Skills Audit; Filming

Filming

Our group filmed over the space of two days. On day one we spent it day filming at Highgate Woods and the second day at London Bridge.

when we went out filming we brought our storyboards with us, so that we knew what shots we had to film. When we were in the woods it was a bit difficult to film, as we didn't know what we should film because there wasn't much in the woods to actually film. In the end we filmed many shots; such as pans, tracking shots, high angle shots, low angle shots, close ups. We just went with it and did what we thought was right. our group had to remember to take a 2 min sound shot of the natural sound around us, this was so if we needed to add natural sound like if the sound was too windy or couldn't be used.

When we was filming at London Bridge Train Station, we started filming then was approached by a police officer who told us that we needed to get a permission pass to film at the station. We took a number of takes of the same shot because there was lots of different people there.

Filming was an enjoyable experience and if I had to do it again I would but only this time I would do it better.

Skills Audit: Editing

Our Skills Audits we were taught at the beggining of our Film project were vital for us to complete our final piece of work. The skills we were taught such as;

Final cut pro- cutting clips, changing speed, changing colour, adding edits

Livetype- creating text, changing its colour, adding effects, adding backgrounds, changing the style,

Sound Track Pro- Listening to the music, playing more than one track at the same time, fading sounds in and our, adding sound effects,

and overall just knowing how to use the programme.

Before beggining editing, our way of keeping all our shots organised was to arange them in order and rename each shot. This allowed us to allocate each shot easily once they were imported into final cut pro.
By then following the storyboard we was able to start putting the shots onto the timeline including extra shots we had filmed. For the changing of scene we put in "fade" edits to allow our film to flow. We began our shots with the woman in a urban enviroment. This gave the film an instant calm feel. Soon as the scene begins to change the normality of our film begins to disapear and the audience will realise somethings wrong with this "woods" setting. In order to make our "wood" settings stand out more, we changed the speed of the shots to a slower pace and added a black and white effect to some of them.
Changing the shots to differeng setting also allowed us to create an elipses. Cutting to the "wood" shots then back to the woman meant that we could skip time and put her in a different place each time rather than filming her whole movement.
The last shot of the woman throwing away the key was our most meaningful shot of our opening. The woman throwing away the key implied that she had something in her past she wanted to hide and she was doing this by throwing away the evidence to it.

Skills audit: Filming

(couldnt add any images to this blog as blogger says it has no more space for images)

During our filming process we spent 2 days filming.

For both days of filming we brought our storyboard along with us. This aloud us to follow what we had planned and reminded us what we wanted to do. Aswell as this, being in the setting also aloud us to realise other shots we could include.

We spent one day (saturday) up Highgate woods. We found it difficult filming in the woods as we were only filming the setting and not an action therefore deciding the shot angles etc was a struggle. However we filmed Tracking shots, Panning shots, High angle shots, Low angle shots, Establishing shots. When filming we just experimented with these types of shots and all took turns with the camera, to see if each of us could make these shots work in different ways.

Our second day of filming was the following tuesday at London Bridge. In order to film in the station we had to get a permission pass from the station offices. Once we started filming there was a lot of people around. In order to ensure that our shots were not disturbed by the people around us we filmed each shot a number of times. When filming the "tunnel shots" the area was a lot less busy therefore only had to take around 3 takes of each shot. However because of this we decided that we had extra time therefore filmed the shots in a number of different angles to give us a wider choice when editing. The bridge shots were most difficult as this road was very busy one minute, and the next minute only had a couple of people on it. This meant that when we were filming a tracking shot, people would walk in front of the camera or people who were vising the area would wave thinking we were famous.

On both days of filming we had to film a 2minute sound shot of each setting we used. This was so that if we wanted to use natural sound in our final piece it would match up.

Overall i enjoyed our filming experience. It was hard work but our whole group was very pleased with the shots we ended up with.

Changes in light of feedback from rough cut

From our rough cut there were only a couple changes we realised needed to be done.

When recieving feedback from our rough cut we were told that there was not much to split our shots of the woman from the wood shots. Although we planned on letting the music create the distance between these two shots, we also decided to change the wood shots slightly. On final cut pro we learnt how to slow down the motion of the clips and we also took away the colour leaving some of the clips in black and white. I think this gave these shots a more "thriller" feel to them.

Although we had not added the sound in our rough cut, when watching it back, we realised and so did others that some of the natural sound in our shots could not be used. There was a shot in the woods that we could not use the natural sound on as you can hear football players shouting in the background. There was also a clip of the woman on the bridge that we could not use as before the clip end the members of our group begin to talk. However we fixed these faults when adding sound so it did not effect our final piece.

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms a

nd conventions of real media products?

This is a 9 shot still image of Zombieland, i will compare this with stills from our own Thriller opening.

