Tuesday 23 March 2010

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Evaluation draft deadline mon 22nd 9am, final deadline mon 29th 9am

Thriller Film Opening Sequence Evaluation - 1500-2000 words
PowerPoint uploaded to moodle

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge conventions of real media products?
What conventions of professional products have you used in your own film? (narrative conventions, character conventions, genre, camerawork, sound, editing, special effects, mise-en-scene? Use screen grabs of your own sequence to illustrate each example where you have followed conventions or gone against (challenged) conventions. Also use images from the films that have influenced you where relevant.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups? (gender, age, ethnicity etc.)
Compare a character in your sequence to a character in a professional film (use images). If you have included a villain/victim character, does the character follow conventions of characters in professional films. For example, is your villain male? Is your victim female? Therefore how are you representing gender?

3. What kind of media institution would distribute your media product?

Discuss similar professional films and their production companies (use images of the films and logos). Which production Company do you think would distribute your film? (if it was professional and if you had made the full film).

4. Who would be the audience for your media product? (BBFC and target audience) Use images from a similar product with a similar target audience. Remember that target audience is not the same as classification.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Refer to Significant moments in your sequence where you have tried to generate a response from the spectator (a close up to encourage identification with a character, music that encourages the spectator to feel suspense, tense, visceral reaction etc.) What techniques have you used to encourage the spectator to want to see the rest of the film? (Clues about narrative, character, etc.) Use screen grabs of your own sequence.

6. What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing your product?

(blog, camera equipment, editing software – Final Cut Express, istopmotion, Garageband etc.) Use screen grabs/photos of all these things. Be very specific about tools/effects/techniques learnt not just ‘I have learnt a lot about the software’

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final product?
Discuss your second preliminary task that you did in a week before starting Thriller. Discuss what you have learnt since then about construction of micro elements in order to create meaning, how to use different techniques, practical skills etc. How have you built on your knowledge that you learnt from the prelim task? Use screen grabs of your prelim task and your sequence where relevant.

Friday 12 March 2010

Feedback to editing

We feel that most of the feedback was constructive with the way that we can adjust the soundtrack and blend the two different sounds together so that it's not so out there.
We thought that some of the feedback was unnecessary with the comments from p1-03 'the scream file was cheap' - the scream was in fact real and our soundtrack for some reason doubled the scream, but we like this and think that this make it much more tense.
We are happy with the fact that most people like the way our footage is filmed (low quality and hand held).
With the comments that said our sequence didn't make much sense we are going to cut out our first scene because we used two different boys for the last and first scene, so this is the reason why it is confusing.

Rough cut feedback

Feedback from group P101: Use of handheld camera is good and makes the viewer feel as though they are the eyes of that character. The soundtrack also mixes in well with the plot and adds suspense and tension. The acting and overall storyboard also seems good. With a bit of editing this will be top notch.

p1-02: we enjoyed the first half of the film more due to the tense and eerie nature of the scene. however, we did think that the music in the end part of the scene didn't work as well as the first half and that it should be changed to something a bit more subtle.

p1-03: Didn't make much sense, story line was perplexing. Camera footage was too dark to make much out. Breathing was a bit over the top. Use of the same scream sound file was cheap

P1 - 04: The handheld camera gave a sence of mystery and made the audience feel uncomfortable which is a convention of a thriller. We dont understand why there was a couple at the begining therefore some of the story became un clear. We liked the muffeled voices and the unclear filter gave it a good sense of fear. the soundtrack was good.

Wednesday 10 March 2010

Rough Cut


Our rough cut is looking good, although our soundtrack does not completely match up how we wanted it to. It does not end at the right time so when we are able to continue editing we will resolve this issue.
When receiving feedback we would like people to focus on:
  • Our style of filming; handheld - whether this is effective or not.
  • The music and whether the change in music works.
  • The colouring of our footage and whether it is clear enough or not.

