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For this brief, the most challenging thing was working together as a group. Collectively we decided to create separate storyboards of the short film we wanted to produce, and then show each other what we had done, and then take a vote on which was best. The idea we chose was to have a girl filming a make-up tutorial, but the lipstick she used was haunted by the evil spirit of Marilyn Monroe. We decided to go with the Youtube idea because all of it’s content is user generated media, and one of the largest sub-sections of Youtube is taken up by young girls teaching one another how to create professional style make-up via make-up tutorials. They are so popular now that brands such as MAC and L’Oreal sponsor the make-up tutorial channels with the most subscribers. We had a group meeting before the shoot of the video, as not all of us could fit in a bedroom and direct Grace on what to do. In addition to this none of us could even be in the same room as Grace when she was filming because she would just end up laughing after a couple of takes. In order to make the film fit in with the ‘make-up tutorial’ paradigm we needed to set Grace up in what would appear to be her bedroom, in front of a camera which she could speak into. This was handy because as she would be looking into the camera, we could fill the space around where she was looking with script prompters and hints so that she wouldn’t forget what she was doing (which was really useful as we had to keep out of the area where she was filming so she wouldn’t laugh).
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To make Grace fit in with all the other makeup tutorials we directed her to be extremely chirpy and friendly in front of the camera, because if she were a real Youtuber, she would want to encourage as many people as possible to subscribe to her channel. During filming, all of the group were going to individual workshops to learn how to edit the footage together. The hardest thing for us to get our heads around was the editing software which could cut together the footage, in the end the notes Lauren made for her Premier workshop were so complex none of us could understand them, so we had to use a different software, iMovie, which Louise had used previously in her spare time. After showing the first cut to the class, we decided not to give away the fact that Grace was being possessed so early on, using jittery sudden 1 second cuts of clips of the oozing black goo out of the mouth. After the crit we decided to each do a slightly different cut of the footage, as some people thought we needed extras in the footage others didn’t, such as music from the exorcist movie, or close ups of the Tampax box (subliminal advertising).
Group: Ces, Stephen, Louise, Malcisha, Lauren M, Lucy RE. Actress: Grace