Story and Plot

PLOT AND STORY:

In today's class we were given an introductory lesson about script writing. During the lecture we were explained about the a PLOT and a STORY, also the difference between them.

A story could be defined as a series of events which have a beginning, middle and an end, this is the basic structure of a story. Whereas, a plot answers 5 main questions being, what, how, why, when and where. A plot defines event with  more detail, however, a story is written with brevity. This should be known that a plot is based on a story. It emphasizes the concept of the story in detail. An example of these two terms could be:

Story: Aiman and Sabaina went for lunch after which they watched a movie together.

Plot: Aiman and Sabaina decided to go for lunch at a restaurant. Later, as they had nothing to do, they watched a movie together.

I did a detailed assignment on these two terms on a cartoon film Beauty and The Beast by Disney Channel, which was later checked by my media studies teacher. It is as follows:

Beauty and the Beast:

STORY: 

Beauty and the Beast is a tale of a beautiful young woman who gets imprisoned by a Beast in a mysterious castle in an attempt to free her father from the Beast. Days pass by and she finds herself the support of enchanted friends who work their way to develop a connection between Belle and the Beast. With time, the two get to know each other due to which a very soft and romantic relationship takes birth between them, which leads to a happy ending in which the Beast gets his normal life back, by breaking the spell casted on him many years ago, because of Belle.

PLOT: 

Beauty and the Beast is the tale of a beautiful young woman named Belle who lives in a small French town. One day her father goes on a business expedition and promises to return in a few days. However, many days go by and her father does not return home due to which she decides to go after him. During her search for her father Belle makes her way in a mysterious castle in the woods. There she meets a strange Beast, formerly a Prince who was cursed by an Enchantress into a beast due to prince’s arrogant nature. The only way he could get his real appearance back was to earn love of another person before the final petal of the magical rose fell. Belle finds her father imprisoned in the castle by the beast. The Beast demands her to live forever in the castle with him if she wants her father to be free. Belle accepts the demand and gets trapped in the castle for eternity. As the days pass by Belle finds support of some enchanted people living in the castle. In the beginning the beast and Belle find many disagreements among themselves. However, with the passage of time they get to know each other better and develop a very strong and romantic relationship between them which later becomes the source of the Beast’s survival.

Film Treatment

Posted by : Aiman and Sabaina

The title of the documentary is ‘INDOORS ALTER OUTDOORS’. The title itself signifies the story of the documentary on which our research and ideology is based on. The documentary backs up the claim that indoor activities has taken over those of outdoors. Children and teenagers nowadays are witnessed more attached with video games such as PS3, Xbox, Wii and Kinect etc., which has resulted in less interest towards the outdoor activities such as  Hopscotch, cycling, Doug the ball etc. This recent trend has been provoked with the help of the new improved technologies introduced in the market in the recent years and their further development into new features, capturing the interest of the youth.

It is going to give evidence of the stance mentioned earlier. The target audience is going to be the youth itself considering it is based on them and one of the most widespread hobbies of theirs; on the other hand, the documentary is also targeted at parents as they will be witnessing one of the most ongoing activities highlighted in this documentary regarding their children which will help us acquire their attention.

The documentary consists of 3 acts that are going to blend in with each other and create the entire story.

ACT 1: This is going to introductory. The theme of the documentary is going to be established in this particular part. The camera will to take short clips of a number of areas showing candid shots of children carrying out their activities. These clips are to be combined with the help of fast editing showing children at different times and at different areas. This step makes the audience clear about the age group that the documentary focuses on. The narration, on the other hand, will back up all the clips that are going to be incorporated in the documentary. It will give a general introduction of the activities of the children and then come to the topic that has been extracted from their lives. It will include facts about the activities of children and lay more emphasis on the shift in trend. These facts will be backed up with the help of short duration interviews of random people from the part where they agree that this habit has become wide among the youth of today. The interviews are going to be captured with mid shots as they will be speaking to the audience. While the interviewees speak out their perceptions, their voices are going to be played at the back of clips showing children playing with gadgets giving proof of the stance. This particular act highlights the establishing part of the documentary.

