Production diary

10th November: This was the first day we sat together as our group to discuss film ideas for our potential opening sequence. We pitched each of our ideas to each other to see which we thought was best and we came up with 2 or 3 ideas although they were fairly similar. The first we came up with was an idea about a girls holiday where you could film the opening sequence as them getting ready in the morning whilst including the titles into that, however it didn't really have a plot to develop so the rest of the film wouldn't be interesting. The second was a pregnancy theme, the girl discovers she is pregnant whilst in an abusive relationship. You don't discover until the end that she is pregnant but she shows signs and symptoms throughout, although we didn't go with this idea as we thought it was done too often. The third idea that we did come up with was a girl with amnesia who is on a journey as she looks through her scrapbook of memories. We eventually chose this idea because we felt it had the best story line and we could develop it the most. We also talked about the different locations we could use to film our opening scene. 

11th November: We put all of our ideas for the film onto a power point so that we could present our film pitch to the class. We each typed a slide so that it was a joint effort. 

12th November: Frankie wasn't here today so Katie and I decided on the character names for the titles and for the characters in our film. These were, Libby - Daisy Blackman, Katie - Eliza Thomas, Frankie - Naomi Waters. Then we researched some similar films to ours such as Memento, which features a man who creates a strange system to help him remember things; so he can hunt for the murderer of his wife without his short-term memory loss being an obstacle and the Notebook, which is set as an elderly gentlemen telling a lady a story from their past in which, a poor and passionate young man falls in love with a rich young woman and gives her a sense of freedom. They soon are separated by their social differences, as they follow similar memory loss story lines to ours. We time lined the titles of the Notebook, the last passenger, Memento and 50 first dates. 

13th November: Today we found an art book that we could use for our scrapbook so we covered the front page in butterfly wrapping paper so that you couldn't see the writing on the front. Then we thought of some designs we could put into the book and where we could fit the titles into our opening scene. Today, we finalised who we wanted to produce and distribute our film, we decided Runner Productions would produce our film and New Line Cinema would distribute it. 

17th November:  In this meeting we decided on the task we were each going to complete separately and the ones we should do as a group. I started to plan out the storyboard roughly as we were still unsure on how we would work all the shots. Frankie wrote the script for the voice over that daisy will recite at some point during the film and Katie wrote a list of props. 

18th November: We continued to progress with our designated tasks in today's meeting. I carried on planning the storyboard, adding to it and changing certain bits so that they fitted to the genre. Frankie created the shooting schedule which gave us a plan of what we wanted to film, when we wanted to film and where we wanted to film. Katie started to research cover tracks of songs we could use as background music for our opening sequence. 

19th Novemeber: Today, I started to research into the font for our titles. I researched which fonts would be suitable for the genre and themes of our film and wrote why they would be appropriate. Katie continued with some research into music for our film. Frankie started the mood board in which she screenshot evidence from other films of our inspiration. Throughout this week we keep changing our minds as we're coming up with more or different ideas as to how the film can continue. 

20th November: In our meeting today, we all continued on previous tasks we had started. I continued to research font titles and researched the fonts of titles from similar films to ours and Frankie continued to develop the mood board. Today we also started to practice and trial out how we wanted the titles to appear and how we could work them into the scrapbook. It proved to be quite challenging as each time, something wasn't quite right. 

24th November: Today, we began to film our titles which I was going to write letter by letter so that we could film it individually and edit them later using premiere, however when we tried to do this we found it difficult as the camera angles weren't exactly the same so the shot was moving around meaning the titles didn't stay in the same place. So then we decided to film me writing the whole word out and speed it up later by editing it on premiere however we weren't impressed by the titles as we thought the styles weren't as stylish as we thought they would look. Frankie told us her mum had smart handwriting and that she would be happy to write out the titles for us, so Frankie took the camera home to film. 

25th November: Frankie showed us the footage she got of the titles her mum had written out and we all agreed that we liked them. Once we tried to edit them to make them look more aesthetically pleasing we realised it wasn't working and you could see there was nothing on the page overleaf. So we thought it would be a good idea to shoot the titles again with a series of pictures portraying a memory on one page of the double spread and then the titles spelt out in foam letters on the other side.

26th November: Last night, I took the scrapbook home and began to decorate a few pages of memories to make the scrapbook look personal. Then when we met at school, Katie and Frankie decorated more pages. Whilst they did this, I started doing some audience research for our film. We got some feedback from our teacher and some other peers within the class and the general feedback was that the genre wasn't clear and it was a little confusing as to how you would tell the memories apart from the present day. So we re-evaluated the storyboard and the genre of what the film had now become due to the music we had chosen.

27th November: Today we finished the scrapbook and decided all of our shots that we need to shot whilst on the train, at the train station and in Southend. Katie began to rewrite the storyboard out in neat and Frankie began the marketing campaign. 

28th November: We completed a risk assessment for the day we planned to shoot and made sure we had everything ready for Saturday so we could film. We also recorded the voice over, so that we were able to edit that into the film once we had all of our footage. We finalised the storyboard and shot list so that we were clear on everything we needed to shoot. 

29th November: Today we filmed. We were faced with a dilemma once we got to southend as our main idea that the film was based around had to be ruled out as the theme park was closed so we were unable to get our roller-coaster shot. Instead we tried to get some other footage so that our film didn't finish short of 2 minutes. 

1st December: After filming on Saturday we sat down and got all of our footage onto the computer so that we were ready to edit. We began to edit a few of the first clips in this meeting and added the music that we had originally chosen, and we put some video effects into the footage, whilst also adding the titles on via Premiere as the written titles didn't go to plan. 

2nd December: Today we continued to edit together. We experimented trying different effects and transitions to make the opening sequence more interesting and also decided on where we could edit in the numerous titles we needed to include. 

5th December: Today was the deadline for our 1st draft. Before we handed our film over we tried to add some more footage into our film as we were around 30 seconds short of 2 minutes as we had a vital shot that we weren't able to include although we will have it filmed for our final piece. We also changed a few bits around and changed the speed of one or two shots. Our teacher gave us some feedback that we are able to improve on for our next deadline.