Session 12 - Planning Our First Workshop - 17/10/12

New faces:

We welcomed two new faces to the group - William - who found out about our campaign through Mr Harris and Kent - who found out about the group through Nadia. We are all really happy new have new students to help us take our campaign to the next stage...school assemblies.

Who's going to say what?:

We discussed who wants to say each part of our presentation.

INTRODUCTIONS TO GROUP MEMBERS AND THE CAMPAIGN - Thomas

HOW WE FORMED - Nadia and Kent

WHAT IS THE FILM ABOUT? - Djed

STATS AND INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM - William

WHY GANG VIOLENCE? - Michael

QUESTIONS - Malachi

Writing down what we want to say:

We all worked on our parts and wrote down what we wanted to say as part of the presentation.

PowerPoint presentation and music:

We all put together a short PowerPoint presentation to show some visuals during our presentation. Nicholas also suggested that we use some music that he created during the period of time that our audience are sitting down ready for the presentation.

Finally we had a run through of our presentation so that we all understood when we needed to say our parts. Our first presentation will be on Friday 9 November during I Space at Pimlico Academy. We are really excited and nervous for our first public appearance. Who knows? we may become celebrities!

Session 11 - Feedback On Promotional Materials and Preparing To Take Our Campaign Into Schools - 2/10/12

Update:

We all gathered together and welcomed everyone back after our break. We had a quick update to see where everyone is and what they have been up too.

- Djed has been active on Twitter - we discussed teaming him up with Malachi so that we can keep the tweeting on track.

- Thomas has been finding the Facebook group annoying as he feels a page would be better - that way people can just like the page than having to add as a friend.

- Thomas has been busy finishing the draft script.

Introducing a designer:

Designer Nadia was introduced to the group and showed us three designs for promotional materials - postcards, logo and t-shirt designs. We discussed what we liked and what we wanted to change.

T-shirts:

- Can we have our names on the t-shirts?

The group fed back that they wanted the t-shirts to have their names on them. We all agreed that it would make the t-shirts look busy but that the idea of a name badge to wear anywhere would be a good compromise.

- I really like the t-shirt design - it is clear and appeals to young people

Logo:

- I like graffiti so the logo is cool for young people

- I love the design because it is modern and eye catching

- It suits the genre of the film really well

Postcard:

- I like everything about it

- It's a good idea and it appeals to young people

- I would put Malachi's face instead of mine on it

Poster idea:

We discussed that we liked the idea of having a poster that we could send over to schools to put up to promote our film and campaign coming to their school.

- A2

- landscape

- Still use the image of Michael from the film as it is a really strong image

- Use some of the copy off of the postcard

- Add get involved and details 

- Blank box at the bottom that other schools can write the date, time and place when the campaign will be coming to their school

What schools do we want to take our campaign too?

- Pimlico Academy - anti-bullying week in November (TBC)

- Greycoats

- QK

- St Thomas Moore

We need to contact the schools and ask if we can have a minimum of 30 minutes to run our workshop in their schools.

Peabody paperwork:

Andrew from Peabody came in to discuss a few things with us.

- We filled in evaluation forms

- Discussed an option of accreditation for our campaign

Accreditation:

We finished up the session by discussing the opportunity of being able to gain a qualification from all of the work we have done as part of our campaign. 

The dates when we will do this are TBC but the following members of the group are interested:

- Malachi

- Djed

- Thomas

- Michael Ajao

Session 10 - Film Feedback and Setting Up The Social Networking - 18/7/12

Feeding back on our film

We started off the session by watching our film - we were all very excited to see it! We watched it through a few times and gave our feedback. There were a few minor changes and some name spelling changes but overall everyone agreed that it looked brilliant!

Preparing speeches for our first presentation

We discussed and made noted of what we wanted to say in the presentation that we will be doing at the school. Sadly since the session our original plan to show our film in assembly didn't happen because there wasn't enough time. We will be doing our first presentation in September after the summer holidays so we will be able to show the film then. We decided that we wanted just three speakers to do a presentation after the film is shown but we will all be introduced any way.

