12 Years a Slave Facts

12 Years a Slave Facts taken from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)
Directed by	Steve McQueen
Produced by	Brad Pitt Dede Gardner Jeremy Kleiner Bill Pohlad Steve McQueen Arnon Milchan Anthony Katagas
Screenplay by	John Ridley
Based on	Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
Starring	Chiwetel Ejiofor Michael Fassbender Benedict Cumberbatch Paul Dano Paul Giamatti Lupita Nyong'o Sarah Paulson Brad Pitt Alfre Woodard
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Cinematography	Sean Bobbitt
Edited by	Joe Walker
Production companies	Regency Enterprises River Road Entertainment Plan B Film4
Distributed by	Fox Searchlight Pictures (United States) Entertainment One and Summit Entertainment (United Kingdom) Universal Pictures (Germany)
Release dates	August 30, 2013 (2013-08-30) November 8, 2013 (2013-11-08) (United States) January 10, 2014 (2014-01-10) (United Kingdom)
Running time	134 minutes
Country	United States United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	$22 million
Box office	$187.7 million

The Hobbit

We are also currently viewing 'The Hobbit: The desolation of Smaug' for our exam and we can see clear contrasts in the production of both films. We can clearly see that 12 years a slave is a lower budgetted smaller company production due to numerous factors such as, quantity of extras, the setting of 12 years a slave was there before hand such as the corn fields, whereas the Hobbit had all its sets specifically made to produce their fantasy land. We can see the contrast clearly by the budgets of both movies:

Hobbit: $225 million.
12 years a slave: $22 million.

So far I have not really enjoyed the Hobbit because its the complete opposite of everything I like in movies, although i am enjoying comparing such huge company productions with smaller so im interested in all the 'behind the scenes' facts and statistics about the two films

12 years a slave

We are currently viewing '12 years a slave' for our exam and so far it has an intriguing storyline and I think the production of it runs very well, and gives an insight to the gritty realism of the lifestyles of black slavery in past decades. As we are viewing this, in our spare time we are still editing and filming much needed extra shots, keeping up to speed with our timeline and predicted progression.

Review on timeline

We are working on targeted time, as by the end of January as shown by my timeline we expected to have finished filming and have editing to only just begin, the only modification is how we have edited whilst filmed to keep it up to date, film, edit, film, edit etc. Therefore are a lot further ahead of ourselves on the editing front and working on time at this point and I am highly confident our editing and publishing of the video will be done way before the 28th of February so its looking good!

Filming day 3

Last night we finally did the third day of filming, after many postponements, and Kirsty started playing the demon ghost antagonist. The scenes went well and now all Bens parts are complete. Kirsty still has some scenes to do but it's going very well and I'm pleased with how it's working out. She suggested a new ending which we liked better than our original ending, so already she's helping out a lot. My only regret is that Ben couldn't do a convincing fall when his character tripped on a log. Ben couldn't make it look not staged and so that's something we regret, but the rest is fine. Kirsty and Ben had good on-screen chemistry and collaborated well on the scenes we did.

Kirstys' costume: Final task

We decided to go with the classic white ghost-like gown, and splatter with fake blood , it looked quite effective, it is long so has a creepy 'draping' effect as desired by the group. We used red blood dye and tomato ketchup mixed together, this gave us a dark gloopy consistency to our fake blood. The only problem was because it was quite cold out and the costume wasnt very warm, therefore some shots were quite rushed due to the very cold weather and wind.  After we had prepared the costume we went out,filming our final shots or the movie opening, including kirsty.

Ben's costume- final task

The idea of the scene was that Doug(Ben) was cutting through the park to go to his friends house for a 'party'. Bearing this in mind we had to brainstorm the stereotypical attire of a teen boy, therefore gender and age representation played a huge part in this area of the task. We decided on the smart casual 'open chequered shirt' with light denim jeans and trainers, which complemented the genre and character Ben was acting in/as pretty well.

Definitions of useful terminology in my coursework and exam