Through her eyes RES 2

The first poster made by Andreea Cristea

STORY

I started writing our script on a shared google doc based on Laura´s shot list. We realised we would need one for our actors. I managed to write four pages of it. In this version we had the protagonist leaving a house costume party as originally planned. I followed the old timeline and the mental list she makes in her head. It was also pretty similar to the storyboard. We were having some second thoughts about it though so we asked Andreea and Reagan their opinions.

Laura especially wants to add more to it, so we have to see what will happen for our script. I´m afraid our costuming will have to change too. Here´s the notes I took from our discussions:

-online auditions next week

-in person auditions for top five (have at least parts of the script to send)

-meet with Anne

-email Steve about extras

-add phone call to story and script (we emailed strut safe, a company meant to help women get home safe, we thought we could add them to the end of our film)

-maybe have car stop to help her?

-all people are suspects in her mind

-don´t portray her as crazy

- We discussed this in particular at length. Andreea especially was afraid that our story line made her seem crazy especially ad at that point she was just imaging all these scenarios. She has a complete mental break down for not a lot of reason. In our minds it made sense as we thought our protagonist has some sort of trauma, maybe that her friend got assaulted and that´s why she´s so afraid. But the problem is we don´t show this in the film and we can´t really show all the news she might be following. We are assuming everybody watching is as aware as us about the situation, which we shouldn’t do. I believe Andreea and Reagan are right about this, and we should definitely change the story up, to show she has reason to be afraid. We don´t want it to seem like women just make it all up. On the other hand, I don´t want to add a bunch of men harassing her, as the counterpart to this is that "not all men". We need to find the perfect balance between these things.

-don´t show man after man harassing her (as Anne said as well we can´t say that it´s all men) (even though its definitely enough men)

-Instead of a party we decided she will leave work

                -we could use the sports club where we work

-Think of arch of the story

-ride cancels on her, no taxi available, She tells herself “I can do it”, she gets worse and worse, climax (walking past the group of guys, her fear at its highest), she calls someone, cools down for end, gets home

Someone mentioned having her on a bike. That would be much harder to film
and woudlnt make much sense (why would she have a bike when she thought
she had a ride home) but I did imagine that it would´ve looked nice

-articles to show why she is so afraid, for example, in the office, on floor, missing persons poster

Strutsafe

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-60055916

https://www.strutsafe.org/

    - Our tutors sent us this article about a company Strut Safe, who help women get home safely. They´re basically a hotline for women feeling unsafe walking alone at night. We thought it might be great if we could add them to our film and have the phone call Bea takes be with them. Laura sent them a couple of emails and we even messaged them directly on instagram, but they haven´t answered us. If they don´t we´ll just make it a friend, but I think that could be really cool. They would also be getting publicity.

We chose her name to be Beatrice or Bea for short. (Pronounced Bee).

We finished parts of the script to send to our applicants 

We had some slight disagreements about story. Andreea also thought she sounded crazy, she imagines everything, so we changed it for Bea to have more reason to be afraid. 

I wrote a story overview. We edited and changed it a bit until we were happy. We continued writing the script based on that.

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We finally finished our script! I think it´s in a place now where both Laura and I are really happy with it. We sent it to Hannah, so we´ll see what she thinks of it.

I´ve added the final story overview here for everyone to read.

UPDATES

location permissions sent off

We have received our location permissions, but we might need to change the dates.

camera testing

List of things we need to do (7.3)

Choose actress

Finish script

Get all our extras

organise crew (Alya or Andreea for lights?)

Post instagram about extras

Finish shot list and story board

Call sheets 

Permission from Bourne Club

Learning agreements

Updated art direction

More test shots for lighting and camera

original timetable

24.3  harness (easy rig) and camera thing with david cooper, also camera testing

24.3 and 25.3 online auditions

Around a week after in person auditions at uni. Also camera testing

Week starting the 7.4 , practising and finalising

Week starting 14.4 filming 

Updated timetable

Our actress who we really wanted, Hannah, couldn´t film during our original dates so we decided to push our shoot to the last week of march. I think we did need the extra time as well though so it works out well. We still have a lot of work to do and the filming dates being so close by stressed us out a lot. We booked the camera and other equipment for that week now. So the film dates are now 28.3-31.3.

