29th September

This week we looked at a number of short films on youtube which, like ours, have Schizophenia as the main topic. We did this in order to compare own own ideas to them and to see if they are common place in a film of this genre (phyciological thriller).


Film one - Schizophrenia Short Film
In this film, black and white is used to show hallucinations and colour is used to show what is really going on and what everyone else can see. We were intending to do that in our film as we thought it would make it easier for the audience to understand what is going on. The hallucinations are made to stand out using both heavy dark makeup and dark clothing. Any voices you did hear in the film were muddled up and sounded unorganised, we thought that this was good as it reflects the mentality of the sufferer. By making the hallucinations more obvious and visable in throughout the film it makes the audience feel more sympathtic as it is like you are seeing the world through the schizophrenics eyes. Also, as the end of this film they go through the events again how the rest of the world would see it, we liked this idea.


Film two - Schizophrenia: A Short Film
In this film, you can't always hear or see the hallucinations the sufferer is having, instead having to use his reactions to try and work out what is being said. This makes you more aware or just how violent his reactions are which makes you feel sorry for the sufferer. However, we thought, that the fact that for the most of the film you couldn't hear or see the hallucinations was actually a weakness as as lot mopre could have been done if we could, we did like the idea of just seeing his reactions, but thought the voices should have been used more. However when you did hear voices they were crazed and angry.

Film three - Paranoid Schizophrenic
In this film the lighting used in low key, whereas in the other two more naural lighting. the low key lighting made the whole film more frightening as well as the fuzziness of the movie. However as we are using black and white for a lot of our film we think that using low key light could make it hard to see what is going on.

22st September

In our theory lessons we have been looking at how genders are represented in the media as well as 'the male gaze', 'the female gaze' and 'the feminie mystique'.

When applying these theories to our new ideas for our short film we can see that the male gaze is not used as our female characters are covered up, due to the cold weather in which the film is set. As well as this the majority of the film is set outside meaning coats will be worn which, if functional normally don't show off the female body.

The Female gaze also isn't used as, once again, due to the cold weather in which the short film is set the man will be covered up meaning our character isn't being used for 'the pleasure of women'. As well as this our male character is quite sinister which is goes against the idea of what most women like to see in men.

However, it could be said that there is evidence for 'the feminie mysique' as both female characters are sensitive and vunerable with Lucy eventually giving into her hallucinations and Roxanne being shown as consently concerned for Lucys wellbeing. Lucy's vunerability and fear will be shown through shakey camera work and close ups on her face in order to convery her expression and emotions.

This week we also conducted a reasearch via a survey to find out what our potential audience woudl like to see. This is shown below:

Mind Trap - Audience Questionnaire

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We gave this survey to 20 people, the results are shown as pie charts below:

15th September

Over the summer holidays Rosie and I decided to completely change our idea. We decided to change it as after looking more into schizophrenia (the mental condition our film does somewhat deal with) we found that our ideas were not acurrate compared to what people actuallyt experience. Our new ideas are darker and more sinister as after researching into people's experiences with schizophrenia we found that the experiences are frightful.

Because of these darker ideas our new film is more of a psychological thriller. These changes meaing any work done before the holidays is irrelevent now however we are going to keep it on our blog in order to show our progress and to compare to our new product.

In the next week we hope to get people from our target audience to read our new screenplay and give reviews, which we intend to record for future reference.

To help us keep track of our ideas we both made our own mood boards, which consist of images relavent to our film:

Mood board

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The notes from our production meeting are shown below: