I want to do a trailer for my proof of concept because i really want to show a story and expand my editing skills and include music to help set the mood of the narrative.

For my proof of concept i will be creating a short film adaptation of Laurie Gilmores book The Cinnamon Bun Book Store.

I want to create a film that reflects the books narrative and themes whilst also adding my own twist and interpretation. The reason why i have chosen to do an adaptation is because in terms of my skill set i'm not someone who writes story's, despite being able to come up with them in my head i struggle to write them down, therefore i feel an adaptation will correspond more to my skill set in terms of visually communicating the story and narrative whilst also allowing my self the creative freedom to demonstrate how i have interpreted the story.

My chosen idea will be in the Romance genre and have themes of Romance, Friendship, Self discovery and mystery.

This will be a feel good, happy romance. Not a tragic one. Aimed at a teenager/ young adult audience that enjoy a good heartwarming film where people kick their feet because of how cute the film is.

I want to create a naturalistic film concept, one that mimics reality. My goal is to create a simple cinema vibe with my trailer. a film doesn't need to have fancy camera shots/ dramatic lighting etc. to create a strong film. My main focus is to focus on the characters relationships and how simple camera shots/ editing can create a strong, naturalistic film.

A quote that i really like from one of our readers sums this idea up really well in my opinion;

"Naturalism is a stylistic approach that tries to make actions, dialogue, locations, sounds, and tex- tures of the filmic world resemble as closely as possible the everyday world we know. It hides all notion that this is a fictional world created for the camera and seeks to convince us we are seeing real events occurring in real and familiar settings." (Rabiger & Hurbis-Cherrier, 2013, P. 160)

This has really helped me gain confidence with my idea because speaking to people about their ideas made me worry that i'm going down a route thats too simple, however when i looked into this it gave me more confidence in my idea because i am creating something for people to watch and feel happy because this could be a real life scenario and ultimately it's a better direction for my concept.

Here is very brief character descriptions for the sake of making the treatment as simple as possible. However, i have done more research and character building to add to this.

As i am doing a romance film its very important to me that i am able to communicate the characters in the trailer as it plays a critical role in the film. I want my intended audience of teenagers/ young adults/ book lovers to see the conection and romance growing with the characters and to do that i need to have a full understanding of my characters traits/ personalities etc.

i spent my time going around manchester researching independent bookstores that i could film in. i did this because i wanted to see the location in person to see if i think it would work for my trailer but i also feel in a situation like this it was best for me to go in and personally introduce myself and enquire about filming. i went to 4 different book stores and sadly i was ether turned away and wasn't allowed to film or they didn't have the right setting for my trailer.

I further looked into a location in my home town to film in as it is a bookstore i am familiar with and i know what it looks like inside, however filming there was not realistic because it would involve travel and possibly staying over in my home town and that is something i didn't want to do because it would mean me and my cast and crew spending money on train and bus tickets and having to bring all the equipment with us. so unfortunately it wasn't a doable plan.

After being turned away from bookstores i had to think of an alternate location. i still wanted to communicate that bookstore feel as it's crucial to the plot of the story. Therefore i decided to look into filming in the libary on the university campus.

Once i had submitted the appropriate documents i waited for them to reply to me which happens to be the next day and after further emails discussing times, location etc i managed to get permission to film on Sunday december 1st between 6-9pm. i chose these times for a very specific reason. i wanted the library to be as quiet as possible not only so we don't get disturbed whilst shooting but to also avoid disturbing the others in the library as it is a public space.

Now that i have the location i can best plan the scenes and what our shooting schedule will be for the filming. this needs to be planned in advance because we only have 3 hours shoot time in the library so before the shoot all equipment needs to be tested to see it works and all scenes and actors must be prepared for the shoot.

To best get my confidence up i made a clear plan as to what i wanted my actors to do in the scene, what i wanted to be communicated and where the cameras where going to be.

My plan was to choose two people who i trusted with delivering a scene and improvising, i had Matt deliver some random bits of dialogue whilst Lola looked at him completley vexed not by what Matt was saying but because he was stood in front of her and she likes him. this was important for me to learn to direct because one of the main elements i will be focusing on with my proof of concept is emotion and feeling shown through action and facial expressions, not necessarily dialogue.

For a first take i think this was pretty good. Myself and the actors were still trying to find their feet with the environment so i feel this was a good starting point.

therefore after the first take i instructed Lola to act a bit more confused rather that stern when she said the what line. One of the ways i communicated this to her was by showing her what i meant because i find it easiest to communicate what i'm saying through actions.

I further encouraged them to keep eye contact and smile more when talking to really emphasise these characters relationship.

For this shoot i instructed my actors to really hone in on their characters romantic connection with each other and focus on what their faces are communicating with the audience and in the end they created a very cute scene which i was very proud of.

