What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
our first problem was the way in which we were going to film the scenes, as one of our key shots was a party scene with a point of view shot. The scene is in the protagonists dream and we needed to portray this aswell. we took inspiration from a tv comedy called peep show.
Here is a link to a popular brittish sit com called peep show:
We sort of jumped into the filming without being too sure about how to film the POV shots, we watched a few programmes and found peep show which is all filmed in POV. So we looked at how they filmed it, They were using top of the range cameras and we couldn't affored them and they would not work to our film brief of an independant film.
I then took inspiratioin from the extreme sports channel where the snowboarders clip cameras to their helmets and board down the mountain, so this was something we could do. We therefore attached our camera to a builders helmet in order to create a realistic POV shot.
Above is a picture of a filming device we took inspiration from.
This picture above if the device that we came up with to film the party scene and the scene in the sixth form.It is verymakeshift but is perfect for creating a realistic image and shows that it is an independant film with little funding.
We also needed to come to terms with some more advanced editing, for example we needed to put a reverb on the sound for the party scene to make the audio sound like it is a dream. We also needed to do some clever cutting and editting to make the scenes run smoothly and converge seemlessly. This means we learned a lot about the adobe premier pro technology for editing the scenes together.
We used a simple hand held camera to film the POV shot which was simple and easy to use with an auto focus which made it very simple for us to do our party scene as there was little to go wrong and we could not actually see what we were filming so we learned to keep it simple when using technology for complicated shots!
For the other scenes we used a more high tech camera which rested on the shoulder of the cameraman. It was large and bulky and we found it hard at first to get used to the size of it. It had an auto focus as well as a manual focus and we used both to film the scene in the bedroom. We used the manual focus to create a blurred image behind the alarm clock and it took a while for us to understand how to use it but it looked really good once we worked it out.
We learnt a lot about technologies in the process of making our fim openings. From the editing process to being able to adapt simple things to create good images that we wanted.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Above is the preliminary task i did in a seperate group earlier in the year.
Above is the Completed film opening.
I feel that I have learnt a huge amount from the preliminary task. I think that it dawned on me how hard it was to create even such a small film as the one we did for the preliminary task and I think I learnt that you need to do a lot of work and planning to make the idea look good and be successful.
The preliminary task was all about continuity and I think that we used the experience of making that video to make sure there were no continuity errors in any of the shots that we filmed for the film opening and I think that our attention to detail was key in doing this.
I think the main thing that I learnt from doing the preliminary task was the shots that work in different places, for example the zoom shot right at the start of the preliminary shot is not very good and I don't think that it works very well, because of this we did not use the zoom feature in any of the shots that we filmed for our film opening.
Other shots we used poorly in the preliminary task were the close shots and the mid shots. In the film opening we used these very well and especially the way we used the establishing shot that I have never used before in the first part of the bedroom scene to link to the extreme close up on Dan's face, I think this works very well!
The sound in my preliminary task was terrible and for this reason I was cautious whenever we were using sound because I learnt that even the slightest noises are picked up on the highly sensitive recording equipment, because of this we recorded a dub over of the narration to make sure the sound was perfect and I think this made the opening very good.
One of the main problems in my preliminary peice was that the actors were not properly briefed and this is because we did not plan the storyboards well enough and we did not prepare the scripts and actors for what they had to do, and for this reason they found it very hard to do and the end result suffered because of it, because of this I learnt to plan properly and to make sure we organise the actors well and make sure they know excactly what to do.
We have been set an assignment to create a film opening. We have been put into groups to work together and make the film openings. I am in a group with dan finn, leah beavis and alice griffin, we started the process by picking the description of our film openings. The choice of film was devided into 4 briefs, these are:
A mainstream action film that will appeal to 15-25yr old males
Your film should appear to be based on a "fictional" comic book
A supernatural thriller that will appeal to female audiences
Your film should appear to be an international co-production
(Opening to The Others, Gothika, Shelter etc)
Film Brief 3
An independent movie featuring a young protagonist
Your film should appear to be financed through regional funding
(Opening to Fish Tank, This Is England etc)
Film Brief 4
An art house feature to appeal to adult audiences
Your film should appear to be based on an actual event in the last 2 years.
(Opening to Elephant, Milk, Che etc)
We chose to make our film opening in accordance to brief 3, this means our film has to be independant and needs to have a young protagonist.
We then ran through ideas of what the film should be of, as we had to make to film to a certain breif we had to evaluate what it should look like to be considered an independant film.
What is an independant film?
and independant film is a film which is not produced by a major film company for example 20th century fox. Independant films are usually made with far lower budget than blockbuster hollywood productions. We can usually distinguish between independant films and larger budget films because of the style they are shot and the content of the film, the artists inspiration is normally much more fluent in independant films and this means that independant films have the tendancy to challenge normal stereotypical views.
Our opening plot.
The film opening starts with a teenage boy dreaming he is in a party, the camera is fitted to a helmet and is used to create a realistic point of view shot. Below is an example of how point of view is used to portray an event where the person is not fully conscious:
the song is called smack my b***h up.
