Meetings

Meeting 1

During our first meeting for our project, we initially decided to create an African Comedy as we thought it would be interesting and different, as well as original. We planned to call the comedy Tunde Comes to England. This film opening was to show Tunde starting school in England for the first time, but however the day turns out horribly for him. Tunde was to be played by Terry, and we were to include his mother (played by Josephine) in the very first few scenes. To make everything realistic, we dressed the characters up in African attire, as Tunde would be picked on because of his attire as well as his struggle to understand the English school ways. To fuel our inspiration for our opening sequence, we looked through many different African comedies, and a popular choice amongst the four of us was the Nigerian comedy, Mr Ibu, which was our major source of inspiration. It was during this point that I decided to take the role of editor of our footage, once it was filmed.

Meeting 2

During the second meeting, we planned what Tunde and his mother were going to wear, aswell as the locations we would film. Our locations were: outside the school entrance, inside the school building by the reception, and in a classroom full of children. Once we had planned all of this, we then decided that immediately we would film the following day. During the process of filming, we all thought that the idea was going really well and that we had done well to get our ideas as far as we thought we wouldn't go when we first came up with the idea. However, within a couple of days after filming, we looked back at what we had filmed and realised that what we had filmed was more like a sitcom rather than a film opening, and we thought that the idea was too silly to be a film opening. After some serious discussion, we as a group decided to scrap the entire idea of 'Tunde Comes To England', and therefore had to start from square one.

Meeting 3

After the failure of 'Tunde Comes To England', we were began to fell very unmotivated and uninspired and were starting to lose hope in what we as a group could come up with. However, days later, Josephine introduced the idea of us making a Drama inspired film opening, along the lines of Skins, but however with each character giving the audience an autobiographical spoken word insight of their life. Our original title for this was to be London Town, which was to be about a group of teenagers struggling with drug addictions and seeking help by going to council meetings. Our film opening was to show the group of teenagers in a drug meeting, then each character talking about their struggle with drugs and what life was like before they started with drugs, and also there were to be flashbacks of each character's lives as drug addicts. After we had filmed and edited, we were very pleased with the results. However, when we played it to our teacher, we were told that our film was 'crying out for different angles and shots'. For a second time, we decided to start everything from scratch once again, but we decided to keep the main storyline, however we dismissed the idea of the characters going to councilling.

Meeting 4

It was during this meeting that Terry decided to bring the idea of us basing our film opening towards the likes of Kidulthood, Adulthood and Bulletboy. It was also during this meeting that we decided 'London Town' wasn't the right name for our film opening. After going through a list of names that we came up with, we all disagreed with the names and struggled to find a suitable name for our film. Terry then came up with the name 'Estate Of Mind' after randomly making jokes out of the names we could use. After a lot of thought, we all decided that 'Estate Of Mind' was the right title for our film as it was a very clever title.

Josephine, being the driving force of the group, decided on the locations we would film and where particular scenes would be shot: for instance the establishing shot, the drug scene at her home, Myrin and Terry's confrontational scene at an Estate. I was offered to play a role in our film opening but I declined, preferring to take the role as the main editor, while assisting in helping Myrin & Terry film. Nevertheless, as well as Josephine, Terry & Myrin being the actors, it was decided that Terry would do the opening titles as well as credits, Myrin would do the the production logo, while Josephine helped edit and took charge in what scenes we would include and the ones that we would dismiss. During this meeting, Josephine had initially insisted for the soundtrack, a song that Terry had recorded many months ago as she thought it would fit our film and would be much easier than asking permission for an already existing song. However, I offered to produce the soundtrack for our team as I wanted to be more involved in our group and take a chance in doing multiple things. Also, I had first hand experience in producing music and that I believed that making the soundtrack for our team would benefit us a lot.