I decided to make individual packs for the actors/actress’s with their parts of the script, contact details, and the times they are needed etc.
I also highlighted the parts that they need to learn and underlined Alice’s dialogue, this should make it easier for my assistant to follow the dialogue, and if the actors need to remember certain bits for each shot it should make it more visual and faster.
The packs also make it more clear to me as to what props i need to arrange for what days etc.
ALICE
The role of Alice is going to be played by Jessica Mason, mainly because of the likeness between her and the character i based the role on, ‘catherine howard’ from the tudors. It would have been unfeasable for me to have booked the real Tamzin Stewart for the role because of expenses etc, and because i am friends with Jess and she is Coventry based, i would be able to do test shoots and re shoots with her quite easily. She has been in productions before and is good on camera and has the right look for the role. I did online casting but most of the girls were unsuitable, and their acting was not that vast, It was very difficult to find the right looking person and after sifting though over 300 applicants i decided that Jess would be better anyway.
I did mock script readings with her and she was brilliant for the part. I based her character mainly on the Catherine Howard character in the Tudors than the typical Alice, and have based her wardrobe on an early 1900’s attire.
She is very playful and naive, and has a broad imagination, she craves the parental figures and friends she left in the city . Her playing age is around 14.
Caterpillar
The character of the caterpillar is going to be played by Luke Murphy, 21, based in Coventry. I didnt get as good a response from the casting sites online and i decided that i would like to use Luke as he has acted for me before and although he is a media production student he did take direction well and was really good at playing a mad character.
This is Luke, acting as a mad character, in a previous video i did for a 2nd year project,
The character of the Caterpillar is a gentleman, who reads and is an unemotional aristocrat. He is reminiscent of the lord of the manor that Alice is staying with. In the film ‘a secret garden’ 1993, theres a similar story of a girl who is orphaned and sent to live with her uncle. She is not attached to the uncle until the end and its a story that is based around the relationship she gains with him at the end. I think i have been inspired by this story, with the whole beginning section, as she, similar to the girl in the secret garden is bored and unsatisfied with her surroundings in this dreary country manor. She is lonely and craves relationships with people, but they are too distracted by other things that seem more important to them than her.
Madison hatter
I have cast a singer from Leamington called Mary Shaw, to play the role of the Madison hatter, she is a bubbly character that would suit the role really well.
The character of the madison hatter, is a likeable one, she is slightly mad and unhinged but she is nice to Alice and guides her to the Queen to go home/stay. She is a wonderland character though so visually she is disturbing, but unlike the others she looks kind. She represents the nanny character in Alice’s real life.
The Queen
I have cast Barry Addams, to play the Queen. He is a very theatrical character and i think he would look very good as the queen, I want the queen to be very unexpected in this version, the audience would proberebly be expecting a stereotypical Queen, but this is going to be like a drag queen, very flamboyant and over the top, the perfect Queen for this wonderland. Her/his character will be un-expectedly friendly and fair, and gives Alice the decision as to wether she stays or not.
I am really happy with the character choices i have made, and i am glad that i can use people i know and that i know will preform well. I was concerned that i wouldnt have gained the same marks by using people i already know in my film, however i have used them for the right reasons. Online casting is not always the best option, as they are sometimes only people that have decided they want to give acting a shot, and i think by using people i know will take direction and that i know look and sound right, it will also be an advantage that they know me and would feel comfortable acting on camera rather than to strangers, and that their own personalities have been considered whilst writing the script.
After meetings with Steve i have decided to change the story slightly, because the beginning and ending were a bit weak.
The main part of the story is when Alice is actually in wonderland which is what i was focusing on, and i needed to make sure that was rounded off nicely as a whole, by having a strong before and after. It needs to be clear why Alice goes to wonderland and there needs to be some sort of ending thats an advance from the beginning.
I have found it really challenging to write the story and script, because i don’t want to write something that is going to look terrible to shoot, being on a student budget etc. I want it to look realistic, and coherent even if it is a fantasy film.
The original synopsis was that Alice was an evacuee in a manor house in the country and was bored of her surroundings, on one occasion when she is working in her room, she finds a camera and starts playing with it, hears someone come towards the room and hides in a wardrobe. She falls asleep and wakes up in ‘wonderland’ which is an escapism from her life. She goes through various stages meeting different characters that lead up to meeting the queen, and then she gets chased into the woods to see a light. She runs towards the light and you see an old lady in her death bed and it reveals that she was narrating the whole time.
The before and after wonderland were too boring and asked too many questions, like why and how was she in wonderland, why didn’t she show the tapes to anyone etc. so i changed parts of the story, to have more of an impact.
