Task 2.2 (Production Company Background)

As part of the course I had to look at two different production companies and look at their history, overview and any logo change. My first company i looked at was Walt Disney, the biggest production company in the world under the name of Walt Disney Productions (1929).

The owner, as the name would suggest is Walt Disney and brother Roy Disney, Disney has existed since the 20's thus beggining in the silent movie era, Disney made its name from cartoon movies, and the first released were short films entitled "Alice's Wonderland" in the silent era. over time Disney adapted to change and obtained its mascot so to speak "Mickey Mouse" cartoons proved very popular in intially America but eventually it spread worldwide.

After the World Wars, Disneys name spread further to T.V and highly succesfull cartoon movies such as "Snow White and the 7 dwarfs", "Pinnochio" and "Bambi". The Disney brothers continued to make family favourite movies right up untill their deaths in late 60's for Walt then early 70's for Roy. However the Disney brand didnt stop there as the franchise continued to expand, not only in movies but also theme parks and its own tv show and an increasing amount of aquisitions to other production companies to show their films, some big names include Fox, Pixar and Marvel.

Some of Disneys most popular cartoon creations include family favourites such as "Beauty and the Beast", "101 Dalmations", "Lion King", "Jungle book" and "Finding Nemo", however possibly its most succesfull films are the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies; all of which feature in the 50 highest grossing movies of all time. Disney are adapting to a change in technologies in the movie industry by releasing 3-D movies such as "Alice in Wonderland"

Disneys logo's have changed over time with argueably the most easily recogniseable logo from the past was this:

nowadays the logo is this:

as you can see the logo has changed in the past, the previous logo shows the towers featured at the theme parks owned by Disney, and it gave it a more fairytale theme, however the change could show a move from the fairytale ideas into more serious themes, possibly this is because Disney have started to do less cartoons and more realistic movies to adapt to these new technologies in the movie industry.

The second production company I am going to look at is Dreamworks animation, began in 1994 by Steven Speilberg, Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen, the idea was to build it into a succesfull Hollywood studio. As the name would suggest Dreamworks are most recogniseable in the animation type films and provide competiton to Pixar.

When first arriving on the movie scene it had teamed up with Universal, and won awards with non-animated films like Gladiators and American beauty. Dreamworks's arguably most succesfull partnership was with Pacific data images, as together some of Dreamworks most succesfull titles all animations, such titles include Shrek 1,2,3, Madagascar 1,2, Sharks tale, Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda, Antz and Flushed away. Dreamworks along with their partners have 5 movies in the highest grossing movies of all time, however undoubtely Dreamwork's most succesfull films are Shrek a film they made independantly.

The Dreamworks logo is very easily recognised it features a child sitting on the moon while fishing, and was the subject of arguements between the founders of the company, Steven Spielbeg wanted it more animated. the Logo has never changed in design however it does sometimes vary in colour from movie to movie, some examples of this is;

these are the two most popular logos they use before the film, and also i couldnt find any evidence however either side of the titles for shrek they used Shrek ears.

Task 2.1 (Synopsis)

With the constructive comments from our preliminary, we had previously thought about basing this as a criminal drama with our main protagonist being an illegal immigrant from Bulgaria, who would be on the run from the police as a drugs mule, however the person who thought up the idea had poor attendance, so we therefore decided that this idea was unattainable, and plus Bulgaria is an EU country therefore making it impossible to be an illegal immigrant.

Us remaining group members thought up a different idea, we decided on a film based on violence in football and general hooliganism. We preferred this genre and felt it would be a change to the usual scene of death and darkness, both of us also have a fairly good knowledge on local football at Grassroots level. The inspiration for our movie were other football hooliganism movies such as "The Football Factory" and "Green Street".

We planned to go down to the up and coming game between Dover and Folkestone, due to the geographic location, a rivalry has always been present, so we built our film around this rivalry.
The protagonist is Harry Wall (me), supposedly the son of the Folkestone Hooligan leader, throughout the game itself you see no actual footage of Harry, it is camera cuts between the two sets of fans singing.

The film is set after the game after Folkestone win the game, two Dover fans; Alex and Shane are in their home town, strolling around, Harry after tasting defeat is looking to cause trouble in Dover with his new bragging rights after his teams victory, despite being outnumbered he dishes out some abuse to Alex and Shane who duly take offense, Alex and Shane proceed to chase Harry "roughing him up" in the process, Harry, however, escapes.

The next scene moves foward to Harry at work in his office block, is then confronted by Alex and Shane who have managed to track him down, as revenge Shane gives Harry a punch to the face that leaves him bleeding. After informing the other Folkestone fans were informed of the attack, Alex and Shane are told there in trouble however they see this as a way become of their own firm....

Preliminary Peer Evaluation

After editing on Imovie HD, the class had to present the preliminary's. Our colleagues had to evaluate the Preliminary's to find flaws and give constructive criticism, we were aware of some problems with the preliminary, but the evaluation revealed some other problems, despite this, on the whole the film was fairly good.

From the start we said we had wanted to keep a fast pace to show the despair and panic of the piece. This was achieved with many quick cuts between the two actors, the antagonist is always the calmer of the two and this is reflected by the worms eye view on him, a point which was noted as a positive by our peers. On top of this the 180 degree was kept although some people pointed out that it was emphasized too much. All the shots and cuts were relatively smooth and the protagonist and antagonists when alone in a shot were centralized.

However some negatives were pointed out that we need to consider and address before we move forward. Our peers noticed a continuity error in one of the shots, this is when the protagonist storms angrily into the room and goes over to the table, at this point the door is still open however on the next shot the door is closed. Unfortunately there was a fair amount of background noise which was out of our control, but again this should be considered before the final piece, some problems were noticed with frame composition, a lot of wasted space was seen and some objects withdrew the attention of the audience from the actors.

However after hearing the evaluation and having some weaknesses pointed, as a group we are confident that we can expell some of the negatives from our work.

Task 1.1 (Pre-lim - Storyboard)

For the Preliminary we had to film a person walking into a room with another person and film them having a conversation, this is the storyboard to that film, In it we had to keep the 180 degree rule and include a number of different shots including 'Over the shoulder', 'Worms eye' and 'Birds eye' which we completed successfully both in the film and this storyboard

Preliminary exercise

Well, we decided to set our Preliminary task on a confrontation between a kidnapper and the father of the girl held captive. We decided upon this idea, because the mood of the preliminary piece is similar to that of the final piece. The part that we have included would feature just before the main climatic scenes. This would be at a point of dis-equilibrium with the father acting as the main protagonist to restore equilibrium.

We have the antagonist waiting for the protagonist to arrive, the Protagonist enters in a desperate mood demanding to know where his daughter is, the antagonist is using his daughter so that the father has to do jobs for him, to get his daughter back, the protagonist is clearly annoyed that he has to do another job, however he accepts it unhappily.

The 180 degree rule has been kept throughout, we also used a range of shots including establishing, close up, over the shoulder, worms eye and birds eye. We uploaded the pieces onto the Mac's and edited using Imovie HD.