FUTHER RESEARCH/ INSPIRATION

THE THREE MEN YOU MEET AT NIGHT 2020

Short film by Beck Kitsis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzTjf1JPxU

"A young woman's walk home turns into a surreal nightmare"

This short film is clearly very similar to the one we want to make. It has that eerie horror atmosphere we want too and It is about a young woman´s journey home after a party. She bumps into three different men, all of whom pose a threat to her. After a lot of stress, she eventually makes it home though, met by judgmental stares from her neighbours.

It is inspiring to see a successful short about the same topic as ours. We´re going to have many similar shots in ours, although ours is simpler than this one. We definitely want to also add details of lights (like in the first screenshot), shots of her walking at night of course, the car headlights behind her and empty streets. It´s useful to see how they used lighting in this film, as I think that will be difficult for us to do in the dark. We´re also going to have some interactions with men in our film, just not as much as in this one.

SPENCER 2021

directed by Pablo Larraín

I watched Spencer at the cinemas and absolutely adored it. I´m mainly putting it here as inspiration for cinematography. (Because other than the main character being a woman in a man´s world, there is not much in common story wise.) I just really loved the way it was filmed, the colours and the softness of the film. The editing too was somehow slow in a way that I really liked. Although our film will never be at this level, I hope to capture some gorgeous shots like in this movie.

SHE IS A CROWD

https://share.shesacrowd.com/map

She is a crowd is a website that allows women to share areas where they did not feel safe, where they were threatened or violated. This way other women have a warning of areas which might be best avoided. Visit the link to see how it works. 

LIFE360

https://www.life360.com/intl/

Life360 is an app that allows a group to share locations. It lets everyone in the group follow each other´s journeys, and when someone gets home safely, it sends everyone in the group a message. It´s a handy way to know that your friends or family are safe.

SHOTDECK

I signed up for a free trial on shotdeck. It´s an amazing library of film shots that you can search through using key words. It´s really useful if you´re looking for inspiration for cinematic shots, framing and lighting. We loved looking through "night shoot" or night time for inspiration with Laura. We needed ideas for lighting and camera angles so this helped us out.

https://shotdeck.com/welcome/home

+ more visual research

SOCIAL MEDIA

We decided we had to make an instagram account to promote our film and to get attention for our gofundme. When we first set up our Instagram account we had to find the perfect bio to quickly explain what the film was about. This is what we came up with in the end. " Following Bea´s walk home, we are taken on an emotional journey that highlights women´s safety issues and the fears that come with it". Then we needed some content.

As a profile photo I just made something really quickly on my iPad, knowing that soon we´d have something better to use. We had asked Andreea if she could design a poster for us, and if she would help us with the Instagram posts. Happily she said yes and was excited to do the work. We showed her some photos we had as an inspiration and explained quickly what we wanted, although we had complete faith in her. I knew she wouldn´t need that much guidance and that she would design something even better than what we could imagine. And she did.

Quick profile picture I made at first 

Our instagram

 

These were some photos Laura took as inspiration. We were thinking of having a dark street or a lampost on the poster. These were photos from her street that we are going to use.

  

Inspo photo from pinterest

I used the image below on the left as an inspiration and made the drawing on the right to see if that could be a sort of thing we like. Like a hazy, smudged look, but I didn´t really like it.

 

Andreea´s poster designs.

First version she made

  

Profile picture for instagram

 

International women´s day poster. We thought that would be really relevant to our film

The final poster

GOFUNDME

We set up a gofundme. I estimated the budget to be around 500 pounds and made a pie for the gofundme. I had to write a bunch of text onto it explaining the film and why we need the money. I tried to be as professional as possible.

We even considered having rewards for bigger donations (ie. If you donate 30 pounds we will send you a poster) but we couldn’t find enough ideas that people would actually be interested in.

We posted about it on our films Instagram and shared it to our own private ones. We quiet quickly started building a good amount of money on it. And just before filming and the closing of the gofundme we got our 500 pounds. Thank you to everyone who helped us reach our goal!