Just from looking you can straight away notice that shot is action packed and something attention grabbing is happening in them. In comparison to our Thriller "Twisted", there are big differences in how each film starts. Zombieland jumps straight into action in its open sequence whereas Twisted has a slow progressing typical thriller opening which switches between two completely different scenes/locations which quite different from Zombieland's approach but just as effective. Similar features of the opening sequences between the two include the credits, title of the film and pro

duction comapanies.

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Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

The preliminary exercise gave us our first filming experience, we had guidelines and rules to abide by such as; not leaving too much space above a characters head, including a match cut, shot reverse shot and over the shoulder. This activity would be good for getting an idea about filming our final thriller, we firstly made a storyboard including drawings and specific camera movement within that shot, we followed the storyboard roughly and along the way changed an idea if we had thought of a better one.

One of the most obvious a

nd vital factors to consider whilst filming is to make sure the camera is in focus, unfortunately our group did not check to make sure we was filming with our camera in focus and we only realised this after we had uploaded the clips onto the computer and the exercise was finished. The shots that were shot out of focus look very unprofessional and you literally have to squint to watch the clip.

Comparing this to how we filmed the final thriller, our camera technique and experience has definately gotten better, learning from our mistakes we constantly checked if the camera was in focus when shooting each and every shot of the thriller opening. This paid off as all of our shots came out crystal clear and because of this we had plenty of shots to work with to build together our final piece.

Another factor we have improved since our preliminary exercise is the type and amount of shots used in a scene, the sh

ort sequence we made before was very dull as we used one shot to film one action. So when the character walked into the room, sat down, and had a talk with the other character, this was all shot using the same angel.

Films and programs will nev

er have this much action crammed into one shot, so we thought about this feature of the clip and decided it was a feature we definaitly needed to deal with and change for tour thriller. In the thriller we included a wide variety of shots and included as many shots into a scene as visually possible, when put together we had great match cuts in a lot of our scenes which we did not include in the preliminary exe

rcise.

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How does your media pro

duct represent particular social groups?

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will you attract/address your audience?

"Alseep" is a 2009 short student thriller trailer which was posted on Youtube on September 22, 2009 and has 8,184 views.

Releasing the short

film

onto the internet instantly gets it out to the world and it being on such a popular site as Youtube gave it very high chances of it getting recognised. The vid

eos success is not only due to it being on the most used video sharing site in the world, its actual content is very good. The filming is professional and of top class, they have used brave and inventive shots that work very well with storyline and mood the clip gives to the audience. The dissolves, match cuts, jumps cuts and other effects work smoothly together as one as well as those points the fashion in which the credits were presented really worked and suited well. As a whole i think the film is extremely good, the filming looks as if done by professional camera men and is way above average for a student project.

In comparison to

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Who would be your the audience for your media product?

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What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

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Audience feedback and comment

Amber Bradley's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of a real media product?

The conversation

Similar to our film "Twisted," the sequence for "The Conversation" is established in a busy urban environment. In our sequence this is where the antagonist is introduced. Urban areas are regularly used in thrillers because it fits some of the popular occurring story-lines involving characters who suit this surrounding.

Other conventions of the opening of the thriller genre may include; establishing the main characters, keys props, close up shots, fast pace actions and some others.

In our film "Twisted" we shot a close up of a woman to establish her as the main character and get the audience to familiarize themselves with her. We also filmed a close up of our main prop which was a "key" to establish to the audience that this prop will be something important to the story-line.

The main character throwing something away creates tension and suspense. It tells the audience that she has done something which she wants to forget.

Although our opening is not particulary fast pace, we felt it contained suspence by cross cutting between 2 settings, the fast urban environment and the bleak annonomous empty woods.

The titles in our sequence are simple but the edit is edgy and creates a sense of fear.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film represents an urban middle class life, whe

re a wealthy woman has killed her boyfriend because of domestic abuse.

In marathon man the protagonist is introduced running in an empty park, dressed in casual clothes.

Although my film opens with a si

milar theme of a woman traveling, she is not the protagonist but is the antagonist. We show this by making her stand out in a busy urban area because she is on her own, wearing big sunglasses to cover her face and once she is at her destination she throws something away showing she is trying to forget something. Her smart blazer, designer bag and smart boots show she is quite a sofisticated woman and is wealthy.

In thriller films, they do not normally give away immediately at the beginning who the antagonist is. This was our aim. Although by making our antagonist throw something away showing she has a secret, the way we dressed her does not give her secrets away. she looks "normal." Another film that does this is Jennifer's Body.

Although megan fox plays the antagonist in this film, the way she is dressed does not give this away.

Link to Jennifer's Body Official Website

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product

and why? How will you attract/ address your audience?

This student film has 5,612 views and has been online on youtube for a year.