We used this music video to give us further ideas on how the scene should look, for example we used a similar kind of music to make the party sound realistic and very hyper, our camera also is reactive when the person operating it moves and this makes it more realistic.
the scene then developes with the young protagonist walking past the people that would normally pick on him and bully him at school and their reactions to him being completely different, in the dream they are kind to him and great him like a party hero and make him feel really popular and important, the young protagonist then walks up the stairs and see's his "dream" girl at the end of a corridor, she turns with a fluent swish of the hair and this is used to show her to have the looks of a goddess. She grabs the boy and pulls him into the bedroom, this is when he is woken up by the alarm clock and the camera cuts to a close up of the alarm clock with a manual focus to distort the character. The next scene is of the boy getting ready for school and the aim of this scene is to juxtapose the image given of the boy in the dream, he is made to look as if he is a party heron in the dream but in real life the audience can identify him to be a geek. This is done by low angle shots and by the mise on scene of the scene.
Our aim in this scene is to show him to be a very different person to the person we saw in the dream scene. We will do this by exagerating the boys movements and making him seem a complete nerd. We use a lot of detail to make this happen, we are making revision posters and putting them up on his wall, we also will use a background from a warhammer website which people will connotate to the stereotype of nerds by using hegemonic beliefs. This is how we will use mise en scene during the film opening.
During this scene we will use dubbing to add dialogue which we also need to portray the character of the nerd. This is how we will use non diagetic sound during our film opening.
Our credits will then appear and this will done via the use of the computer, we are going to create a website and the we will record us moving around the website and going past the names and titles of the people in our group. This will then be edited and the writing will come up whilst we a going past it to look like we are writing the words as we are going past.
This then goes through to the title where we will also have filmed the two main characters walking to school and then bumping into eachother, we will do this on a dreary and rainy day to create a sad look of the characters. The title will come up after some clever editing to have a split screen and the title will come up letter by letter.
Here is our story board edited together to form an outline for how the filming should be done, this is called our animatics.
We also created a mood board to show what we used as inspiration for our ideas for the film opening.This is our mood board:
Our potential audience is assumed to be younger people which are female, between the ages of 12-30, just to be sure we asked a group of people whether or not the would watchit and the majority were of this segment. The people weasked were our focus group. Wewould advertise the filmby creating a webstie and by creating pageson popular socialnetworkingsites for example twitter and facebook.
We used actors from our group to make it easier and this also meant that they knew what they needed to do and they could give good feedback from the actors point of view. The locations we used were very easy toobtain,we used myhouse for the party scene and invited a few friends round to act as extras and we gave them detailed instructions to make sure they did it perfectly and were not confused. We use Dann Finn's bedroom to film the bedroomscene as it was very close to schooland we could film it in a two hour period.
We did not need many props or costumes but we made sure we had complete continuity if we had to film the scene again and we did this by making sure the locations were exactly the same and the clothes of the actors were exactly the same.
For our first assignment we were set the task of making a short film to show we can create continuity in a film. To do this we had to plan the film very well, then the production stage ie the filming, and finaly the post production stage.
In the pre production stage we worked out the plan of the production. To do this we drew out a storyboard in which we drew different shots and analysed the camera angles, close up shots, etc. The conversation scenes had to be carefully planned as we had to use shot/reverse shots to produce a convincing conversation, and by using this shot method we had to abide by the 180 degree rule which stops the audience getting confused. we had to plan different equipment to use, we decided on a tripod for stability in the shots, a dolly for a moving shot to create a better stability than holding the camera amd a clearer shot.
In the production stage we started filming, we got to grips with the equipment by doing a series of rehersals, after this we started to film the propper production. our first shot was a slow zoom shot and started as a long shot and finished as an extreme close up with a medium close up and a close up and a medium shot in between. after this shot we did a moving shot with the dolly, we needed to pan the camera at this point to turn round a corner which made the filming of this scene perticularely difficult. The next scene involed another extreme close up and then we tilted the camera to show an over shoulder shot to a hand opening the door and then the tilt shows the other character in the window. This lead to the conversation scene in which we needed the shot reverse shot, we used the 180 degree rule to make sure the audience wasnot confused, in this scene it was very difficult to get a good camera position as one of the characters was in the far corner of the room and this made it hard to get a good position for the camera. After this we did a match on action shot of a girl receiving a text message to her phone, the we cut and filmed an extreme close up of the text message, this was difficult to do as it was quite hard to focus on the text message. after this we had another match on action which was very difficult to film, the scen was a boy jumping off a balcony and landing on a girl and crushing her, as obviously we could not actually film a boy killing himself and another person as we would only have one chance to film it and for health and safety reasons, we had to do another match on action shot, so we filmed him about to jumop off and then cut and filmed the end product of the jump which was him laying ontop of her with them both dead.
After we had filmed the production we had to do the post production, this is the editing stage of the process. In the post production we discored a major problem which would hinder us hugely in the capuring stage, as we had been looking back through what we had filmed and we did not rewind back to where we had left it so we had large chunks of time without any film which made it difficult to capture. The capturing of the film went quite well after we had sorted out this problem and we were then onto the edditing stage of the post production, at this point we were putting all the peices together, we had to cut the parts that we didnt need and then paste the other parts together. We had to do a series of montages to get the match on action scenes to flow smoothly and in the suicide scene we cut into a black screen whilst the audio of screeming and a laning were going on and then cut to the shot of the two lying dead on the floor The editing stage was not easy at all, we found problmes with the editing software although it was probably just us making mistakes, this meant that the smoothness of the changing of scenes wasnt as good as we would ahve liked it to be, and the overall quality wasn't as good as it could of been, after a bit of practice i think we will be able to use the software a lot better and the products will be a lot smoother and more successful.
