These are a range of different genres and stories, but all deal with the same aspects of supernatural or superpowers. This is were the main protagonist have a special gift (or a sixth sense) that they discover they have and learn how to work and control it. Our extract we have chosen is at the beginning of a film, but not the opening, before the synopsis unfolds into an adventure or thriller. With such an open and imaginative genre we were influenced to be as creative and as weird as could. With such a mysterious and supernatural genre you can have unrealistic circumstances and bizarre shot types. Taking on the role of director I was able to direct my other team members to explore the ideas I gave them as far as they wanted to come up with a visually good final cut. One example of this would be the 380 degree turning shot of the main character on the bench and the zip pan shot in amongst the crowd to get the overwhelming feel of the many voices pouring into her head.

These shots aren’t shots you’d find in your typical romantic or children films, they are very non naturalistic. Our genre influenced us to try out shots we wouldn’t immediately choose in normal filming. Another shot we took was agaion very abstract but has been seen in classice for example Rebel Without a cause -

By taking on the role of director, one of the things I needed to do was develop and explore the main character and her character. In our group we went through how the main character’s “gift” affects her mentally and physically and how we can show this in our film making. We did some research with films like what lies beneath, where Michelle Pfeiffer’s character grows more and more distressed due to the problem of no one believing her“Gift”. We concentrated on showing this distress in our main character by shots of her eyes and hands becoming more fidgety and worried.

There is a clip in the spiderman movie of Peter Parkers eyes a her survays his new powers and how they effect his senses and sight.

Another area I worked on with my other group members to develop was the Narrative. Together we came up with an overall synopsis to help us come up with our extract narrative and then the genre –

“Our basic plot for our film is based on a 17 year old girl who begins to read the thoughts of everyone around her. An unknown man contacts the girl by every means of communication possible but never in person, he seems to know everything about her and her gift. She begins to think she is insane and attempts to find the unknown man to find out more about her gift and why he knows so much about it. While trying to track him down she overhears the thoughts of stranger whose thoughts disturb her leading to her attempts to help and save them. This leads to a disastrous conclusion.”

We adapted and changed a few things as we went along due to improvised filming of certain crowd scenes and close ups. As well as director, with my other group members we all contributed to the editing. After shooting a good 15 minuets worth of footage, we realised we would need a lot of editing to make everything sync in time and look like she was hearing voices in her head. Another thing I came across in editing was with filming the voice overs of people we had to mix and match between the voices and images to suit the right on screen character. One major thing we decided to change was to add a non diagetic soundtrack to our extract. We had decided not to add this, but myself and the sound editor played around with some ideas, I as director came up with the conclusion that it needed music to add a more intense feel.
Our overall feedback was very good; one thing that was questioned was why we added the static sound effect. After analysing our piece as director I wanted to add this effect to represent how the main character has always heard the thoughts of people around her but not clear enough to make it out or understand Them. By adding the static it showed that at this point of her life she was finally tuning into it like a radio. This suggested that we didn’t make this decision to add it very clear, but also that it is an under analysis that needs to be thought about.
We got good response to the use of sound, for creating the “hearing voices part”, this worked well with my decision to edit it like this.

The use of Micro elements in our piece helped a great deal to develop the narrative and embrace the audience’s response to our sequence. For example the use bizarre of camera shots, the tempo of the editing and the sound effects of the diagetic and non diagetic sound. Gives the audience the feel they are experiencing it from the characters point of view.
As the Director, I was responsible for overseeing the creative aspects of the film, developing the vision and carrying it out, directing what tone it should have on the audience, organising the crew/cast and approving the other micro elements carried out my other group members. Directing can be seen as a kind of storytelling, I developed this to help and enable the choices made in our film extract and create a successful visual narrative.

Lisette Cooke