- Thomas - Introduction
- Djed - What is our campaign about?
- Paul - Finishing and questions

Setting up our social networking

We set up our Twitter account (@Ambitionfilms) - which Lanta and Djed will be in charge of, Facebook - which Thomas and Nadia will be in charge of, a Gmail email account - which we will all take responsibility for along with our YouTube Channel.

We finished the session really excited and can't wait to show our film in assemblies!

Filming day - 14/7/12

We all met at 9.30am and got prepared with make-up and the clothes we needed ready to film. It was a really exciting day as all of our words were being made into reality. The make-up artist did a really awesome job of scars on the members of the group playing gang members! We even got a tester of a really gross looking fake cut, it looked amazing!

Everyone had their roles on and off screen and filming went to plan, minus the rain - which made it harder to film the outdoor scenes straight away. It stopped raining after a few hours so we were able to get all of our whole film shot. It was a lot of fun and very tiring but it was well worth it for our film and campaign.

Thomas, Djed, Lanta and Nadia worked on a behind the scenes video and here is the result of it:

Session 9 - Rehearsals - 11/7/12

We have been rehearsing for the past three weeks with a professional actress Eilidh, who helped us to get into character and Patrick who will play the role of dad, helped us to understand where to stand and feel what our characters would really feel in the situations in the script.

In our final rehearsal we worked together with Patrick and Eilidh to choreograph our fight scene.

Session 8 - Confirming Roles, Script Content And Practicing Lines - 20/6/23

We started off the session looking at the storyboard to remind ourselves of the shots that we want to use in our short film.

We discussed whether everyone was happy with the script and everyone agreed that they liked it but they wanted to change the ending.

We finalised roles and re-arranged a date for filming as most people couldn't do the original date proposed. We have now all agreed that we will be filming for the whole day on Saturday 14 July 2012.

The roles are as follows:

Cast:
Tyler: Nicholas (Malachi stand in)
Paul: Michael
Mum: Actress
Dad: Actor
Gang leader: Paul
Gang member 1: Malachi
Gang member 2: Michael A A
Extras/other gang members/passer by: Nadia, Djed, Tom, Lanta, Karl

Crew:
Director: Tristan
Assistant director: Karl
Art director: Tom
Camera Assistant: Nadia, Nicholas, Michael A A
Edit assistant: Malachi

We had a run through of all of the scenes and practice lines. We made a few minor amendments to the script as we wanted the ending to be slightly different. We filmed the scenes whilst everyone was practising.

We finished up the session by going through our expenditure rationale forms for filming and promoting our campaign and filled in feedback forms.

Session 7 - Finishing Our Storyboard And Doing A Location Recce - 30/5/12

Going over roles:
We started off the session by going over everyone's roles and allocating characters for everyone to play.

Cast:
Tyler - Nicolas
Paul - Malachi/Paul/Michael
Mum - we will be getting an actress in
Dad - we will be getting an actor in
Gang leader - Karl/Paul
Gang member 2 - Micheal A.A
Gang member 3 - Lanta/Malachi
Girl (stabbing victim) - Nadia
Other gang members/extras - Nadia/Djed

Crew:
Director - Tristan/Karl
Assistant Director - Tom
Art Director - Tom/Lanta
Camera Assistant - Nadia/Nicolas/Micheal AA
Sound - We will be getting a sound man to do this
Edit Assistant - Malachi

Filming:
We looked at our schedules as there are a lot of exams going on over the next few weeks to see when everyone is available to film.

Filming dates:

- Thursday 21 June 2012 - 2.45pm - 7.00pm
- Sunday 24 June 2012 - We will film on this day too if we need to.

Storyboard:
Tom finished drawing the storyboard and it looks really great.

Paperwork:
We discussed and filled in an expenditure rationale form for our filming. This explained what we will need and how much it will cost.

Location recce:
For the final part of the session we went out to the locations that we will be filming at to do a location recce. We filmed the locations.