Description of my intro + Beyond the intro

It basically starts with very short cuts between flashback and reality. In the first shot you're able to see the character playing basketball with his mates. It quickly cuts back to reality where you see the same character walking on crutches across a sports hall. He is also looking down and seeing the basketball court he used to play on before the tragic injury. It then goes back to the flashback which is in the basketball court and the character jumps to shoot the ball. Just as he is about to shoot there is another cross cut and it goes back to reality and the character continues walking then leans against the balcony. It then goes back to the flashback and he shoots the ball, lands awkwardly and hurts his ankle. There is a zoom in on his face when he lands and you see the agony/pain he is in. That is the last flashback and then back. There is a cut back to reality where it shows him walking across the hall and into the changing room. He then sees Ryan, a friend, getting ready for training and he sits down and has a conversation with him about the lack of desire to play even when he is back to full fitness because he is does not think he is ever going to be the same player he was before the injury. They talk about all the other habits like smoking that he picked up due to the emotional stress of being on the sidelines for so long. He then walks out the room and walks through the hall where he stops and glances at a framed picture of the great basketball player Max Leiva but does not show any real emotion. Most of the conversation is in shot reverse shot. All the shots are basically about 4 seconds long each and for most of the flashbacks the camera is at a slightly high angle. The flashbacks are in slow motion to try and capture the players moves in some sort of glorified way.

Beyond the intro
As the movie progresses the character's downfall is much more serious and the things he gets involved with are deeper. He starts using all sort of drugs to distract him from getting angry at not being able to play. The genre is not very clear but there is a similarity in story lines between my movie and the movie '17 Again'. In that movie Zac Effron gets another chance after he blows it during high school. It is the same idea but without the whole comic thing about him going back in the past. My story is a bit more profound and has a darker meaning to it. This intro is meant to attract the teenage audience.

Production Diary: Day 1

Monday, 18th January 2010
First day of filming. Max, Ellie and I recorded the first shot of the intro in his room. Shes looking into the mirror, putting on some make-up and you see her reflection on the mirror. It was initially a mid shot of her body but we had to change it. It took us a bit of time to get used to using the camera but we managed to shoot the scene it accurately. The shot is just two seconds. When we finished we looked at what we recorded and decided a close up will work better in making it a bit more like an intro.

Day 2

Tuesday, 19th January 2010

Today was the second day of filming our intro. We managed to shoot three scenes in one hour. The first one was a better version of the shot yesterday. We zoomed in on Ellie's face to give a better effect. I though it was of higher quality than the shot we filmed yesterday. We also did another shot of me picking up my bank cards, keys, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes on the table. This was a bit more complicated than we originally thought it would be because I was meant to pick everything up in one clean swipe and also Max was supposed to zoom out and pan the camera at once but we found a suitable way to do it. We had to change the way i picked up the things, so instead I used both hands and picked them up separately. The last thing we filmed was Ellie putting on a high heel. This wasn't too difficult and once we took a few shots it looked very good.

Day 3

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

Third day. Unfortunately we did not get much work done today. We planned on filming at 9am but had to wait for the second girl in our intro to show up but she eventually didn't. The plan was to film her scene and the other 'key' scene so we ended up only doing the 'key' scene. The three of us went into Scholars house and filmed it. It didn't take very long. None of us thought it was fantastic so we might look at it later and maybe film it again.

Day 4

Monday, 25th January 2010

Fourth day. The three of us reviewed all the footage that Max shot while he was in London. They were a lot so we had to delete most of the bad ones. He filmed certain stations in the london underground. We also played around with the effects on 'imovie' to see which ones we would eventually pick. In addition to all that we got some filming done today. We got the shot of Jade brushing her hair getting ready for the party. We did a few takes of that and I thought they were all decent. Later in the evening, we went to The Regal and took the still pictures with Jade, Ellie, and BK. Max took all the pictures.

Day 5

Tuesday, 26th January 2010

After we got the still pictures last night, we thought it would be a good idea to put our piece together and start thinking about the editing and how its all going to work out. We had a look at the clips and finally decided where and when to cut them because most of them were too long. Ellie put the clips together even though they were parts of it we have not recorded yet because the rest of it is in london. We hand-picked the pictures we wanted to use in the intro and put them onto idvd to try and create a slide-show. We decided what background to use too.

Day 6

Wednesday, 27th January 2010

We found it really difficult to import the idvd clip into imovie. We tried various ways including putting the idvd file on a blank disc and then importing to imovie but that still didn't work. I downloaded a software which I thought would help us but that also was useless. We eventually got a guy called Julio to import it because he had a particular software in his memory stick that we needed to use.

Day 7

Monday, 1st February 2010

After importing it, we cut about 5 seconds of idvd video because it was too long. I also put in some transitions to make the piece look a bit better. I had to edit a lot of the shots as well because we thought most of them looked better either slower or faster. Furthermore we decided to make another idvd clip of the still shots. We did it and put some other pictures then imported them to imovie.