ACT 2: The editing going to be at a normal velocity in this case. The narrator is going take the audience towards an 11 year old (Dawood) and  who will act as an example of the theme of the documentary. He will be filmed with the help of candid shots while carrying out his day to day routine during which the camera will be following them playing with different gadgets as to prove the point of the invasion of indoor activities on them. He will be interviewed as well in which he will be questioned about his attraction towards the video games etc. Different camera angles of the camera are going to be used in this particular act. The use of angles will be used while filming Dawood at the time when he will be playing some console of his, this will show the concentration level and the attraction of theirs from different angles such as high angle to show the console and the low angle to show their expressions, close ups of his face and hands that all comes under the 5-shots rule while playing etc. The camera follows him throughout the day with the help of panning and tracking in or out. His parents will be included in the video and with the help of L cut and 180 degree camera angles as with this the feel and emotions of both the parties will be sent out to the audience. Interviews will be taken from his parents also, asking them about the problems they have regarding this particular habit that has become common; the parents will also be questioned about the activities they were dwelled in at their times and the changes they see from their time onwards to till date. This will make the documentary more informative and the parents whom we were aiming our documentary at will feel closer to the topic considering their childhood has also been incorporated in our documentary.

ACT 3: This part brings the documentary to its ending. After the clips of Dawood the narrator supports the theme of the documentary and brings back the audience from the his footage. With this, the narrator raises the question ‘Do people agree?’ and a number of interviewees will answer the question by saying ‘YES, No or Maybe’ with the help of fast editing and a still shot will be placed immediately after the interviews of a playground which will slowly fade out.

The lights in the documentary will mostly be natural light. This is because we will be interviewing random people outdoors and so natural light will be the only light at times of outdoor interviews. However, the lights that will be used for interviews recorded indoors will be made up i.e. using a background light and also a key light in order to give a very homely feel at the faces of the interviewees, diffusers will be brought if required in order to tone down the key lights. There will not be a complete usage of high key or low key lights but a moderate approach will be taken in practice.

The editing is going to be simple; we are not going to use any special editing technique just the simple editing tools and transactions such as fade in and  fade out etc. in order prevent our documentary from giving a very ‘artificial’ feel to the audience. The background music is going to be soft and playful, in accordance to the theme of our documentary.  The sounds are going to be synchronized in the interviews. Moreover, a lot of Depth of field shots and point of view shots will help show the perceptions of the people in our documentary.  

The colors and props are going to be according to the theme of the documentary. The colors that we are going to use in our media text will be those which give lively effect not serious or dark effect. Characters would be wearing their normal clothes as to show that we have taken candid shots without any interference from our side.

Furthermore, the duration will be kept up to 5 to 6 minutes. This is will be easy for people to watch considering it’s hard to for them to take a lot of time out of their busy routines. Moreover, stretching out the documentary further on brings with it the risk of being monotonous at some point that could become a cause of the audience losing interest during the video.

Over all the feel of our documentary is going to be very light .The overall feel of the documentary is going to be very light, which the young children's around 12 to older people in 60's can enjoy it, keeping in consideration the stance of our product. Considering that we are aiming at children, teenagers and parents it would be wise to adapt a calming and soothing approach throughout the entire video.

Documentary title

Posted By Aiman and Sabaina:

Before coming up with the final title design we made two more before:

—————————————–

We produced this final title on Adobe Photoshop .This is going to be the title of our documentary.

We have written the word ALTER in red colour. Reason being that it gives an impact to the viewers about what it signifies i.e. Indoor activities have become more common than those of outdoor activities. A change it colour makes the word more prominant.

Below is the picture of how we made this title.

Research-Titles

Posted by : Aiman and Sabaina

Before making the title of our documentary we looked up few posters to get an idea how a documentary title would look like. The following three are the titles inspired us the most during the construction of our own title:

The words in this title are written in different colors as to highlight the significant elements that hold an important place in the story line of the media text. This gave us the idea to write our title in some way like this so that the words which we are trying to highlight in our title the most are made prominant to the viewers.

