Newspaper Progress #2

The film logo

The first version of the 'Die' logo.

Die story

The film begins in Churchfield Park. The camera takes various shots of the park. Shots include leaves on the ground, the trees, the paths and benches.

A young man is sat on a bench in the park. The man is Ian Bates. He is wearing dark leather jacket, blue jeans and a black t-shirt. Ian is drinking alcohol from a flask. He is suffering from depression as he raises his head to look at the sky. The camera shows a low angle shot of the sky with the branches of the trees in it. Ian lowers his head and looks at the dice sat next to him.

There then is a close up of the dice on the bench next to him. The camera then zooms out to show a mid shot of Ian sat on the bench next to the dice. Ian then picks up the dice and holds it eye level to his face. Ian then speaks to the dice before rolling the dice on the floor, the flashbacks then start to happen.

It then shows Ian in his usual day job in the library stacking books before a man knocks the books out of his hand. The man then doesn't apologize because he walks off without noticing. Ian then takes the dice out of his pocket and rolls it across the floor.            

A Throw of Dice Trailer Analysis

This is the film trailer for the film A Throw of Dice. This film is related to ours because it involves a persons life and future on a throw of some of dice. The films trailer is cut down to show the film as it happens but in a way that you can't understand it without watching it. The trailer also doesn't have anyone speaking over it because the film is a silent film with no speech involved in it. In the trailer the animals and sound represent an evil force coming towards the land. This makes the audience want to watch the film to understand what is coming and why are the animals afraid.     

The Dice Man

The Dice Man is a novel written by George Cockroft under the pen name Luke Rhinehart in 1971. This novel has a similar premise to our story. The Dice Man is about a psychiatrist who gets bored with life and decides to add excitement by basing all of his decisions on the roll of die. Things soon spiral out of control when his actions lead to things like rape and murder.

Our story revolves around a man who carries a demonic die with him. The die is controlling the man and making decisions for him. Things get worse when the die forces him to kill an innocent civilian.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dice_Man

Journey

Story update

After several days of trying to figure how to make a good story without over complicating it, I finally came up with an idea. Me and Matthew Topham had been working out an ending. We both agreed from the beginning that we wanted the twist to be that the die is possessing the main character, but we had trouble trying to make it work. We even suggested revealing that the die was possessed at the beginning if the film, but we thought that this would spoil everything.

My solution was to make the audience believe the character was crazy by having him talk to the die. Then at the end of the film, after he has murdered an innocent, he throws the die away. A man sees the die on the ground and picks it up. Upon picking up the die, his head shakes violently (see the Jacob's Ladder effect video). The man walks up behind the main character, who is sat up a bench, and strangles him. After he has killed him, he holds the die in his hand and stares at it unemotionally. A demonic voice suddenly says "Your soul is mine." to the man. The film ends there.

Matthew came up with the idea of the main character dying at the end, but I didn't know how to make it work. After discussing it, we decided that the guy who gets possessed at the end should kill the main character. Matthew thought that it could be a cycle in which the person who carries the die must kill the previous possessor. This reveals that there have been a lot more people possessed in the past and a lot more to come.

Jacob's Ladder head spinning scene: Trickshot #1

This is my attempt at recreating the famous head spinning shot used in the 1990 psychological horror film, Jacob's Ladder (shown here). Firstly, I recorded myself rotating my head left to right, up and down and at different angles, stopping every so often. Then, I sped the footage up 4x and added a delay effect.

In retrospect, it doesn't look perfect (I don't have the correct software with the correct effects to make it look perfect) but it will do as a test. We aim to use this shot in our film.

I tried different methods of recreating this scene. From 0:20 onwards, I started moving my head faster and more erratically. This created a better outcome. As I said, when editing the actual film, we'll be using Final Cut - which has more practical effects for this shot. Such as a velocity envelope, for example.