Now the film begins with Alice writing a letter to her friend from the city who has also been evacuated but to a different location. She writes about how she is bored of her surroundings and is upset she never gets to see her mother and father and also the male and female owners of the manor she has no relationship with. She only has her nanny, as a parental figure. The only other children staying at the house are twins who keep to themselves and just play tricks on Alice. As Alice narrates this section we get little snippets of shots depicting these characters in realistic settings. Alice ends the letter telling her friend she had herd people talking about sleeping tablets and how she thought they are a good idea, and if she took enough she could sleep until the war ends. She does not reveal where she will sleep in the letter but she says its in her favourite hiding place where no one will find her. There is then a shot of her taking the tablets and her belongings to a bookcase where she pushes it and theres a secret room. Inside is a little blanketed area with all her bits and bobs, including a camera. She closes the door and lights a candle to send her to sleep.
She then opens her eyes and she is in a bright flower bed, she gets up and looks around and comes across the characters of the twins, who are wearing gas masks, and matching costume. They lead her to the character of the caterpillar, who emulates the male figure in the house and also her father. (The gender roles in 1940s were still very traditional in aristocracy, eg. Male, father, figure is working so never really gets to spend time with daughter, now is fighting in war so again no connection, mother is worried for the war, their husband, brothers and relatives would have been fighting so they would have been very depressed and had a lot of emotions to deal with, all the children would have been lonely and worried for their future and that of their family and country)
The caterpillar character leads Alice to the mad hatter, who emulates the nanny, and the motherly guiding figure she has in her life, she is more personal with alice, and helps her make the decision as to wether she wants to stay in wonderland or go back to her life as it was. Alice needs to take more sleeping potion to stay there or she needs to have an antidote to wake up, otherwise she will ‘disappear’. Alice is unsure of what she wants to do but knows she does not want to disappear so needs to find the potions which are with the Queen.
The Queen of wonderland is a scary looking character, but seems nice enough and seems to help alice. She gives her both the potion and the antidote, and lets Alice decide. The bottles are unmarked though and Alice leaves it to fate to decide what her destiny is. she picks a bottle at random and the scene cuts to black.
you see the candle in Alice’s hiding place flicker out with alice still asleep.
Narrating is a reply to Alice’s letter, from her friend telling her she understands and its the same for her, as she’s going through the same thing. She says the war is almost over and to just wait it out, and she says how the sleeping tablets are a good idea however you should not take other peoples drugs, as you can die from them if they are not right for you. She ends the letter saying she looks falward to seeing her soon.
The camera pans out from the room to suggest that Alice does not wake from the wonderland, but its left as a cliff hanger.
I had a meeting with the tutors about the script this week, to try to sort out what makes it not seem right so far. It is basically really weak at the moment, and after doing the test shoot and reading it again it’s really uninspiring and lacking something. As Steve said in the meetings the endings really bland and i need to ask questions of the script and change it. From this i thought harder about what the point of the film is, because to me the most important thing is the visuals, and thats mostly the easiest thing for me, to try to make it look nice, but if the story isnt right people are going to lose interest before it even starts and if they do watch it the whole way through they might be a little un satisfied with the ending. There needs to be more focus on why she is in wonderland, and why she has the camera with her. Whats the point of the story?
I am awful at coming up with ideas when i know i have to produce them, mainly because ill just think of things that are totally unachievable. Id rather not produce anything than make something that looks like a bad version of something else, which is what most student films look like. But i think the key would be to think of a better story then if i cant film it, think of ways around filming it.
I like the idea of Alice being evacuated to the countryside but i don’t know enough about evacuees so i have been doing some research into this. There are heaps of storys online of different survivors of the war that tell of their traumatic times whilst living outside the city. I want to change the ending from her slowly dying to her reflecting on the story whilst watching the tapes in some sort of asylum. One of my favourite films is ‘Girl, interrupted’ and theres various stories of different people with mental afflictions there. I also find mental illness’ quite fascinating. I would like the characters in the wonderland to be dramatisations of factors of her real life that make her feel inadequate, such as the bitchy twins, the characters that you look up to or fear in your adolescence, I want to work more on the caterpillar character, but id like him to reflect the adults that you look to for intelligence when your a child, you will believe almost anything they say, and trust it because they seem older and wiser. The mad hatter is a character i want to work on a bit more. I dont want it to be too similar to the mad hatter in the books and films, but i still want that in there. I want to keep the idea of the woodland masked creatures to be there following the orders, but i want the mad hatter to be a female, one that Alice would have the most trust with. Perhaps the queen only appears in her nightmares now and the audience don’t actually see what happens there.
I still need to work really hard on the script because these are just ideas, ive been trying to watch as many videos and films as i can to get ideas. This is one that i came across the other day from one of the bands i like, its visually how i would like the twins to look, how their character moves etc. and its just sort of given me ideas.
