We have just finished editing our sequence and over-all I am pleased with what we, as a group, have created. Although there are some things I would do differently I am happy with what we have done.
At first, we had the idea of filming our footage in the style of a teen-comedy like ‘American Pie’ because we thought it would be original and different, but this idea didn’t happen due to the fact that we had trouble thinking of a plot and somewhere to shoot it which would fit with the genre.
In the end we decided to concentrate on the genre of ‘social realism’. We researched films such as ‘This is England’ (Meadows, 2006) and ‘Dead Mans Shoes’ (Meadows, 2003) to get inspiration for camera shots and the interaction between the characters. Although, once we had filmed and we started to edit and change our footage, we thought the genre of social comedy fitted better due to the use of back humour out actors used, although not purposefully, in our footage. We felt that black humour is fitting to our genre of social comedy.
As a group, we then researched ‘A Room For Romeo Brass’ and ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ because these films use shots, atmosphere and interaction in the same way that we wanted to.
The storyline for our story is about two brothers, Frank (the older brother, played by Ben Watson) and Bobby (the younger brother, played by Will Bannister). Frank has got involved with knife crime and is getting himself into dodgy situations, he is also trying to keep these secrets away from his younger brother to protect him. Our sequence begins with an establishing shot of Bobby walking home, we shot this footage at Adembrookes and at a Council Estate in Trumpington. We took the inspiration for this beginning from ‘Dead Mans Shoes’ which starts off with Anthony an his brother walking through the countryside. As a group, we thought this looked good and decided to film Will walking through the concrete scenery until he got to his front door. Once in his house, Frank starts to get fidgety and scared about his younger brother finding the knife. Our clip ends in Bobby finding the knife and a confrontation starting.
In my group, I decided to be the editor. I found this role quite hard but I am pleased with what I produced. I was responsible for editing the clip to make it flow better and to make it look like a social realism film. I decided to edit our clip so that the atmosphere between the two brothers when the argument was happening was really intense. I made the shots of the characters faces change very quickly to show the urgency of the argument.
As a group we also decided to not include any non-diagetic sound to convey how the characters were feeling. Also to build up the tention between the two brothers. However, earlier on in the sequence we decided to include sounds of the city to make it more realistic. We added sound effects of helicopters, sirens and cars.
Overall as a group I think we worked well together, however there were some disagreements about the name for the film, at first we wanted to call it 'Barrel Boy' because we were going to use a gun as a weapon, but we had trouble finding a gun. Insted we decided to call it 'Merkin' Skankin' and Shankin' because it sounded appropriate and added to the comedy element of the film. There was some dispute about the name of the film but we decided to use it anyway.