CPR- Story Creation

Our first independent work was as a group, we had to create a short story which we can record in a small studio space. We all came up with a basis for a story in the seminar however creating a solid story to use for the studio session for CPR proved a little more difficult. We met on Tuesday and didn't expect we would be there for over an hour deciding on the story line. However eventually we all decided on a solid idea that was simple in both cast and studio space. The story had to involve both fire and blood and had to be about 2 mins in length or less. So this is our idea:

A male character is tied up in a chair central to the room. He has duct tape over his mouth and a sac over his head, he seems to be unconscious. There is a dimly lit light swinging just above him. A woman enters and is obscured by darkness, she is a shadow. Slowly the woman walks around the man, he begins to wake and panics when he hears her. The woman lights a cigarette and takes the sac of the mans face, he seems to recognise female and starts to panic more. Woman takes a drag of cigarette and flicks it behind the male, she then turns around and approaches the table full of torture weapons. A fire begins to blaze behind the man where the cigarette has been flicked, the male character realises this and attempts to scream through the duct tape. Woman doesn't react as she thinks he is screaming at the torture weapons she is going to use on him soon. She goes through the line of weapons layed out on the table as they get bigger and sillier along the way. Finally she finds what she wants and turns around to start the torturing and instead finds the fire has just spread to a gas canister at the back. Just before she gets time to react the gas canister blows engulfing the entire room with the two characters in it.

I thought this was a good idea, developed from Fionas idea. I also have to metion that my group consists of Ruby, Fiona, George, Mark and myself! Emma (the producer) left CPR during the first week to change to sound so we have a smaller group than the others in the class. This is slightly beneficial as we have less conflict but could cause a few problems in the long run. Back to the idea we developed, this will hopefully be a simple idea that we can pull off. When we wrote it as a group we thought of things that we had or could get easy and kept the props as simple as possible (except the gas canister, which will be hell getting but someone will have one). The torture weapons are simple things such as knives, spanners and maybe even a bannana (Just for a laugh)! We have been a bit playful with this idea but I'm glad that we have made it as simple as possible and I think this will be quite entertaining if we do it right.

CPR- Introduction Lesson 1

This is my blog for the Creative Project Realisation Production skills module. I'll be updating this throughout the course of the module until Christmas.
The first lesson was an interesting analysis into what we will be doing throughout the rest of the year. We looked into the basic steps of converting an idea into a short film and what it requires to make the film. This included the research elements which we looked into by Suzanne showing one of the films she had made and briefly explaining the research it took to make certain scenes. This was an insight for me as it showed the elements that you can sometimes miss in films. For example, Suzanne showed us one of the scenes where a male character is stabbed through the torso with a pitch fork. She then explained the steps she took to pull it off using the fork ends and removing then attaching them to the male character. This looked very real with some fake blood in the picture. We then looked at it from the perspective of using special effects and what it would require to make the scene, using After Effects and Meyer. This insight helped me to recognise exactly what we will be doing this course and helped me to recognise the amount of detail I will be going into for my own project.
Toward the end of the seminar we talked about creating our own short story using blood and fire and no dialogue. This was an interesting exercise as it required creativity inside boundaries. We were then put into groups where we pitched our ideas we had just made. The stories were all interesting and from them we were able to create the main story in our group. However this was out of class and will be in the next blogpost.
The first seminar was more of an introduction into what we will be doing throughout the next few months. I am interested to see what ideas will unfold, what will happen soon...