Designing Process Of The RLNC Logo - Part One

Here I will now take you through the step-by-step designing process of our RLNC Logo, used at the beginning of our film (shown below),

The idea for this logo came from my profile picture on Facebook (shown below)
Coretta then suggested making cartoon characters of ourselves and putting them into one image, with our initials being the name of our production, great idea aye?

(1) The first step was creating a background, which was very easy (below),


(2) Then I had to create our cartoon characters, many changes were made to our characters and I will take you through each characters change.

Above is myself (Nickie), initially I had red hair, but then wanted to make it a little realistic in then sense that i would never dye my hair that colour and black would not have shown up, so I went for a honey blonde/brown and got the perfect result (Shown Below).

Lydia - had quiet a few changes made to her character, however i shall only take you through some changes for it'll be boring to go through every step.

This was Lydia's initial design, reason why I gave her red hair was because at the time she had dyed her hair red, so I thought it would be significantly realistic to give her red hair. However when analysed by Lydia herself she disliked it and wanted brown hair instead the cheek.. (shown below)

Then Lydia hated the fact that I had left out her flower, (woops) she also decided she would prefer a bob instead of the hairstyle I had given her, taking all these points into account I created her final cartoon as shown below,

Coretta along with Lydia were the two picky ones out of our group, I was extremely please with my design for Coretta's cartoon character (below)

But Coretta wasnt please with the WEAVE, and wanted a bob also, the cheeeek! So I pimped her hairstyle out and kindly took her want into consideration and gave her a bob (shown below)

The process for Rula was very straight forward and no changes were made with my initial design (shown below) :).

(3) With all characters designed and finished, it was then time to add all elements together, the background the characters and moosh'em together, shown below:

Analysis - On First (Draft) Opening Sequence

This clip is the produce from our first filming seesion. Although we thought it was successful we made a few mistakes which then came apparent during the editing stage. In the first shot it jilts causing the shot to jump from one shot to another. Also these two different shots have two different background noises so the shots do not flow. The next shot shows a close up of Alicia (Juliet) and the sound goes fuzzy. This close up is proficient but the shot gets hazy and loses focus. The two shot which comes after is good but it jumps to quickly to the close up of he mobile phone.The next couple of shots flow but the background noise changes from each one. There is then a quick jump to her facial experession where she is suppose to hear Ashley(Olu) and Shaniqua (Christina) giggling and making noises. We then she a mid shot of Alicia (Juliet) putting her mobile in her pocket and taking out the prgnacy test this transitions really quickly to a shot of her looking at the test and walking off with no reaction. This is not affective as it doesn't clearly show what is going on and the shots jump to quickly making it difficult to follow. Alicia (Juliet) then runs out of the park and the camera follows. There is then a zoom in of the pregnacy test which is focused and clearly but it zoom in two quickly. The shot then jumps to Jermaine (Toba) getting up from the swing and running after Alicia (Juliet) as he sees something is wrong. The shot the focuses on Alicia (Juliet) when she stops running and turns around to Jermaine and tells him whats wrong. We felt this shot was not good because the dialogue was falsified and not really realistic whereas in a urban drama things have to be pragmatic otherwise it defeats the objective of a urban drama. There is then a shot of Jermaine bursting through the park gates screaming at Alicia to wait then there is digetic music playing whilst the credits come in. We felt this was quite effective as it acts as a pre-credit sequence which is used in many films and sometimes in TV Dramas. Overall we feel that this could have be improved and we could use our skills to produce a better quality piece of work so we decided to start again and use this as a exemplar opening sequence to helps us see what areas we need to work on.

Fake Blood Recipe

Whilst Alicia washes her hands in the bathroom, we see a transition from clean to bloody hands once she becomes panicked.

When we came up with the idea of Alicia washing her hands and blood appearing, we thought it would be easy to just use halloween blood, however we soon realised this was not the case, when we went to film the 'blood scene' the halloween blood didnt look as realistic as we had hoped. The colour was not right and the consistency was extremely runny. We then had to find new recipes in order for us to get exactly what we wanted.

Here Are Some Fake Blood Recipes We Used :

Method 1

1 c. Karo Syrup
1 Tbsp Water
2 Tbsp Red Food Coloring
1 tsp Yellow Food Coloring

Mix together in a mixing bowl and you're done. Try adding blue or yellow for a different shade


Method 2

200ml Water
5 Tablespoons Cornflour (corn starch)
300ml Lyles Golden Syrup (or Corn Syrup)
2 Teaspoons of fresh cream
5 Teaspoons Red Food Coloring
2 Drops Green Food Coloring

Just mix the water and cornflour together, then add the rest of the ingredients. It looks fantastically spooky in itself and is great for bleeding scars and vampire mouths. It doesn't taste wonderful but is totally harmeless for vampires and ghouls of any age and even washes out of clothes well.


Method 3

Or There Is The Conventional Method Of Buying Store Bought Halloween Blood, although we had a few problems with this.

Music

As the exam board strictly prohibits us to use any copyrighted music in our opening sequence we had to choose another piece of music which was not copyrighted which still ,ade the opening sequence effective. We was originally going to used Kanye West number 1 hit Love Lockdown as it is where we got the idea of the name and we thought it would go well with out media piece. We found out it was not allowed so we started to research songs that we could use. We looked on youtube but we couldn't find any music that wasn't copyrighted. We then remembered we had friends who produced beats for their mixtapes and we asked our friend Jerome whether he could make use a beat. We used influences from Kidulthood and Adulthood like the ione used in the running scene and also other peoples mixtapes to formulate out theme song. Nickie was the assigned to remake the theme tune for our openeing credits and our logo. She used software such as fruity loops and I movie on the Mac computers to do so.
Below are some of our previous ideas and our influences.

Kanye West - Love Lockdown


Jstar entertainment- we liked the begiinning of this because it has the sound of jail bars and sirens in it and the beat reflects today's youth culture.


Akon- Locked up
This reflects the prison life and urban life not only in England but in America which may appeal to viewers in other countries.

Screenplay

Here is our original hand written screenplay. At times this was difficult to script as there were many rules to abide by but we managed to get the gist of our story detailed inside.

Next, we wordprocessed our draft....

Unfortunately after filming according to our screenplay, the Love Lockdown opening scene was failing to appeal to us. We were shown the opening scene for a film called "Trainspotting" in which a voiceover was used extremely effectively. Instead of a script, the story could have been told from Alicia's point of view making our flashbacks more coherent.

Here is our version of a Voiceover ( our little doodling =] )


Recording Our Voiceover from the Apple Mac was a simple task and went perfectly...now the task came to match the voiceover with the appropriate scenes...Ohh the joy :(