Things to do before shooting

You should now be well underway in the planning stage of your coursework. The vast majority of you appear to have done some solid research into genre openings (both your own and the class teacher's); most people appear to have written their treatments; every group appears to have two storyboards (one for the whole movie and one for the opening two minutes) and you are now ready to move onto the next stages of planning.

Script

You should now draft a script for that opening section. If you need help on the layout for your script, you should look at, and follow, the format from this website

Remember, it is just a script for the opening two minutes. We don't have time to write a full script. It's not Hollywood, baby!

Shot List

After you have a script, you should have a Shot List. You can find it here in the resources folder on the school network:

R:\SUBJECTS\English\AS media\OCR AS Media\FoundationPortfolio Coursework

You need to list all the different shots you will use in the two minute section. List them in the order in which they will come in the film (they may not be shot in that order!). You need to fill in the duration of each shot; the cast who will be in the shot (sometimes there may not be any cast); the camera angle used for the shot; and also any movements of the camera that happen in that shot. The notes are any additional information that you think proves relevant.

If you need a copy, please save it into your H drive or onto a memory stick.

Shooting schedule

This is a plan for when you will shoot things. You can see an example here

Remember, you may not shoot your opening sequence in chronological order, as you may not have the necessary costumes for the first part, or you may not be able to shoot at the specific setting, or you may not have certain actors early in your shoot. You need to decide what will make sense to shoot first and why.

If you have a look at Principal photography on The Lord of the Rings movies you can see that in the shooting schedule, "The first scene filmed was the Wooded Road sequence where the Hobbits hide underneath the tree from a Ringwraith."

Again, you can find a template for the shooting schedule in:

R:\SUBJECTS\English\AS media\OCR AS Media\FoundationPortfolio Coursework

Yet more planning

You will also need to do some planning on:

Costume design/inventory
Camera maps
Set design/location list

You may want to use the internet to find some appropriate formats for the above. I think you've been given enough pointers!

Get planning folks.