board shows a range of characters such as Allison from The Breakfast Club, Angela Chase from My So Called Life and Anna from Like Crazy.  I chose these characters to take inspiration from not only due to their sense of style and appearance but due to their personalities, they can all come across as quite shy and with low self confidence, but once they become comfortable their confidence comes through, this would work well with my character due to the romantic nature of the trailer.  Costume would include a lot of oversized wear, with big coats and jumpers, dark in colour, this would also contrast with the white dress worn in the underwater scenes, adding to the dream like atmosphere.

Deconstruction of Romantic Drama Film Website

Health and Safety

In order for everyone to be safe during the filming process we needed to consider the risks involved and how we could prevent them.

We used a swimming pool as our location for filming the underwater scenes, and therefore this involved people having to hold their breath for a long period of time, which could have lead to alterations in breathing patterns. We reduced the risks by taking regular breaks to ensure people were not out of breath. 

Another hazard is that for some scenes, we filmed with a tripod, meaning there was a trip hazard. In order to prevent any injuries we made sure there was warning and reminders that people should take care when near the camera. 

We also shot some scenes near a fire, which of course created a lot of dangers. We made sure that no one got too close to the fire to reduce the risks of people getting burnt or getting smoke in their eyes. 

History of Romance Genre

Filming Equipment

We used a GoPro Hero 4 Silver to film our underwater footage. It was very easy to create clear shots that we could then edit to create the dramatic scene.

The rest of our filming was shot on a Canon EOS 600D DSLR camera. The settings allowed us to change the shutter speed and alter the exposure and aperture, as well as the focus to create professional looking footage. We set the shutter speed to 50, which was around double the frames per second (24) as this is the recommended setting to create cinematic footage. 

We used a tripod to stabilise some of the footage in order to create a contrast to the handheld footage.

Behind the Scenes - Filming Underwater

Celtx

We used Celtx to put together our storyboard, as it allowed us to clearly organise the different frames chronologically, as well as select the type of shot, description of action in the frame and the length of the shot.