Channel 4's The Promise

A program that I've been watching recently is 'The Promise', written and directed by Peter Kosminsky and starring Claire Foy, playing Erin, and Christian Cooke, playing Len. One thing that struck me as I watched the first episode was how cinematic the titles are, and I think that was what drew me in. Also, the subject of the program is something that isn't often talked about, and i've found it incredibly interesting (if horrible, too). I did history for GCSE, and we learned a lot about before the Second World War, and a bit during, but one thing that isn't often taught is the aftermath for the Jews, and I had no idea that they faced any kind of hardship post-war.

As well as being informative, the Promise is also beautifully shot. The opening sequence has the titles going to black screens with white writing. The titles have things like 'Daybreak Pictures' as well as the actors, which is unusual for a TV series.

Although the visuals for the program in general are very well done, and the research is in depth, I find that i'm not sure about the storyline. The program is set in two different times, and keeps hopping back and forth between them, which is never confusing, but it seems quite badly done. I think that all the parts set in 2005 are a bit unnecessary, although I understand that the point is to show that Israel is still in conflict. I find that although I liked Claire Foy in Little Dorrit, her character is just a bit too sulky to sympathise with, and a bit too bland to find her worth being a protagonist. There are also a lot of pointless scenes, for example the scene in a nightclub where we learn that Erin has epilepsy doesn't make sense. Surely if she was epileptic that would be the last place she'd choose to go? And the fact she has it doesn't actually add anything to the story, unless it becomes important in a later episode. Finally, the use of 'cliffhanger' style endings of each episode just seem to make it a bit too cheesy for the subject matter, turning what should be a highbrow drama into a bit of a soap. Also they just seem to be at random, rather than built up to during the episode. With an hour and a half's worth of TV to play with per episode, you'd think there would be something that would keep you watching for that long, but there isn't.

Although the 2005 parts seem somewhat flawed, I do enjoy the 1946 bits, where we follow Erin's grandfather Len as she reads his diary from the time. Christian Cooke is probably better suited to his role and has a far more interesting character to play. Overall, I will carry on watching The Promise, but I always feel just a tiny bit disappointed when we go back to Erin's part of the story.

Reviews for 'The Promise':
The Guardian
The Telegraph

Titles 2.0

After analysing the titles for Mean Girls and Juno we realised that most production companies have an introductory clip that shows which company produced the movie. For example, here are the Paramount and 20th Century Fox ones:





We decided that once we decided on a name for our production company we should make something, maybe more simple, but similar to that. As the names used in many chick flicks are quite quirky and unusual (e.g Juno - 'Mr Mudd productions'), so we wanted to come up with something similar. Then Andrea had the idea of calling it 'Bumblebee Productions', which we both found quite inspiring. We've had the idea of having a bee fly around the name, which my dad is going to help me create, as he's a graphic designer and works with the software all the time.

Ahh...

The person from freeplaymusic.com has replied to my message:

It's a shame, but it looks like this means we won't be able to use this track without paying for it. Worth a try though! We'll have to look into some other options. This was my reply:

Titles

For our movie we will need to create titles, so we spent a lesson looking at the order, font and style of titles, in a few movies similar to ours, such as Mean Girls and Juno.

 

We wrote down the order it appears in Mean Girls (couldn't get the clip up, but it's in this post)

1.   Production company

2.   A (someones name) production

3.   Lead Actor

4.   Film title

5.   It then lists the actors, not syncing any shots of them with their character apart from Tina Fey's name coming up. This is because she also wrote the screenplay or had some other role in the creation of the film.

6.   Casting Director

7.   Based on the book

8.   Music supervisor

9.   Music conductor

10. Co producer

11. Costume designer

12. Editor

13. Production designer

14. Director of photography

15. Executive producer

16. Produced by

17. Screenplay by

18. Director

From this, we know that for our film the first credit should be the Lead Actor and the last should be the Director, as they are the credits that stick in people's minds and are likely to be more well known by the general public.

Reply

The owners of the website have replied to our message. Here is a screenshot of the email:

This makes it sound like we can't put it on YouTube, but this is my reply, just in case we can:

Hopefully they'll reply as speedily as they did before, because then we can use Monday's lesson to look for alternatives if we can't.

Music For Our Film...

We've been listening to the soundtrack we might have that I last posted, and we're not really sure that we like it. We did some research and we found out that the original song we were using, Cool Shades, is on freeplaymusic.com, which is a website for music that is not copyrighted. 

We decided to send them a message in their 'Contact Us' section to check that the music is definitely copyright free. Here is a screenshot of the message we sent... (click to make larger)

 And they replied with this:

Soundtrack

This is the music we're thinking of using for our movie opening. We found two instrumental covers of two different songs and put them together. When we edit the film we'll put this on and change it to make it appropriate. We'll also need to add sound effects too.

Experiment shots

After editing what's there of our film, we found some old film that we'd done to show different shots. We'd done it before the holidays but had forgotten to edit it together, so we did that during our lesson. Here's the finished thing:

Filming - Day 2

Last week we filmed for the second time, because we decided that lots of things needed to be re filmed for continuity purposes and a lot of our film was quite shaky. We made a list of all the things we need to to re film in order, and checked them off as we went. We met up at Alice's house again, because although she is no longer part of our group she still let us film there. We were about to start filming when we realised that the tripod clip was missing off our tripod (again!). We didn't want to have to postpone the filming because we needed to get on with editing, so I walked back to my house to get my dad's tripod and buy some props that we would need (Special K cereal and milk), which meant we lost about an hour of filming time. We carried on anyway, but it got to about 4:00 and it was starting to get dark, and although all the filming we had left to do was inside, the light in the room we were using was covered by a pink lampshade, which made the light go a funny colour, and we couldn't take it off. We filmed it anyway, but we will probably need to re film that bit again, because it really doesn't look right and the continuity is awful.