Directors and their techniques

Andrea Arnold.
Andrea Arnold is a filmmaker and former actress from England, who made her feature film directorial debut in 2006 with Red Road. She ays: '' My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something''.
In Arnolds British film- Fish Tank- there is a scene in which Mia- the protagonist- goes for a walk. Arnold uses long shots here to show the journey from her house to a newer houing estate. These long shots show the amount of time it takes her and the hand held camera work shows realism. I think this style of filming will work well in our film as we want a tense atmosphere.

Ken Loach
Ken Loach is known for his naturalistic, social realist directing style and for his social beliefs.  He strives  in every area of filmmaking to emphasise genuine interplay between actors, to the point where some scenes in his films appear unscripted. All scenes are carefully scripted, around which some improvisation can occur. The final script and the final film are actually very close.
Rather than employing method actors, he prefers unknown talent who have had some of the life experience of the characters they portray. Loach's film work has been described as naturalistic; he emphasises the genuine interplay between actors, and foregoes over-dependence on special effects.
Loach makes great efforts to help the actors express themselves naturally and honestly. He believes that shooting in order, from first scene to last, helps the actors to find a response to their circumstances. Many actors in his films are often not given the full script at the beginning of a shoot, but rather they experience the story just as a fictional character might do. He will often give actors their scenes a couple of days in advance so they can learn their lines, but they still won't know what comes after that. If a scene involves shock or surprise for a character, the actor might not know what is about to happen.

Cast

Simon Oxley

Playing Richards

Heath Woodward

Playing Brett Mallard

Nicola Stewart

Playing Sarah Mallard

Casting Calls/ Auditions

To make our adaptation of Story of an Hour more realistic we decided to age the characters by about 10 years. This would help us convey the fact that Sarah has been suffering for years. In the story, Sarah is in her late 20's, but we have changed this to the playing age of 30-40. My dad has opted to play the part of either Richard's or Brett.

We then had to find two more actors the play the remaining parts. As there are no actors/actresses in school of the age we need, Mirada being involved in amateur productions decided to advertise the roles on Facebook, and a local blog website dedicated to casting calls.

Experimenting with colour

I decided to use the windows editing software before i used photoshop as it is something i am more familiar with. For this first picture i brought down both the brightness and the contrast. On top of this i made the highlights dark.  

For this picture i bought down the saturation- taking out some colour. I decided to bring the temperature up to balance the darkness, i didn't want the picture looking too dark, but then i didn't want the colours too vivid and bright. After doing this i added a slight blue tint. I like this final product, because although the editing is simple, it makes the shot look a little more cold and there is a sense of loneliness about it.

Again i kept the editing to as little as possible, changing the colours until it looked a little more bare and cold.

All i did here was change the saturation- this time taking away the majority of the colour. Lastly, i decreased the temperature of the colours.

Harry Potter

After watching the special features on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2- i noticed that the original footage was different to the footage that we see on the big screen. The behind the scene footage shows a very orangy natural glow, where as the footage we see has a blue/grey duller tone to it. This would have been done in the post production stages and an effect i would like to create on our final piece.

I was unable to find two clips exactly the same, but these pictures have been taken from the same scene. The first picture shows the footage- filmed behind the scenes- on a camera without any effects. As you can see the colours aren't desaturated, they are very natural. The second picture shows a clip from the same scene where the colouring has changed. The duller tones add a sense of drama to the piece, it helps set the mood. Without the editing a scene wouldn't have the same effect. I really want to experiment with the colours because i think it would make our final piece more dramatic. We want the audience to feel sorry for Sarah without manipulating them too much.