In the end though we realised we would´ve needed more money. We spent more than we thought we would. We had also not taken into account that Gofundme takes an amount of the money. We only have a small amount left that we wanted to use for the film festivals, but we´ll figure that out later. At least we had enough for the actual filming. 

MAKE UP AND COSTUME

Now that our storyline was updated, I had to come up with new art direction ideas. I first set about for the make-up. We thought it would be nice to have her make-up change throughout the film to show her changing state of mind. That way we can add an element of experimentalism as well. At the beginning of the film then, when she´s closing up at work, she´ll have a normal minimal face of make-up. Then after every encounter that makes her more afraid, her make-up will change a bit. I made some mood boards for my two main ideas. I thought of a blue one, inspired my Euphoria and the 60´s/70´s. I thought blue could represent mainly her tears (and melancholia/ sadness) and having crystals or pearls as hardened tears. She tries so hard to hide her emotions but her being upset still surfaces. The red one was a similar idea, but as blood instead of tears. When you cry your eyes go red and your face goes red too- and the pearls would still be there as crystalised tears. Red can also be the colours of anger and rage. She not only is sad and cries, but is outraged at the situation. I really liked both mood boards so I wasn´t sure which one to go with yet.

Before the mood boards I had drawn these (I was also thinking about her costume. I liked the pink one a lot originally)

 

These drawings really helped me decide which make up to go with. I really didn´t like the way the blue eyeliner looked when crying and much preferred the red blushed look. Once I had decided on the red look I just had to think of the specifics.

Final ones:

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2

3

Before filming we had trouble securing a make-up artist. I sent a message to several Farnham based artists but only two replied. And these two were unfortunately unavailable on some of the days. One was available one day, the other the rest. But then the other one too said she actually might only be able to do one day at which point we decided it was pointless. Hannah was also more than happy to do her own. She has done that kind of make-up before and was good at it. We just decided to cancel both make-up artists for simplicity. We´re really lucky Hannah was so good at it.

She did a test make up look on Monday:

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2

3. It was just missing the pearls but it was one of the final stages of the make up

I bought the pearls off amazon. The rest of the make-up Hannah used her own.

Next for the costume I thought she should wear something that would stand out in the dark. I thought about our film´s mood board and the colours we´ll mainly be seeing. (Mainly though it was just going to be dark).

I narrowed it down to two of my favourite colours, a bright sort of magenta and a bright yellow. I made another collage to compare the two and to try and decide which looked better. I eventually decided that my favourite was the yellow one. Before we ordered the coats though, Andreea came up with the idea of having a reflective coat. I thought that was a really interesting idea, and imagine Bea glowing in the dark, whilst our extras were blending in. We ordered two coats then, a yellow and a reflective one.

 We tried them out on Monday before filming and unfortunately the reflective one just looked grey most of the time. It didn´t look great on camera and I preferred the yellow one, so that´s the one we went with.

Sometimes it shined and looked cool

Most of the time though it just looked dark grey

I loved the yellow it was so nice and bright

PRODUCTION

Booked BnB. We compared the prices and found a nice and cheap nice looking one in the center of Farnham. https://www.farnhamrooms.co.uk/

Actors agreements. We got Hannah´s and Poppy´s nice and in time, but our other extras took their time. We got them eventually.

location permissions- Laura mainly dealt with them and we got them nice and in time as well.

learning agreements- We both updated our learning agreements for the sign off.

Risk assessments- I mainly did the RA for the locations. Anne had some recommendations she wanted us to add to them so I did.

Everything for sign off- we ended up being a bit late with everything and the link we sent to Anne didn´t work for some reason. She called us very stressed out about it. She was kind enough to sign it off before our filming though so we just about got it in time.

Police? I wasn´t sure if we had to really inform the police and couldn´t find where to do it. I asked Anne about it and she said we wouldn´t need to, as our film doesn´t involve anything too dramatic (violance, nudity, uniforms etc)

We´ve starting doing our cast and crew calls as well.

NEXT IS FILMING!