Voice Over Script

Sean- voice over

I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly lucky guy

                             

Poker’s a game where luck can come in pretty handy. Take a look (shows his hand of two Aces). But believe it or not this isn’t the type of place I tend to visit often or at all for that matter. First of all, take a look at my fine co-players

That’s Eddy, he’s the ‘Boss’ around here, nothing happens without his say so...He’s quite the poker Player.

This Guy’s Tommy, he’s the muscle for Eddy’s operation, an expert at making people’s life a misery.

As for the others at the table, they’re relatively small fish, most of them junkies and gamblers in debt to the big man, especially the woman; she’s a piece of work.

 In fact, I’ve never met any of these people in my life before, thankfully. They’re not your average upstanding citizen.

You see, I come from a pretty normal background, at school I wasn’t exactly a genius, but I wasn’t thick either. I wasn’t the coolest kid around but I wasn’t a loser either. I was normal. But there was one thing in life that I loved. The army, it was my life. I was a rifleman in Afghanistan, and served 2 tours of duty. And I was good (Trails off)

But I was wounded in the shoulder during operations in the Helmand province; perhaps you’d like to see it

But I guess all good things come to an end. After that the army gave me a leaving present of a disability payment and an inability to work.

Editing

Influenced by our music and footage we have made the decision to take further inspiration from the Guy Ritchie films such as 'Rock 'n' Rolla' by introducing the characters with titles, narration, freeze frames and some shots that summarise their character. Additionally, we are going to experiment with split screens to imply a busy atmosphere - these decisions mean that we are seemingly moving towards a more conventional gangster film however it will exaggerate the contrast of the gangster theme to the underlying IVF theme that is very serious.

Additionally, we have used After Effects with the help of a more adept visual effects artist in the group to create a bomb scene in Afghanistan. We added an explosion and gun shots with a good audio to highten the verisimilitude.

Music

To accompany our footage we used 'Garageband' to create music, we used the preset loops and wanted to resemble the music in the 'Oceans 11' film with prominent bass and percussion, with quieter electric guitar interludes. This creates a stylistic, modern and tense atmosphere that fits the gambling genre perfectly. We also wanted to juxtapose the slick poker front to the gritty IVF storyline by using an emotional piano loop between the jazzy bass and drum music. We exported the garageband file as an mp3 file and using usb imported it into our Adobe Premier Pro production of the film. We then started synchronising the change in beat to the change in shots to give an empathised and slick shot change.

Filming

Using the Re-Shoot Shooting Script we were able to film most of the shots that weren't of a good enough standard from the initial filming day. Continuity was a big obstacle - we had to attempt to recreate the same mise-en-scene that we had in the initial shots which was achievable in terms of the set and lighting however we couldn't control actor's appearance, but tried to mask this as best we could. To achieve the same lighting we used a loft light on the top of the door to bring up the light levels as it was naturally darker on the latter filming day. To have the drinks, chips and set in the right place we took several screenshots from the current edit and used this to re-create the set and urged our actors to endeavour to bring the same costume and with some characters grow their beard to a similar level for a more convincing verisimilitude. However, hair length was subtly different and one of our characters lost the black tie he wore in the initial filming and the best we could do was a black tie with white stripes. So varying hair lengths weren't scrutinised we took some shots of the character ruffling/re-arranging his hair to create the illusion that it is merely in a different position opposed to a different length. Overall we are happy with the shots and will look to further the editing and record the narration - we may have to expand the script to coincide with the footage.

Filming

Today we filmed a very short section of the film which will occur in one of Shaun's flashbacks - the shot is a point of view shot of Shaun running in Afghanistan and then falling back as the explosion goes off (an effect we will place in editing) to show how he injured himself. We used the location of the Verwood Sand hills as the setting looks fairly similar to the Middle East desert and it will be easy to adapt the colour/contrast settings in Adobe Premier pro. We cannot be too sure how the outcome will be until it is imported but we are hopeful that we can create the mise-en-scene of a war ridden Afghanistan - largely relying on the success of the explosion effect. We used a single camera, handheld and ran with it holding it at eye level to create the shot.