Audience Questionnaire

This is our audience questionnaire which we will present when screening our film to our test audience.

Mute Audience Questionnaire

We will publish feedback once it has been recieved.

Original Josh Sequence

Our original sequence involved a short scene where Ava dropped her purse and a man at the busstop texted her to tell her to pick it up.

Here is the extra footage:



This lead us to remove the footage so we decided to film another short scene in Ava's house.

We decided the scene was a bit irrelevant to the film opening and it was a bit of a red herring.

Behind-The-Scenes Video Diary

We created a short video made up of behind-the-scenes footage from our first shoot:

Note: Sorry about the sound, please turn your volume up for this video.

Final Storyboard and Shot Lists

In our final lesson before the first shoot date, we finalised our storyboard and wrote out the shot list so we are now fully prepared for Sunday.

(Click to enlarge):

Props & Equipment List for Shooting Day

Odelia
iPad
iPod touch + headphones
Props to dress the room
Tripod
Clapperboard

Jess (& brother)
Phone
iPod touch
Props to dress the room
Digital Camera
Video Camera

Charley
iphone
Props to dress the room
Admin folder
Storyboard
Pag light

Robbie
iPod
Laptop

Everyone has also agreed to bring one pizza each to share amongst us and our actors!


Equipment collection times:
Odelia 3.45pm (tripod)
Jess 2.25pm (camera)
Charley 2.25pm (admin)
Robbie will not be taking any equipment this weekend

Practicing Focus Pulls

We booked an after school session with the media technician Chris so we could learn how to use the manual settings on the video camera. As well as learning focus pulls, we also learnt how to change the exposure, aperture and adjust the depth of field for interesting and more advanced cinematography in our sequence. Here is a short video of us experimenting with focus:

Storyboarding

Here are some photos of us working on our storyboard:

New Audience for 'Mute'

We recieved feedback for our proposed target audience for 'Mute' from our teachers.

Our original rating for the film was 12A -

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/12a12

Our intended audience being similar to other drama / action 12A films; such as The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), or I, Robot (Proyas, 2004). It was aimed at 12 - 25 year olds, and fans of the drama / action genre.


However, after recieving feedback from our teachers, we decided it would be more successful if we matured our film slightly, raising the rating from a 12A to a 15 -

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/guidelines/15-2

This involved creating a darker storyline for our film, involving more deaths of major characters and more threat, graphic violence and language.

Our target audience changed from being 12 - 25 to more like 16 - 25, closer to other 15 rated movies such as Taken (Morel, 2008) or The Book of Eli (Hughes, 2010).

Breaking down our opening sequence

This is our sequence, broken down into rough ten second segments of what happens.

All is subject to change, but this will give us a rough idea of the direction we are heading in.

Mother Tongue Opening Sequence

0 - 10 sec: We see a girl sitting at a busstop, headphones in. Music is playing.

10 - 20 sec: She gets a buzz on her 'communicator': 'You dropped your purse :-)', it's from a man standing nearby. She picks up her purse, and smiles at him.

20 - 30 sec: She stays at the busstop and looks around. Groups of people are clustered together, all staring at their 'communicators' and typing frantically. The bus arrives.

30 - 40 sec: We cut to the girl arriving home. She opens her door and takes her headphones out- the house is silent.

40 - 50 sec: She moves into her house and goes into front room- her younger brother is sitting with his back to her, playing a games console, and as she enters, he pulls out his 'communicator' and begins to text while simultaneously playing - he doesn't look at her the whole time.

50 - 60 sec: She gets a text from him: 'Mum wants to talk to you'. She sighs and exits the room, to the kitchen.

60 - 70 sec: She goes into the kitchen and we see her Mum. Her Mum has an iPad, and they have a small conversation.

70 - 80 sec: Conversation continues.

80 - 90 sec: She leaves the room and heads upstairs.

90 - 100 sec: She enters her room, opens her laptop and goes onto the internet.

100 - 110 sec: Her homepage is BBC News, and she surfs momentarily, before getting another text: 'Dinner's ready.' She sighs and exits the room.

110 - 120 sec: We end with a slow zoom on the computer screen, where there is a news article about a scientist who claims that the long extinct human voices may still exist.

2nd Treatment Feedback

- Possibly scrap the tube location. Might be easier at the busstop - try to contact TFL to sort out locations.

- Girl keeps headphones in at busstop / tube, the reveal of silence can be when she arrives home.

- Change the rating to a 15. Make the synopsis slightly darker, really hard hitting and gritty in this world gone quiet. Explicit violence, sex, political commentary- tackly some tough issues. Possibly scary.

- Shoot more than we need then cut back.

- Different ages of people at busstop / tube if possible, adds realism to the scene.

After this feedback, and discussing possible changes, we finally got the GREEN LIGHT!

Our New Final Treatment

new treatment

Target Audience

Our target audience is teenagers, fans of action and drama. The film will be rated a 12A for mild violence and language. Our headstrong female protagonist will appeals to teenage girls as she is a positive role model, and there is a love story element between Ava and one of the boys. Boys will also enjoy it because of the action and the attractive female lead.

Teenagers are the most frequent cinema goers with 40% going at least once a month (source: UK Film Council) and the most popular genres with 15-24 year-olds are youth-themed drama, crime, action-led films and comedies (source: Office for National Statistics). Both genders go almost equally as much, which is why we want our film to appeal to both boys and girls.

The film would also be suitable to a slightly younger audience, as long as they are accompanied by adults of course. These adults, older than our target audience would hopefully also enjoy the film because of the action and drama elements.

