BRASS MONKEYS - Screening to the year / Audience Research.

On wednesday the 10th December there was a screening of our project in the main hall and we invited people to come along and enjoy our finished product as seen above. However, to ensure that this was not wasted, we handed out a small questionnaire that i made with only about 6 questions. We picked out the questions carefully and realised that they were the 6 that would provide the best results. We gave out about 8 questionnaires in the end which is a big enough sample to give us seful criticism to work with. The majority of our feedback was in fact extremely complimentary, and to be honest some of the suggestions on how to improve our work were not ones that were possible to include. For example more violence, blood and guns, is simply something that would not go with our light gangster genre as we took that path rather than the heavy gangtser route. however as you can see in our film the genre is easily identified with the amount of violence that is involved. I am pleased to say that all other comments on the questionnaires were exactly what we hoped for, and there was nothing else to improve.

The afternoon of that screening turned out to be an enjoyable day for us all as we managed to get the chance to see everyones final opening sequence and we managed to get feed back from our target audience of age 16-30 year olds with students and teachers.

Final outcome 'Brass Monkeys'

The final outcome to our opening sequence 'Brass Monkeys' was a great success. The voice-over has been inserted into our sequence by Mitch and it enhances the way our audience percieves our film in a positive way. As a group we are extremely pleased with the outcome and are sure that our audience will enjoy it. Wednesday afternoon will be an important time for all groups as we will be playing our sequence on a big screen for an audience to watch and give feedback via a questionnaire we have devised, this will be the crucial point in weather or not our sequence will be a success which we are sure it will.

new script!

after cutting and editing most of our clips, in some cases, having to rearrange them, we realized that the previously wrote monologue for our sequence would not fit the images correctly, and so i had to write a whole new script.

the fancy cars, the violence & the drugs, none of this means nothing, unless you have got ambition, and you pushed your way to the top of the food chain.

ive never really been into violence, I was raised well in a council flat in Bromley by bow, still one thing thing my old man told me before he done the vinnie, was never let anyone take you for a mug, and theres only so much disrespect you can take until you snap. and that’s when you realise, money don’t grow on trees, cos if it did, you wouldn’t be a criminal, you’d be a gardener. if theres something you want, you gotta go out there and get it.

that was the regular us two months ago, wheeling and dealing, and for a while, nothing could touch us, but what goes up, must come down.

see that handsome fella, thas me, gary vince jones, but call me jonesy, the rest of the boys say that im too serious, but how comical can a villan be?

that’s lennie, hard as nails, but as daft as a brush, and although hes a head case hes a right softie with birds.

that’s lennies brother bill, and I know what your thinking ‘ what a tart, but underneath that Gucci suit hes as rough as the rest of us, and hes as tight as a ducks butt. ..

the term gangster is thrown about a lot these days, where as we prefer the label, lowkey business men. now theres two associations this side of the thames that you don’t wanna get involved with, that’s us, and knash and his affiliates, and as much as we like doing business with them, I prefer to stay well away from em’. hes what you call all the gear, and no idea. and hell lose it at the click of a finger, some say hes over the top, but I know how much of a good business man he can be’.

i recorded this as a studio quality mp3 file in my bedroom studio at home. i am more than happpy with the outcome, and after it has been conjoined iwth the footage, i believe are final version of the sequence will be complete.

'THE LAST SHOOT'

our last shoot, only required myself and my brother and his friend as the actors. the pool table shot of knash and his associate. it was a long process, because i had to fill the boys in with what i needed them to do, and after about an hour of filming!!yes, you heard me, an hour for one shot, we finally got the footage we needed. in their defense, they have no acting experience whatso ever, but they actually exectued the roles very successfully.Then i set the camera on the tri-pod, to record my self for the footage of my characters expostition. ineede to repeat the actions i needed again & again, to assure i had a lot of footage to choose from.

Progress in our Work

With just two days untill the deadline, it is important that we all know what we have to do to get this finished in time. We are on track to get it done, and we will work through our spare time, and try and keep finding things to improve it. The Footage we needed is all captured, and we are just playing around with the best editing techniques to make it look like a proper film rather than a home movie.

Editing Process

Mitch has been our main editing man during the course of our opening sequence, while my self and Jonny have had a go ourselves to share up the tasks but Mitch proved to be much quicker and more familiar with the way the editing works. In a previous lesson, we provided a rough cut to the class and teacher. This gave them their first taste of what our film was going to entail. We found this process very helpful due to the fact that constructive criticism came back aswell as alot of good points. We have made the audiences response one of our main priorities so that we can create the best film possible, and the feedback came back that we need to make one or two of our shots sharper and fasten it up a bit. Another one of our problems was we had a screen split into three seperate parts, each playing clips of our footage. The problem that arose from this was that it was too much for the audience to look at at once but just recently we have made adjustments to this and have found a substantial alternative to make sure it is easily viewed. At the time, being a rough cut, it made the group pose the question 'what is it really about?' and it bacame slightly unclear on what our purpose was. However, we did explain promptly afterwards that a voiceover was going to be inserted which will explain everything going on and make things a whole lot clearer. Mitch will be responsible for making the voiceover, we all agree that mitch has the best cockney accent to match and conform to the genre and explain everything fluently.
Just recently we have decided to abandon the idea of having two different backing tracks in our sequence. It didnt sound right in the end and there was a huge contrast when we had to change between one song and the other and it sounded unprofessional and not as good as it could be. It was a hard decision as to which song we were going to chose, we all, as a group, liked both songs equally as much, hence why we chose to have them both at first, but we came to a conclusion of having 'dirty harry- by the Gorrillas' as our main backing track. Once we played the whole sequence through again with just one backing track it was evident that it sounded much better and had an increased professional outcome and we found ourselves extremely satisfied with what we had achieved.

EVALUATION OF OUR LAST SHOOT

Overall during the course of our last shoot it went very successfully. We kept our locations open and travelled around various places in order to suit our genre to the best locations possible. I think that we found some fantastic locations and used them to the best of our abilities. These locations were St Mary’s Cray, Bat and ball and 7oaks. We shot over 22 minutes of footage all of which was of a high quality and the group and I were very pleased with the way in which the day panned out. We decided to re-shoot the previous car scene and we were very lucky to get similar weather to the first shoot, it was extremely cold however which also matches the inner meaning of our title ‘Brass Monkeys’, which we also made reference to in one of the scenes by Mitch and I. At first Jonny wasn’t going to feature in our opening sequence at all, but we thought it would be good if he did on the day. Jon was able to do a very good job in the acting and now has established himself a ‘hard man’ character in our film. During the filming, we didn’t come across a lot of problems but there were a couple of small ones. These being that at the place we were shooting (outside St Mary’s Cray station) there were a lot of people walking about and we needed to wait until it was clear to perform certain scenes. Another one of these problems was that one piece of our footage was taped over which was completely accidental but we were lucky that we had numerous high quality back-ups at our disposal.
The use of various weapons, for example a snooker que, golf club, small hand held bats and a thick chain, helped us conform to the typical violent British gangster genre and made us all look the part. Another way in which it helped us get into the role of being a well groomed gangster was that we all turned up in smart clothing and suits to enhance the way the audience interpretates our characters and views our overall sequence, while becoming familiar with our genre.