Soundtrack Progress

Our work in Garage Band creating our soundtrack is going well. We have taken inspiration from the film 'Kidulthood' as the scene in which a girl kills herself, the heavy bass sounding music makes it really intense. The soundtrack uses heavy bass and really loud rapping over the top to create an intense atmosphere. We thought that this style would suit our last scene much better than an eerie sound score. In our scene, the murderer is filing his bag with tools and we wanted a heavy sound score with bass and more rocky sounds to make it more intense and to put the viewer on edge. We are reallt happy with our soundtrack so far as all the timings work well with the image on screen.

Tuesday 9 March 2010

Editing in Progress

So far the editing of our footage is going well. As Hollie and Georgia were more heavily involved with filming the footage, Kiera and myself will be more involved with editing to portion out the roles within our film. As our footage was in MP4 format it was unrecognized by Final Cut Express, causing us a few problems. However, once the footage was rendered correctly the editing process was much easier. The clips shot for footage were all quite long duration, so we did not need to cut and shorten clips too much. The footage was shot horizontally so we needed to rotate the footage to make it the right way up. Once this was sorted the footage was fine.

All that is left is some final tweaks to cuts and transitions, and then to add our soundtrack and our final draft will be complete. I am happy with our sequence as i think it shows the effects how we wanted them to be and has the right atmosphere that we were looking for.

Filming progress





Now that we have completed our filming I think that we were successful. The footage that we recorded was to the affect that we wanted - confusing and tense to the audience. As we did not have access to a camera we had to use a high quality Nokia. This actually helped us because as it obviously had a lower quality than what the camera would have had this made it look much mre realistic in the way that it is someone watching the girls. It made it confusing because it was not clear what was happening at all times, although it may not look good at first glance of our footage this is the affect that we wanted so I feel that using the Nokia was much more successful.

We encountered some problems when we were filming because we wanted to film in the dark but realised we did not have access to any lights to be able to see the footage. This meant that we needed to film when it was gettin dark. We did not realise how quickly it got dark so some of our footage is not clear - since this we have found a way to overcome this issue by changing the brightness and contrast of some of our footage. This has made it much clearer. As Kiera and Fran were unable to help with the filming we found our first idea hard to follow as we only had to female actors. We then figured a way round this by tweaking the story and making it a bit more confusing so that the story is not given away in the title sequence.

We have followed the ideas from the films CloverField and Blair Witch Project. These films both use handheld cameras to give it a much more realistic feel to it. As the main theme of our title sequence is that the girls are being watched, the use of a handheld camera made it much more successful.


Above is footage tht has been taken from the Blair Witch Project. The camera quality is not of a high standard which makes the footage seem much more realistic. I feel that this film was very affective and moved the audience and made them feel unfortable - which is exactly what we are going for in our title sequence.

Catching up.

I think that we have now nearly caught up with the rest of the groups as we filmed on the 7th and have now uploaded our footage and we are now concentrating on editing and cutting it. Also we can now fully concentrate on our editing and blog work. Also we will be working on our soundtrack and sound effects. I think our blog is better this time than it was in children's film as we have more blogs and more in depth work. Also after getting back my children's film grade i know i have to concentrate on my evaluation and getting a higher grade for that. I feel overall this time around our blog work and filming has gone better and should hopefully end up in a better grade.

Cloverfield.

This is the trailer for the film Cloverfield, we have put this onto our blog because this has a similar effect to how we wanted our footage to come out like, mostly handheld camera work which we feel adds to the tension and suspense of the sequence.

Progress Filming


After not managing our time well as a group, we made some time on Sunday evening to film. However because of our organization we were unable to take a camera out from the college therefore to overcome this problem we used a Nokia mobile, this was a bonus to us as it added to the effect of our film; seeing as we wanted it to be filmed very similarly to 'Blair witch project' and another film, 'cloverfield' which are both filmed hand held all throughout. We went ahead with this style of filming as it seemed much more effective creating a more realistic yet tense atmosphere.