I have an online marketing strategy and this is a step by step account of how i am going

to construct that strategy. In order to make my film successful on line, i am going to begin

by creating a vimeo. Once this has received a lot of hits i will then upload my video onto

youtube. I can do this because i am aware that it can now be successful. In order to

introduce people to my film i will create a Facebook page to advertise it and send a link

onto friends i have on this networking site. I could also have a screening of the film for

friends/ family and piers to introduce them to the film officially. I will then ask friends to

send this onto their friends and i think this is a good strategy to get a lot of hits. As well

as using youtube i could use other networking sites such as; Myspace, Bebo, Twitter etc.

I could also try to get my film into independent film festivals such as Raindance and they

may then put my film onto their virtual film websites.

Here is an example of a Facebook page specifically for films-

http://www.facebook.com/Film

Who will be your audience for your media product?

When preparing out opening sequence to our thriller, we had to think about our audience. Our audience would be aged between 20- 35, 80% skewed female, and their class will be C2DE.

Our audience is is Technically Savvy and is likely to be working class (profession such as admin officer/ secretary), enjoys socialising with friends, regular cinema visitor, will have their own page on a social networking site (most likely facebook or twitter), reads often (books aswell as celebrity magazines), owns a blackberry, uses public transport, takes pride in their image, busy scheduled, keeps a diary, healthy diet, has an ipod.

This is an image of what you may find in our audiences bag:

This bag belongs to Jennifer. She is a 26 year old woman who works as a receptionist in a solicitors firm.

· NOW magazine

· Diary and Pen

· Purse

· Hand cream

· Selfridges Receipt

· Water Bottle

· Blackberry

· Cinema Discount Vouchers

What have you learnt about technologies from the process constructing this product?

Before starting our film project all 3members of my group were new to everything. None of us had any experience therefore during preperation, filming and editing, we picked up loads of new skills.

Research and preperation:

Before we started filming we had to learn about different genres within the thriller genre. To research these we used the search engine google to look at various websites.

We watched various thriller films, including marathon man, to gain ideas on what skills are used in filming a thriller film e.g. camera angles, shots, music etc.

We watched openings of various thriller films to give us even more of an idea of what to include in our opening. We looked at the camera pace, match cuts, music, titles, and other aspects. We watched these clips mainly on youtube.

Before starting this product i did not realise the usefullness of google and youtube. The information we found out on google was easy to access and helped us a lot with our project. The clips we watched on youtube were easy to access and their was a wide range that we could study and analyse.

Productions:

When filming, we used our storyboard to help us keep track of what we needed to do. The storyboard aloud us to plan in advance; the angles of each shot, the mise en scene, the location and to know who in the group is going to be doing what. It kept us organised and allowed us to seperate tasks into the short time we had. A shot i think we used well in our thriller was the low angle shot of the woman on the bridge. The low angle shot made her look weak as she was so far away from the camera and her surrounding was very big compared to her. When filming we had to take into consideration the weather conditions. This is for the safety of the camera and also the different weather conditions would effect the editing of our final work. When filming shots for our match cut, one thing we need to do is make sure there arent any people in one shot that wouldnt be in the next, as it will look unproffesional. The area we chose (london bridge) was hard for our filming as the amount of people in the area changed rapidly. One minute the area would be empty and the next it would be crow

ded. If we was to film this project again, although i feel we edited it well, i would choose a setting that has a lot less people travelling through it.

Editing:

When editing out final piece of work, we put a lot of effort and time into making it as proffesional as we could. Our preliminary task helped us rehearse for this task and gave us the chance to get used to the software we needed to use.

Our edits from one setting to the other did not fit when we first put them onto Final Cut Pro, so we experimented with different effects to the find the one we thought suited them best.

For our match cuts we took a lot of time, playing the clips in slow motion, to make sure that they looked neat and accurate. We also included shot reverse shot when editing.

To create our titles we used "live Type". This programme contained a number of text styles, sizes, colours and also different effects. You could choose where on the page the font will appear and also decide whether you want a plain background or whether you would like the texts to go over your video. We chose to have our titles over our video as we wanting the tension to continue building and we felt that having a black screen seperationg the clips at any point would reduce the tension built.

For our music we used "Soundtrack Pro." On this programme we could upload our video and playback music over our clip, to see what went well and what didnt. The programme had loads of different styles of music, as well as different sound effect and it also allowed you to overlap sounds. This helped us to make our music as unique as we could. We used two different music clips onto our track, one to suit each setting. In order to make the music sound proffesional we had to learn how to fade it in and out and where it was appropriate to overlap. We also used some natural sound in our thriller opening.

We also put togever a video which explains in word out experiance of different technologies during out filming process -->

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the

progression from it to the full product?

