Everything started with the Genre...

The first thing we got given before we started making our movies was our genre. Our group got given the genre of a rom com and we thought that the first thing we had to do was to research what both the technical and the narrative conventions are of this particular genre. We found out that some of the technical genres for a rom com were the use of warm lighting throughout to create the happy cosy atmosphere that rom coms want and the use of pop songs at specific moments of the film so that the target audience of teenagers can recognise them and want to watch the film. We looked at the narrative conventions aswell and discovered that these normally included some light hearted comedy, usually set in a big well known city with the 'couple' being of different social classes. We looked at different films that were already out and got inspiration from them, using things such as The Holiday and their idea of the cute-meet. This is a situation in which a future romantic couple meets for the first time in a way that is considered adorable, entertaining, or amusing and we realised that this was the type of thing we needed to inlude in our clip. This helped us to understand the types of things we had to include while we were making the clip of our film and this made sure that we could make our clip as close to our genre as possible.

After we had the genre we decided that we had to start storyboarding the scene. We started to storyboard a couple of scenes based very closely on the rom com conventions that we had researched and we started to write a sort of script for the type of things we wanted to include in our scenes. These included things such as using close ups of each the main characters and including an establishing shot so that the audience can know exactly where the action is taking place.


It was only after we had started to plan exactly what our movie was going to be about that we got given a script. This was a real 'spanner in the works' and it meant that most of the planning we had done prior to this we could not use. However we had to find ways to overcome this hurdle as this is exactly what happens in the real world of film, the director gets given a script to work around. The script was also not very good as it was not very well suited to the rom com genre that we were given. It was hard to keep exactly to the script especially where the stage directions said things such as 'menacingly' as we were trying to keep the film as close to script as we could but still trying to keep the lighthearted atmosphere of the genre.

After we got over the fact that we had a certain script that we had to use and a particular genre, we had to redo our storyboard and start from scratch. We storyboarded our new idea, adding in some reverse shots for the conversation between two people in the film and adding in some mid close ups to introduce both characters and settings. We then went on to start filming!

We went out and started to actually film the real thing but had many problems along the way. The first time we actually went out to film, we forgot to put a tape into the camera meaning we didn't actually save any of our work. Then the second time we filmed we captured some stuff and then rewinded it, meaning that we filmed over all our work! Although this was really annoying and set us back a couple of hours, it was definitely something that we were able to learn from and not do in the future. After a couple of hours of filming, we had all the shots we needed and were able to start editing!