When receiving feedback for my directing i was told that my excitement and enthusiasm when directing the scene and my reactions to watching it made my actors very happy and comfortable. As this was portrayed as a romantic scene i constantly checked that my actors were comfortable with the situation and constantly gave them re assurance. Its important for me to appear excited about my work so other people involved feel happy and that they are doing the correct thing and overall i think it makes for a healthier shooting mindset.

I only wanted simple camera angles because the main focus of this directing session with me was to focus with communicating with my actors, therefore i felt two simple close ups and a wide shot would be the best for what i wanted to achieve.

This session helped me to bring up my confidence and allowed me to practice my directorial skills and see how i would be as a director. In the future if i were to do this again i would come with a scripted scene just to focus more on dialogue and how emotions and feelings are portrayed through that.

Overall, because of this trailer re search i now have a better understanding of how trailers are formatted and what elements i would like to incorporate into my own work, taking inspiration from these two trailers.

The first trailer i've looked at is Love Rosie (2014) this is a heartwarming romance about two best friends who are in love but they keep missing each other, which matches the themes of my proof of concept very well.

The trailer follows what i call a more storytelling/ cringy format with the title cards telling the story and providing context to the film. It also has a lot of transitions and has a very 2000s romance film vibe to it. This is sort of the energy i want to communicate in my trailer because ultimately, like Love Rosie, My film idea is not a sad, tragic romance it's a happy feel good film and watching this trailer has really helped me to understand the format for my film as well as the elements i can include and how the narrative is presented.

In the original script the characters Noah and Logan have a conversation outside Noah's house however due to scheduling conflicts with the actor playing logan it meant he was unable to make it to filming. Therefore, instead of re casting, because of the limited time i decided to instead write a new scene with Alex and Noah's characters still follows the same goal as the Logan and Noah scene but instead with different characters and how their characters would respond to the scene. Although i would have liked the variety of the different characters for my trailer i did like the change i made to the script and felt it would work better going into post production.

I further made slight changes to other scenes where appropriate to create a better rolling story in the hopes of achieving a strong narrative for the trailer.

Next time to avoid another scheduling error i will approach my actors at an earlier date so if anything did intervene i could find alternate cast members.

The scene was filmed in my room by my bookshelf to help set the narrative of the film and i used my warm ring light to create a cozy book setting which is what i wanted to achieve.

Due to my room being extremely small i opted to just have me on crew for this scene, if anymore people were involved the room would have been very cramped and it would have been extremely hard to do anything productive.

Because of this small space i made sure to take my time when handling equipment such as the lights and microphone. To avoid anything being damaged or anyone injured i oped to do some of the close up shots with the shotgun mic attached to the camera. This was not only to help with the quality of the sound but to also take into consideration the size of the space and what would be a more comfortable method.

When filming the above ground baking shots we took extra care to secure the camera over our coffee table in the kitchen and continuously kept the camera recording when placing the ingredients into the bowls.

The reason why i wanted these scenes was to provide some more variety with my shots and create an interesting oening to my trailer, it also would help to show more variety in my skills as a camera person.

Before we began filming i made sure to test all the equipment so that everything could run smoothly for filming and i set up the kitchen for the first scene. However, when i collected the equipment in the morning the light that i books ended up not being available, therefore i had to switch lights to the smaller box LEDGO lights. However, this ended up working in our favour because the smaller light worked better with the smaller space.

The first scene that i shot with ethan required the whole room to be dark, but we filmed during the day, therefore to fix this problem i put my black blanket over the window which blocked the light so that only the phone screen and the slight light from the LEDGO lights were lighting the room in order to create that phone light effect. I did the same thing for a future scene when Florri and Ethan were sat on bed watching Tv.

Throughout filming i was constantly reassuring and directing my actors so they were clear on what needed to be done, as these scenes didn't have any dialogue or a specific script it was really important that i communicate well what each scene was trying to achieve and the emotions and characteristics that came with it. something that helped with this was the fact that most of these scenes would have no audio therefore i was able to direct my actors whilst filming which provided them with more knowledge and confidence.

Moreover, it was also important to consider my actors comfort when filming. As this is a romance film there were alot of scenes that required physical tasks such as hugging, staring at each other for long periods of time and sitting on a bed together. Even through my actors were already close friends it was important to me to make sure they were always comfortable when working with each other and that they could take as much time as they needed to prepare for the scene.

Overall, we had a very fun and productive second day of filming and being able to communicate properly with my team allowed me to get the shots and character narrative i wanted but also allowed me to gain more confidence in myself as a director.