Im also going to watch some more films and read about both mental illness and behaviour, and about evacuees, and how i can adapt these things into my script and film.
I havent really had a chance to get the 5D out until now, as i didn’t have permission to use it out the loan shop, so i took it on a test shoot for the interior scenes.
The training was a while ago so i used some online tutorials to get to grips with changing the shutter speed and iris settings, whilst in filming mode. The camera that i am most familiar with is my Pentax K100D, which i personally favour over the Nikon and Canon bodies, but perhaps thats just because i have spent so long using my own. I have been trying to get familiar with the Nikon cameras, as there are more variety of lenses in the loan shop, and i can only get the sigma lens for my own SLR, which isnt even as good as the standard one i got with the camera a few years ago. I have become more and more familiar with the other SLRs over the past year or two just for my own experience so i wasnt expecting the 5D to be a lot different. I was pretty much wrong. I am glad i took the camera out on a test shoot because there were many little errors in exposure that made the film look grainy in certain scenes, and the lighting in different areas of the room kept changing. All of the problems i have managed to adjust in the editing, but i did just do a basic edit to put on my blog, its not edited properly at all.
I will make sure i don’t make the mistakes i did with the camera on the test shoot in the actual shoot so that i wont have to fix things in post.
There is currently no audio in this section because the audio will be Alice narrating. I will also have to adjust the script as this section is slightly longer than her narrating will be.
The other main problem was that the shots didn’t flow well, i really need to re think the angles i shoot at to make sure that each shot flows well into the next.
Throughout this process i have been doing my script by hand, and when i have a sort of structure i decided to type it into Celtx scriptwriting programme. This is the first script i have ever written so i was bound to come across a whole load of problems. I tried to write the script in the same format as one of the film scripts i have collected from some of my favourite films, just to get the structure of a script.
I am in the process of posting all my casting calls on different sites. I will be auditioning in London on thursday of next week or the following tuesday depending on the response i receive.
here is the description i am posting on star now, a casting site that our casting director on a previous film i worked on used.
A re-adaptation of Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, set in the 1940’s.
short film directed by student, and fashion photographer, Suzii Globe. The film will be set in country park ‘coombe abbey’ in warwickshire. Travel costs will be covered and any expenses paid. The film is set in wartime Britain, main character, ‘ Alice’ has been sent to stay with her aunt in the countryside to avoid the blitz. Whilst studying in her room she gets distracted by an old film camera she finds in the room, and starts playing with it. Someone comes towards the room and to avoid getting into trouble for playing she hides in a wardrobe.She finds herself in a wonderland with her camera, and each main stage in the original story is gone through in a very stylistic and surreal way. For example, the tweedle dee and tweedle dum characters will be school children in gas masks, the tea party and guests are bizarre, and the scenery is very surreal/dark.When the Queen meets Alice she is threatened by her natural beauty and chases her through the woods.
Alice runs towards a flicker in the distance, as it gets closer the audience can hear faint hospital sounds that get louder and louder. It then cuts to an old Alice, lying on her death bed. She mutters where to find the tapes with the footage she took in wonderland she left behind, but the audience cannot see if anyone can hear her.
I started collecting props together for the film, heres a few of them…
drink me bottles
the queens plastic face (looks really creepy)
Possible dress for alice…
I went on a drive to Falmouth, where my best friend studies marine photography, to have a look at some of the locations down there, although coombe is perfect and logistically amazing, i still wanted to broaden my options.
Falmouth is logistically a nightmare to get to, it was 6 hours from coventry and its 9 on public transport, its 7 hours on a coach from london aswell so is totally unfeasable on my sort of budget, i still wanted to see though, as its supposed to have alot of abandoned forests and untouched woodland and beaches. (i was considering using a lake or beach side for the catapillar scene).
I drove around and explored lots f different places, the daffodil farms were stunning but wouldn’t have been that relevant to my film, not enough to have set the entire film there, or got my actors there.
i did some photography to put in my ppp portfolio whilst i was there though and got some costume props for the film from the thousands of fancy dress shops.
I would like the twins to be in uniform, and they will have gas masks on, decorated with daisies and flowers. The characters will always have gas masks on, and so i would not have to cast twins, i would have to dress them identically though. Any dialogue will be dreamlike and haunting, and each twin would finish each others words and sentences.
The look is inspired by the horror of images taken with these masks on, they take away the identity of the person in the image, and are really quite scary.
I like the idea of using twins as an image that always scares me, is the twins in Kubrick’s ‘The shining’ The symmetry looks very surreal and distinctive.
Suzii Globe Final Major Project 