Planning: shotlist

This is the shot list I created for my film opening, It only included the Chase scene of the film as I knew the titles would be more abstract due to the emphasis during that sequence being on the titles. 

Planning: Location

I went on a rece around Ringwood looking for suitable locations to film my music video, I wanted areas which looked urban, this was difficult however due to the abundance of trees and foliage.

After wandering around all afternoon trying to find a suitable location, I was still unhappy with the locations I had found. None presented the futuristic, urban look I wanted to present.

Therefore I chose to ignore the rece shots and instead decided to film in a multi storey car park. I wasn't able to go and get location pictures for this however, so I chose a car park I'd been to before, this meant a storyboard was out of the question as I wasn't 100% sure how the car park was laid out, so instead I chose to write a shot-list.

Planning: designing a product

My brief was to create an action film based on a real or fictional video game, so I chose to take elements from a number of real title to create a brand which would be representative of real products whilst maintaining a setting and style which would still be achievable considering the constraints I had in terms of setting, characters and mise-en-scene in general.

A logical first chose of inspiration was EA's mirrors edge
This is a game well known for it's free-running style game-play and also incorporation of action. so was perfectly suited to my brief, however the majority of the game takes place atop sky scrapers which is not possible for me to achieve, there fore I looked to other similar games for setting.


Character Design


I found the Mirror's edge character design interesting.



The costume is simple, but also highly affective so when designing the costume for the characters I took this into account and this costume in particular was hugely influential in the design of the final costume.

Other sources of inspiration for the protagonists costume were:

Jade - Beyond Good and Evil

Cole - Infamous 2

Setting

I looked to the Half life series for inspiration on the setting, they had an interesting combination of sci-fi and modern day elements. which would be relatively easy to achieve for my film.

Another game with an aesthetic which could be interesting to explore was portal, the simple white backgrounds could make an interesting setting, similar to the district 13 setting seen in my earlier research.

Antagonists


For the antagonists I wanted them to be highly conventional so they were immediately recognizable as the troops/members of totalitarian regime.
To ensure this I thought about the kind of images I associated with this type of character, and also looked at conventional images. I chose to include my own perceptions as well as research as I am a member of the target audience and I wanted the enemy characters to be somewhat cliche and instantly recognizable for what they were.

I again looked at Mirrors edge as a key source of inspiration:


But also examples from games such as:

RAGE                                                 Beyond Good and evil                                                                 

The look of the Antagonists also borrowed heavily from films such as

Equilibrium

To give the film some Grounding in reality I also looked at modern day SWAT teams for inspiration for the antagonists.

The product

The Idea I had for the product was one similar to many other films and games, featuring totalitarian states. the key protagonist is a key member of the rebel group who is vital to ensuring it's victory. Whilst the enemy is enforcing the status quo with excessive force.

From the examples I had gathered and seeing as many of the themes I had already collated leant themselves well to cliche, therefore I chose to name the Fictional game my video will be based on.

"On the Edge"

I felt it was representative of the kind of names seen within the genre, whilst being simple and catchy enough to be memorable. 

Titles

From the previous Examples I gathered the thoughts I had starting forming about the titles were to have floating text "in the world".

A previous examples where this could be seen were in the Deus Ex opening, and also slightly in the Crysis opening but those were instead on the various objects in the scene.





The technology being explained in the previous video is the reason why I picked it out as an example, because, like I previously said, incorporating the titles into the environment is where my thoughts are in terms of titles.





The same effect can be seen in this game along the edge of the tracks.

From this research and looking at titles usually seen in action films, I chose to challenge genre conventions and go for a more dynamic way of displaying titles by incorporating methods seen primarily in video games.

Distribution company

As the brief was for the film to appear to be based on a video game, I felt it would be required that the final film be a collaboration between a film and video game distribution company.

From the research I had already done into video game openings a trend I noticed where that they were all distributed by the same company.



EA are a well known distribution company who have published a huge variety of games including many from the action genre so they were the production company I chose to use for the video game arm of my films distribution.

For the film aspect I looked back at many of the example I had already found during my research to try and find a consistent distribution company. however whilst I recognized a lot of the big name production companies,  such as Warner Bros, Paramount and Columbia. none provided a constant trend, in fact every example had a different distribution company.

So in the end I looked at some of the less well known production companies, as from the research I concluded that they are more likely to take risks on innovative and original IP, and also from looking at the types of distribution companies involved in previous computer game to film adaptations, I found that smaller production companies are more likely to take on these kind of productions.

A production company I found through my research was Film district.

they seemed to have a tendency to publish horror and action films, as well as being an indie publisher, therefore making them more likely to take risks.

Summarising, the two distribution companies I chose for this film were EA and Film District.

The Brief!

A mainstream action film that will appeal to both 15-25yr old males and females.
Your film should appear to be based on a "fictional" or real computer game