We were booked to film on the first floor of the library by the bookshelves. However, when we got there we were informed that the upstairs of the library was shut for maintenance, causing and issue as we were told we couldn't film up there. The staff informed us that they knew we were coming they just had not informed us of the planned maintenance. This was where i started to panic and tried to think of a solution as to an alternate day/ filming location. However, after 10 minutes of talking with the staff we were able to negotiate an hour and a half of filming upstairs as opposed to the originally planned 3 hours. Although this was inconvenient and we couldn't take as much time as we wanted we were still able to achieve all the shots and filming in the time we had up there. It definitely helped that all of the shots list/ shooting schedules where pre prepared and everyone was familiar with the scripts that i have to them in advance. All in all despite this sudden time change we had a very productive shoot.

One of the benefits to being in the Library by ourselves was we didn't have to worry about anyone interfering with the shots and because of the bigger space i was able to have more people to help me. Whilst i still concentrated on directing and the camera i was able to have help with the sound from my actors who weren't in certain scenes, and i believed that that also helped with the productivity of the shoot because for myself there were less things to focus on and i could primarily focus on directing my actors and smakll sound crew.

Once again, i followed my enthusiastic director approach and created an existing set. Because of the scripted scenes it also meant that i was able to take a step back from being as involved and trust my actors to give me their interpretation of the script and i directed them where needed giving more responsibility to the actors when carrying the scene.

This was a take we had to prepare for in advance because we could only do one take for continuity, therefore there were many practice rounds without the use of flower before the actual shot was taken. We then cleaned up immediately afterwards to avoid any accidents.

It's something that i took a lot of interest in, mainly because of the genre of my trailer. As i am doing a romance and my actors are being somewhat intimate in the trailer it was important to me that i make sure that their comfortable as well as my audience therefore i created an intimacy contract for my tow main actors to sign so that everyone was comfortable with the environment and so they knew that if at any point they were uncomfortable they had that freedom to express them selves.

For the future i want to look into ethics better as some of the paperwork on the data collection forms confused me a bit.

That one of the reasons why i chose to do a book adaptation because i could create something that i was passionate about and loved as a consumer myself but i wouldn't have the pressure of creating a whole new story.

My aim was to create a film concept that was heart warming to watch and gave the audience an insight to characters and how you don't need fancy lighting, camera shots etc. to tell an interesting story. My focus was to make a naturalistic piece that can represent a story in the real world and i feel as if i've done that.

Pre- Production

Doing the pre production paperwork scared me, becaus eim not strong with understanding paperwork and it confuses me, however because i kept a steady plan throughout and remained organised i was able to keep on top of it and understand it. It was important to me to first get my risk assessments done because without them i couldn't film. One they were done i moved onto the more directing based paperwork. I wanted a clear plan as to how my trailer would run/ look so i created things like a moodboard and a storyboard to get my initial ideas down. I then did some trailer re search to get an idea of what kind of shots/ elements were in trailers. I also created a playlist for my film to help inspire it.

Character Bios were important because my proof of concept is a book adaptation, i wanted to make sure that the characters fit the characters from the book because part of my audience would be people who have read the book therefore the expectation is that its the same characters. Agin location was important for the same reason. One of the biggest plots to the story is that secret notes are being found in the books of the bookstore the character Hazel owns, therefore securing a location that gave off that same impression was important.

I carefully worked through the rest of the paperwork such as shooting schedules and shot lists to make sure that my filming days were planned carefully once i had my actors. I made sure that all paperwork was completed before shoot days.

Filming

Overall the 3 filming days went smoothly (Apart from the small library issue) and i was really pleased with how the shots came out. It definitely helped to up my confidence when it came to directing and making sure that i kept constant communication with my actors/ crew. I believe that my enthusiasm and appreciation for my team really helped with the environment on the set meaning it was fun but also extremely productive. In the future for my directing skills i want to learn how to best communicate my vision without having to show my actors what i mean, as i am told that that is not a traditional way of directing, however in the time i had that is what best worked for me. I would also look into getting a bigger crew. Due to everyones availability with other projects i didn't feel confident asking people to be on my crew, the only extra crew member i had was on sound when we filmed in the library and i would liked a bigger team to learn how to fully direct more people and their skill areas. The size of the spaces i worked with also wouldn't allow for a big crew. I would have maybe benefited from having an extra person do camera however camera is something i wanted to do as well as direct and produce because i could view my actors from the eyes of the camera but also feel confident in the shots i was getting. I also think this was down to my confidence when asking people to help because i knew that everyone was busy with other projects and i didnt want to put too much stress on people on my course so in future i will look at reaching out to the film or any other students. But overall i think i need to work on bringing up my confidence when instructing people/ asking them to help me.

Overall, i was extremely happy with my longer trailer and the progression i made when creating my two trailers. My main goal was to communicate a heartwarming story through the shots and dialogue and create a smooth flowing trailer and i feel like i've done that. It was especially important to me to also show the progression of my editing with post production and i think i've done that well with my two trailers with one definitely not being as strong as the other.