This is a picture of the photo montage.

Day 8

Thursday, 4th February 2010

Max and I went into town and we filmed the club scenes. We went to Revolution and The Fez and we managed to film people standing in the queue and also the bouncers letting them in. We also filmed cars passing by and the we did close-ups on the club names. The panning was also done almost to perfection as we got the disco light inside the club and the zoomed out to show the outside of the club. There weren't any difficulties with the filming although we were asked by the manager at Revolution to email them asking for permission before we used their name in our intro. The bouncers also had a problem with us filiming them and they asked us to leave :)

This is a short clip from the intro. It shows the revolution.

Day 9

5th February 2010

Today we added in the shots from last night. We placed them differently in between the first few shots of the intro and made it look more complete. I edited the beginning of the intro and cut out a lot of seconds to make it look shorter and more fast paced like we imagined it initially. Also I added some transitions like the 'cross dissolve' and 'push' to make it look more efficient when moving from shot to shot. Unfortunately we could not get the music we needed for the intro but we are working on it and we should probably have it by next week. This is the kind of music we're looking to get though. 'Ohh Wee' By Ghostface Killah, Nate Dog & Mark Ronson

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Day 10

This morning we tried to film the last bit of our intro but couldn't because of the actors needed were all busy. We decided to start working on the titles and deciding where to put them and which fonts to use. We already had some titles on the still pictures that we made on idvd therefore we thought about putting the rest in different shots. We started off with putting the the credit of the music producer on the shot where the disco ball is flashing. Then we put the costume designer on another shot on the heel shot which is up there.

Day 11

Tuesday, 9th February 2010

We tried out different shades of orange and effects to try and fit a title in on the train shots but we couldn't find any effect to use because all the shots were so short. They were all one or two seconds and that made it particularly difficult to put any titles in. Also the original idea of changing the words in the train to make it look like title credits was not able to be done because we need some high tech CGI equipment to be able to that.

Clip from intro. Piccadilly Circus

Day 12

Wednesday, 10th February 2010

Today we managed to get a lot credits in on different shots of the intro. We put in all the names eg Jade Ashcroft, in the right places and they looked quite good. Furthermore, I found a suitable effect to use on our actual title 'Narcissist'. We had to cut some shots into two parts to make it look decent but it worked quite well. The titling and credits are nearly done and what we need now is the last shot of the intro where the guys say goodbye to the girls.

This is the title effect I decided to stick with.

Day 13

Wednesday 3rd March,

Today we decided to have a look back at our intro and see if any changes could be made to make it look better. After watching it, we realised that the titling needed to be improved a lot. We thought it would be a good idea if we removed all the names of the stars and put them in a slide show on power-point, then insert them back into imovie. The rest of the titles i.e the production manager remain on the actual intro with the tube sequence. We haven't actually finished but we hope to be done soon enough.

Day 14

Today was supposed to be our last day of filming but we couldnt get all that we wanted done because two of our actors werent available. We recorded the two boys (Max and I) saying goodbye to the two girls (Ellie and Jade). It was done in Stables and was filmed hand-held because there was a problem with the tri-pod. The shots were about 4 seconds long each.

Day 15

Monday 7th March,

We started editing the recording we got on friday. It wasnt as great as we wanted it to be because it look low budget. We didnt have the tripod that day so everything we filmed was handheld. We realised we needed to film all over again because we couldnt get the actors we originally wanted. In the draft recording I was just a dummy. We then decided to continue playing around with our titles because the slide show power point idea didnt work out quite well. We had to import the whole film intro again without the titles and then put them were we wanted to.

Day 16

Tuesday 8th March,

We got the actors we originally pictured in the intro and started re-filming the 'goodbye' scene. It took a short amount of time to film but there was a problem because we couldnt get a couple to be in the scene due to complications. We then started editing and added the transitions and effects.

Day 17

Wednesday 9th March,

After editing, there was one more thing we needed to get done in order for the intro to be complete and finished. We needed to get the music. Initially, Max was supposed to get one of his mates to compose the song so we could use it in our piece but he couldn't get it so Ellie's friend helped us out and gave us the permission to cut out a part of his song. Ellie and I listened to it and though it was great and would fit in perfectly with the intro.

Day 18

Friday 11th March,

We got the music and imported it into our project on imovie and now all we had to was cut out the bits we needed and edited so it fitted perfectly with everything.
Also another thing we did was, we imported the audio of Max saying 'There was no laughter the morning after, but that performance last night was worth a Bafta'. This was meant to come as the title 'Narcissist' came up in the intro. We edited the music so it faded when there was dialogue and the end of the intro so the voices of the actors could be heard.

Day 19

Monday 14th March,

After the work done on friday, there was nothing much to do to the intro again. We added in a few more credits including a production company name. Also we got a different piece of the music for the tube sequence and imported it. We added in a bit more of the music right at the tail end of the intro so it sorts of fade out. We then watched the whole thing a couple of times and couldn't point out any particular flaws apart from a few blips which we cut out.