Practicalities

We have the two actors confirmed and will definitely be able to use ourselves and friends to use as extras in the tube scenes. At least one of our mums will be able to play the mum in the scene and Jess has a little brother who will be able to play the brother. We plan to get on the tube at Cockfosters on a Sunday when it will be relatively empty. Robbie has volunteered his house for filming. We all have phones, laptops and iPod touches to use as vital props, and Odelia has an iPad. We will easily be able to make a fake website for the last part of the scene on Photoshop or even create a free website.



Anjelica Barbe







James Wilson



Josh Pedro











Proposed New Opening Sequence

The scene starts on the tube. A girl is sitting down, alone, with her headphones in, loud music blaring out. We see clusters of people on the tube, all with their phones out, texting and showing each other things excitedly. A man approaches her and taps her on the shoulder. She takes out both her earphones to look at the man, and we hear the tube is in total silence. He stands, staring at her, his phone out, when we hear her phone buzz, piercing the silence. She looks around at all the other groups of kids, they are texting each other frantically and yet none of them speak. She pulls her phone out of her pocket; she has a text. 'You dropped your purse :-)' The man points to the floor, at her purse, then moves away. She picks it up, and steps off the tube, as her voiceover comes in. For the remainder of the scene, we hear an intermittent voiceover from the girl. She speaks slowly, bleakly. We cut to her arriving home to a silent house. She walks into the front room, her younger brother is playing on a games console. He pulls out his phone as she watches, and simultaneously texts her with one hand while playing the game with the other hand. She reads the text: 'Mum wants to talks to you'. She leaves the room and moves to the kitchen. We expect her to greet her mum and maybe talk about how their days have been, but instead she gets out her phone and types away in silence. This serves as an anticlimax for the whole sequence and leaves the audience wanting to know why nobody communicates vocally. Her mother types back on an ipad, and we see a closeup of the phone with her response, something like 'Hard day at work. How was your day?' The girl texts back then goes upstairs and immediately logs onto her laptop. On her homepage, there is a news article about a scientist who has been arrested on suspicion of developing voiceboxes in a lab. Before she has a chance to read it, her phone buzzes again: dinner is ready. She gets up and leaves her room, leaving the camera to zoom in on the article so it is the last thing the audience sees. As this is a very simple idea, a chronological narrative which just sets the scene for the rest of the film we can be really elaborate and artistic with our shots, with lots of focus pulls and titled frames and whip pans to demonstrate our technical ability and accompany a creative storyline (written and adapted by group members).

Possible Character Names

Lexis (meaning 'word' in Latin)
Ava (meaning 'voice' or 'sound' in Persian)
Tacey (from Latin meaning 'be silent')

New Synopsis

Living in a speechless world where evolution has led humans to be born without voice boxes, Ava meets two rebellious boys who have somehow managed to keep their voices.
Together, immersed in a world of revolution and secrets, they flee the country to locate a team of rebel scientists developing their own manmade voiceboxes. The only thing they need is the DNA of a human who can speak, but the government is on the team's trail and what began as a journey of hope turns into one with only the tiniest chance of success, even if they do make it in time.
A thrilling, fast-paced Action-Drama from Binary Studios™, Mute is far from the average rebellion story and certainly doesn't end in fairytale perfection, yet audiences are guaranteed to be glued to the screen from the first second to the last.

New Film Plot

Here is the short story we are basing our film opening on, by Jessica Wilson.

Voice

To be done over the weekend (29th/30th Jan)

Charley: 

• Blog new treatment
• Practicalities - confirm actors and locations

  Jess: 

• Post new film idea
• Re-do blog design

Odelia & Robbie:

• Research new genre
• Research similar films and influences

Change of idea

After much discussion with our teachers, we decided that the idea for our opening sequence just didn't fit with the rest of the film, mainly because we thought of the idea before we thought of the film's plot.
The standalone opening sequence would not have made sense to viewers and therefore to the examiners until they had watched the rest of the film, which of course we are not going to make, so as a coursework project the idea didn't really work.

After deciding this, we had a group brainstorm and decided to switch genre from Psychological Thriller, as we thought it would be best to start from scratch to avoid not getting distracted by our original idea. We also decided that we wanted to do something a bit different, as a lot of groups have made Thriller films in the past so we wanted to try something new.

The best way, we decided, to come up with an idea was to think about what story we wanted to tell, and after a few ideas we thought about a short story one of us had written earlier in the year, as it was quite unique and would have been simple to turn into a film. Everyone read the story and liked it, so we decided to go ahead with this new idea, changing our genre to Action/Drama.

The film plot

Opening sequence:
Tom is in a coma. He is trapped in a metaphorical white room inside his mind, hallucinating. These are hallucinations based on his memories with his ex-girlfriend, Maya. We then see the title 'Six months earlier' and the rest of the film shows the events leading up to this coma.

Rest of film:
The story starts when Tom meets Maya on a bus. They get talking and end up going on a date to cafe. They go on several more dates and it is evident that Tom is very much in love with her: infatuated. The audience can see that Maya is not as keen on him as he is on her, but Tom doesn't notice (dramatic irony?).
On one date, Maya breaks up with Tom because she doesn't feel it is working. Tom doesn't take it well. He can't accept their separation and continues to stalk her.
The film comes to a climax when Maya sees him looking into her window an confronts him. It ends in a violent fight in her kitchen, and in a moment of anger and passion, he grabs a knife and stabs her. Realising what he has done, he decides he cannot live without her, or with the guilt, and stabs himself too. Missing the fatal spot, he is taken to hospital in a coma.
The final scene shows the life support machine being switched off.
We then see Tom in his metaphorical white room in his mind again, the four walls falling down and the bright white cuts to black: he is dead.


[Please note that this planning is no longer relevant to our final idea, only our original idea, as we changed our concept: see our change of idea post]