We encountered a couple of problems along the way these being:
-The darkness effected the camera quality as it couldn't focus properly showing only a black screen.
-The variety of shots; we were not able to show a very large variety, this was because of the style in which we filmed it- hand held. However we feel as though we still got the same point across but in a much more realistic way.

We decided when filming to change the order in which our sequence would flow, using what we initially decided to be the very first image on screen to be the last. It would add a sense of confusion and mystery, this is effective as it would make a viewer want to watch on. Also doing the filming all hand held the viewer can then bring themselves into the film creating a connection between the film and themselves.

Uploading our footage

We filmed on the 7th of march, then in our lesson on tuesday the 9th of march we had some problems with rendering the footage as we filmed it in mp4 which went straight to quicktime and it would not let us render it. Georgia then worked out how to render it and our footage rendered without any problems. We now just need to concentrate on editing and keeping our blog work up to a good standard.

Deadlines

Wednesday 10th - Rough cut deadline (allow half an hour to quicktime and upload)
Friday 12th - Feedback lesson and half an hour editing
Tuesday 16th - NOT IN COLLEGE
Wednesday 17th - Editing
Friday 19th - Final cut deadline ( allow half an hour for quicktime and upload )
Monday 22nd - Evaluation draft deadline - 9 am Moodle/email.
*lessons this week spent on putting finishing touches to evaluation*
Monday 29th Final evaluation deadline - 9 am moodle/email.

Friday 5 March 2010

GarageBand work

I think our idea to work on the soundtrack now is a good idea as it will help us to catch up the work that we have missed. We have spent the time putting together sounds that we think will work well with our idea for filming sequences and putting them together in a rough version of the final soundtrack. This means that when it comes to editing out final sequence when it has been filmed we can just slightly rework the soundtrack to make the timings fit but the main soundtrack will be complete. this will save us time and means that we can use the time after to make it better.

The problems with filming has taught us to be more organised and to leave time for problems to occur. We should have made sure that we would all be able to get to the place for filming on the day at the right time.

Progress of soundtrack.

We have nearly finished our soundtrack for our thriller opening, we have chosen dark and intense sounds to set up the atmosphere of the sequence. We have done as much s we can until our filming is completed because we cannot sync it in to the sequence yet. When we have finished our filming we will complete our soundtrack and then sync it in with the scenes. Until then we can only chose appropriate sounds for our sequence.

Further GarageBand work.

Filming Plan.

As we have traveling issues we now have to film on a weekend, so we have chosen Sunday 7th of march to film. This means we can have the whole day to complete our filming and can take more time and care with our scenes. We then have the whole school week to edit to make sure our work is of a high level so that we can catch up with the other groups. As we cannot film until Sunday we have used the week where we cannot edit to make our soundtrack and catch up with the blog, also we filmed some test footage in college to put on the blog and practice our scenes.

Progress So Far.

So far I think that the project is going well as the group work well together, coming up with separate ideas and combing them to make them stronger. We have had some really good ideas for our filming however we have had some problems filming with getting to locations. The first weekend we planned to film the weather caused problems as we needed it to be dry enough for a fire but the snow prevented this. We rescheduled for a weekday but traveling to our chosen location was impossible for this day. This has put us behind on our filming and left us with a disadvantage as we will have less time to edit. However, if we all put more effort and time in we should be able to catch up.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Garageband progress


This is the beginning of our soundtrack, instead of using sounds within garage band itself we have installed a CD specific of thriller sounds to create a much more realistic effect.

Organization update

We were originally meant to film on Sunday evening, however our organization in taking the camera home was a poor effort as we forgot! we have learnt by this mistake but luckily already had a back up plan to do the filming Wednesday evening. We are aware that in order to improve our grade our camerawork needs to improve to a higher standard, therefore we are going to aim to get a large variety of shots and test footage.

As we are unable to edit this lesson we have decided to use our time effectively and start the construction of our sound track.