Our preliminary match cut exercise gave us an idea of how the process of making our final opening sequence would be. Firstly we drew up a story board in a single lesson and in our next double lesson we filmed for an hour, then spent the rest of our time editing this work.

our main problem with this exercise was that the camera was not in focus. Although we focused the camera when we started, we did not focus it after every shot which meant that it did not stay in focus. this made the film look unprofessional and was hard to see. This made us extra aware when filming our final piece and we checked after every shot that the camera was in focus. If we did not do this then we would have had to reshoot everything.

This clip shows a shot from our preliminary exercise and shows that the camera was unfocused

When filming our preliminary match cut we did not take a variety of footage. Rather than filming each shot from different angles, we planned what angle we wanted and just shot that. This meant that we could not change our mind about the way the shots would match therefore could not improve anything we didn't like. However because of this, we remembered to film each shot in loads of different angles for our final piece which gave us a wider variety of choice.

When filming our preliminary match cut we did not line up shots properly. This made our film look unprofessional and messy. Because of this, in our spare time we asked for help off one of the technicians who taught us how to line up shots properly and this allowed us to use this skill in our final film.

This clip shows that our shot was not lined up in our preliminary film. T'sharna's head is cut out.

Audience feedback and comments?

After our screening at the cinema, we got feedback off of some of our audience.

This image shows the words that came up most often:

We used Wordle to create this image.

We also asked one member of the audience to give us a video feedback of what they thought and what they would improve:

This interview was filmed in City And Islington College!!

T'sharna Bernard's Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In our film "Twisted"we set the two different scenes at the beginning of the film. This was the train station and the forest. In the station was where the antagonist character was introduced.

In the photo

above (which has been taken from art of the title sequence) from strange days, they used a close up shot of the main prop, the gun. This was done to show the audience what the main props were. we as a group decided to show a close up with our main prop, the key in the characters hand but she was playing with the keying.

The last shot in our film was a close up still shot of a hand, this was done to create suspense and to get the audience wondering but ours was in the forest under and bunch of leaves where as the hand in the image above is not underneath anything and i don't think it is used to create suspense.

How does your media product represent particular social groups

Marathon man opens and sets the scene with a man running around the park in the city. 'Marathon Man' can be compared to Twisted because both films open with someone walking or running somewhere, although in Marathon man, the man that is running is the protagonist where as in the film we produced Twisted it is a woman walking and she is the antagonist even though the audience don't become aware of this until the end of the film.

At the end of the film Twisted, the audience see a character, who hasn't been introduced before, they don't know who it is, or what has happened to them and why they are there. They audience

also don't know whether this character is a protagonist or an antagonist.

what kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? how will you attract/address your audience?

this student film had 13,715 views

genesis, A Level student Film

I have an online marketing strategy and this is a step by step of how

I'm going to construct this strategy. In order to make this work, I will upload my video online on to youtube. if the film was successful on youtube i would then try to promote the film in film festivals such as Raindance and Sundance (http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/) As weIl as using youtube, I would use other social networking sites such as; Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo and other networking sites. I would then send links to all my friends and would get them to forward it to there friends so this would create a 'buzz' around my film.

This is how i would advertise my film. This is a facebook link to the dark knight about promoting their film: http://www.facebook.com/darkknight

who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for "Twisted" would come under the class of C2DE and would enjoy spending time socializing, shopping going to cinema's such as "the odeon" and "vue" and just enjoying life.

We took a picture of what we think a person that would watch our film would look like;

We think it would have;

- Smart phone, Blackberry, or iPhone

- Magazines

- Purse

-Essentials, like make up, hand cream

-Cinema Tickets, as they go to the cinema regularly

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

we made an animatic of what we learnt about the different technologies while making the product, some of these technologies are:

-research; blogger, youtube and google

-filming; it was just the camera's

- editing; final cut pro, soundtrack pro and livetype.

looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

When doing our preliminary match cut exercise we had to make a short film with a match cut but it didn't go very well. Our group made a lot of mistakes such as; the film was out of focus so therefore the filming quality wasn't good. Also the lining of the shots were poor, as there was either too much space above the head or the top of the head had been cut off.

When we started the preliminary exercise we didn't really work well as a team and as we progressed into making our actual film our team work got better and we learnt to work together as a team and faster.

We filmed our match cut exercise during a double lesson and spent an hour filming and the other hour editing. Therefore we did not have much time to put it together, whereas with our final thriller opening we had a lot more time to film and work out our shots as we filmed over two different days and edited over something like two weeks.

In our final thriller opening our shots are in focus, so the quality of the filming is good also the framing of our shots has got better compared to the preliminary exercise, as there is just enough space above the characters head.

Audience feedback and comments

People in our class filled out audience feedback sheets saying what they thought about our film. We then went on to the website wordle.net and made a word cloud of all the words they came up with. The words that come up big are the words that came up the most such as "good"

After we finished watching our thriller opening in the cinema at The Screen on The Green, we asked our friends what they thought of our film and here is what some of them said;

"it was good but some of the cuts were a bit slow"