The following titles are written in a simple way using a common font. These titles  are a great example of the effectiveness that we can achieve by carrying out a simple approach.

The titles posted below are those which we came across during our research among which we seleted the final three titles posted above:

Production house

Posted by : Aiman and Sabaina 

 

Channel 7 productions

(our final production house )

Channel 7 productions, is one of the most renowned communications agency Pakistan has to offer.

It has released a number of TV commercials and documentaries over the past years, This will benefit us in a way that we would get more information regarding documentaries considering their experiences in this field. This production house is already an established one, The chances of driving a wider number of people towards our documentary through this channel will be much more than that of using a newly established production house. It is also known amongst people for coming up with quality projects so when the audiences will see that our documentary through this production company they would want to watch it and many channels will also be willing to play our documentary. Moreover, being an advertising agency as well, we would get the advantage of advertising our product through one agency and eliminate the time used to find advertisers and transfer our work to some other agency.

Production house research

Posted by Aiman and Sabaina:

Before finalizing our production house we went through a number of production houses. Following is the list of  companies we considered before making the final decision:

1) Y productions Pakistan

2) Film4productions

3) BBC films

Documentaries de-construction-1

Before starting on making our own documentary doing this particular assignment is crucial. Deconstruction of any documentary helps discover even the minor details of it. Knowing this information would aid us during the construction of our project as observing the tiny bits and pieces cluster and make up the whole thing.

BIOGRAPHY ON ALFRED HITCHCOCK:


Duration: 43 minutes 05 seconds
Anchor: Paul Merton
Official Channel: BBC

The first documentary I have observed is a biography on a renowned personality, Alfred Hitchcock. This biography takes us through the life of Alfred Hitchcock, his experiences, his birth, his education and of coarse his success over the years. This documentary has been delivered to the it's target audience such as Alfred Hitchcock's fans, fans of old films, adults etc, via internet and television (BBC).



This particular clip is a blend of docu-soap and biography documentary. Reason being that the biography is part of a program which describes the history of celebrities in every episode, i.e. the program has several episodes. Other than that , the biography is participatory as an anchor participates in it himself who guides the viewers through out the entire clip and narratives Hitchcock's as a story being told to the viewers; this not only effectively gives the message to the audience but also makes it more interesting as the body language of the person narrating makes the viewers feel like he is directly speaking to them.



The codes and conventions are similar to those of a classic documentary. There is narration, an anchor who leads the story, interviews, mid close up shots on the interviewees, establishing shot of the birth place of the Hitchcock etc. These conventions are similar to those that will be witnessed in our documentary as ours is also based on classic documentary.



The location of the documentary is the Hitchcock birth place. This not only helps define his biography more effectively but also gives a feeling of practically experiencing his life. An example could be taken of the clips taken at the institution Hitchcock studied in when he was young. The anchor goes through the stories of Hitchcock on the places where those stories actually took place. Other then that, the clips from his famous movies are showcased in the entire documentary as to show his work and success that he gained from it. Instead of re-doing his entire life again, it is shown in the form of clips taken from his films which I believe better define the person Hitchcock was.



The soundtrack used in the background is quite strong. Similar to those heard in Hitchcock's films. This particular selection of music makes further covers the elements related to Hitchcock in depth.

What caught my attention the most were the camera angles and the lights of the biography. Although  the camera angles used are mostly the ones we see in all the biographies, e.g. the mid shots of the interviewee and the wide shots of the birth place of Hitchcock which establishes the scene etc. but what distinguished it from others were the dramatic shots of the university and the camera closing up on the face of the anchor while he narrates the story of Hitchcock in order to create more impact. Furthermore, the lights displayed during the interviews are dim lights with a strong key light which creates a very dramatic atmosphere. Hitchcock being a director himself, this biography has been produced in a way that the purpose behind is implemented, the strong drama, the serious mood etc. seen in Hitchcock's films are captured in this documentary.





.