Film Trailer: Production Days 1+2

Finally, the first edited vlog of our first two days of production. I think doing the vlog has definitely helped me with my editing skills in Adobe Premiere Pro - it took a while to figure out, but, well, I can only improve from here.
In this video, we hijack an empty room at school and turn it into an office, and take a field trip to New Scotland Yard.

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Film Trailer: Set Pictures Days 1+2

We're really pleased with how the filming turned out! We shot some vlogs while we were out and about, but until that video is ready and edited, I've collected some photos of the sets and trips we took.

And, to top it all off:

Film Trailer: Meetings!

Me and the rest of my production team for this year mostly communicate using a group chat on WhatsApp, which allows us to message each other free with our phones. It's really useful for sharing ideas - and, most importantly, organising events, as we had our first sessions of filming on Thursday and Friday.

Film Trailer: Shot List

This is just a more detailed version of the list I had previously. This time it's written with shots and more detailed imagery so all of us know exactly what goes where and what to film.

·         First shot of protagonist asleep in a bed – close-up of a phone ringing and the character rolling over to answer it

·         Protagonist bathed in shadow, long shot of him sitting on the edge of his bed

·         Voiceover: “Alex, they’ve taken her.”

·         Extreme close-up of the handle of a gun

·         Protagonist grabs the gun, focus pulls out

·         Long shot of the character walking out of the door – fade to black

·         Zooming out from a close-up of sign to a long shot of the protagonist walking past the New Scotland Yard building with voiceover

·         “Good morning, everyone. For those of you who don’t know, I’m Chief Superintendent Adams.”

·         Cut to meeting room – mid shot of new Chief Sup. Adams as she speaks to her new team of Detective Inspectors

·         Voiceover interspersed with cutscenes to the group of detectives listening and some fast-editing of a van pulling up on the pavement next to a small girl

·         “We’ve had an incident this morning. An eight-year-old girl has been taken from outside her school. Her father is the new CEO of IBM, so we assume ransom. We’ll be keeping this quiet – it hasn’t hit the public yet. Shaw, you’re heading this one. Let’s go.”

·         Cut to protagonist and his boss arguing in the same office later in the day:

·         “Chief, please, give me this case.”

·         “Just stop. You’re a relative. It’s not going to happen.”

·         “But Chief—”

·         “Listen, it’s in Shaw’s capable hands. Relax.”

·         Cut to a dim long shot of the protagonist and his brother on a balcony. Protagonist says: “I’ll find her.”

·         Cue fast-paced shots of walking, research, tensions rising

·         Long shot of protagonist in an alleyway with a brown envelope

·         Close-up of him pulling a picture from the envelope

·         Long shot of protagonist finding a group of people in another alley – a few leave but one, the one in the picture, remains

·         Protagonist says: “I need to know about the Hudson kid.”

·         “I don’t know anything.”

·         Close-up of the man’s face as protagonist pins him to the wall, gun-to-head, saying, “Are you sure?”

·         Fade to black

·         Fast-paced editing of long shots, protagonist running down the road with the alleyway stranger’s voiceover: “There’s got to be someone on the inside.”

·         Long shot of protagonist bursting into his boss’s office with picture ‘evidence’: “I think he’s involved.”

·         Close-up of Adams: “You’ve had it in for him since the start. Give me your badge and go home.”

Film Trailer: Planning

Me and the rest of my group made a startling realisation once we'd finished with our posters and magazine covers: now we actually have to make the trailer.
Lots of us had so many different ideas to get across so we decided to go away, write them all down in the form of a list of shots or a part of a storyboard, and meet again. This was the snippet of storyboard that my idea was on:

With everybody's conflicting storyboards and ideas it was a nightmare to put them all together and compromise, but once we'd all just sat down on a Thursday afternoon for an hour and talked it through, we finally managed to wrangle something a little bit like a plan of a film trailer into a list on this: my most prized piece of paper for 2014.

This will be the list we will (hopefully) constantly refer to throughout production and post-production of our trailer so that we know what should come where and we don't forget any good ideas.
We also have a shoot planned for this Thursday afternoon and Friday morning to film the office scenes with our Chief Superintendent. Fingers crossed.