I started by making my teaser trailer however when i was working on it i couldn't get the right feel/ pace for it and it felt a bit all over the place and i don't think it showed my skills very well. Because i was getting nowhere with it i decided to use that teaser trailer to practice different transitions and movements with editing and try to refresh my memory with premiere pro. I then put that to the side and begane to work on my Feature length trailer instead to see if i could create something better.

Trailer One

I began making this trailer by referring to my story boards and looking back at my trailer research so i could fully plan the order for my trailer, as i struggled at first with my teaser trailer i wanted to take extra care with this one and exploring the pace and format of the trailer.

I looked over my continuity sheets and and begane selecting the best clips/ sound files to make up the trailer, following my storyboards and shot lists i was able to create a story line to my trailer.

I then began to go more into detail with layering sound, i wanted to incorporate music as well as have some scenes with dialogue and some silent scenes with extra dialogue over it telling the story/ establishing the themes of the narrative. I made sure to record white noise when filming so that sound clipping wouldn't be a big issue and i adjusted the levels were appropriate and made sure all the scenes and dialogue matched. Because i used two different ways of recording sound i was worried that the quality of sound would differ from when the audio was recorded with the boom pole and zoom compared to when the microphone was attached to the camera because of the small spaces but i was happy when i realised that the quality was the same throughout.

As i was adding music i spent extra time fixing the sound clipping and adjusting the audio so when there was dialogue the music wouldn't take away from that dialogue and when i wanted the music to be the main focus the transition was smooth and not abrupt, creatinga. really good flow and pace to the trailer. I think the sound works well with the trailer however there are still some bit of white noise clipping that i wasn't sure how to fully fix, but i don't think it takes away from the trailer or is to distarcting. I definitely want to look at improving my skills with sound as its never been ,y strong suit.

I was very lucky to have great natural lighting in my locations that only required small adjustments with the LEDGO lights during filming. When working on the colour correction in the edit i wanted to focus on the natural lighting from the scenes and keep that warm tone to the shots to balance with the cozy/ warm feeling of the film. By editing the exposure and levels of lighting i was able to create clearer and brighter lighting whilst keeping that warm tone. The shots from when we filmed in the library are a lot more brighter than the shots from the house and they still came off as a bit too bright in my opinion in the final edit so i will look to work on this in the future.

Once shot i'm particularly proud of with the lighting is the shots where Ethan is sat in the dark and when Florri and Ethan. Once i adjusted the exposure to bring up the lighting from the Tv/ Phone screen it created a really clear image and made the scene look filled by the light from the electronics, this was some of my favorite bits that i worked on in my Feature trailer edit.

Once i had finalised the format/pace and sound of the trailer i then worked on exploring the transitions to make the trailer flow better and tried to learn some new editing techniques such as the moving and positions of some shots and adding different sound effects to help with the sound cutting. This is something that i loved experimenting with and learning how to do because it allowed me to not only make my trailer appear cleaner and run better but also help me to expand my editing skills which was one of my main focuses with this project.

Overall, I loved the final outcome of my Longer trailer and im glad i stepped away from my initial trailer to work on this one because it allowed me to create something i was prod of and allowed me to show off my developing skills as an editor. In the future i will look to improve my understanding of sound and better look at colour correcting to further improve my skills.

I didn't want the animation to be the main focus of the trailer i only wanted it to be subtle therefore i only added basic movements to it which i think worked really well.

I was very fortunate that i have a great group of friends who i knew i could trust in terms of acting and professionally but also appearance wise they fit the theme i was going for.

Cast

Florri Humphries- Hazel

Ethan Harris- Noah

Remy Bryant- Alex

Sarah Gore- Jeanie

with finding costumes for my cast i want simple everyday looks so using pieces from my wardrobe and my actors wardrobe would work vey well. The overall mood for the film is cosy so having costumes that reflected that is important.

Costume

Hazel- Comfy jumpers, messy bun hair and glasses

Noah- Flannels and jumpers (Cool but Casual)

Alex- Jumpers and Baggy trousers

Jeanie- Stylish but comfy and practical at the same time

I initially wasn't going to re visit this trailer however after i made my successful longer trailer i decided to revisit it and turn it into a teaser trailer. To me this trailer is not the best and does not show off my skills well and the pace doesn't feel right however the reason i decided to finish it and make something of it was because i wanted to show off the development i had when creating the trailers and the challenges i faced. If i had more time i would have definitely looked to improve this trailer massively fixing the pace and some of the sound in it.

This was technically meant to be my first trailer but because i decided to stop and revisit it it's my second trailer however i still consider it to be the first one because of the improvements i made to my longer trailer. I personally hate the shorter trailer however i'm glad that the progression of my editing will be communicated through my work.

I only did ones for the two scenes i needed the most guidance with