Final Evaluative Commentry

I think that doing the main excercise has been really good and i have really enjoyed it. I have been happy with what we chose to do and how we have handled doing it. We did a social realist drama about knife crime and how troubled teens can be. This is quite a current thing repeating occuring in the media at the moment so we thought it would be a good thing to relate our film to. It has a very negative view in the media but in our production its more about the feel of safety then about crime, however things in our production could go wrong depending on how the character chooses to deal with the "chavvy" crowd he assiociates himself with.It can also relate to few of the modern TV dramas that are about at the moment such as "skins" which is quite popular .


***

How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I think are production is mostly representative of what alot of people think about the current youth of today. So start of with we have used basic and common sterotypes, with the chavy guy and the girlie girl, both getting ready to go out. We have made the guy in this a troubled character and you know he has problems when he picks the knife out of the draw because thats not a common day to day occurance to get a knife and put it in your pocket. This is how some of the older generation percieve people to be like now. I think if we had included the voice over into our edit it would have made it better and more unstandable as to what he was thinking and how he really felt. I think the main idea with the knife is that he feels the need for it more as security, like the girl needs her make-up etc. To the girl her make-up and choosing the right clothes is important to her, as most girls can relate to and this can link in with the knife feeling the nned for the knife. Where we based him in an urban area and a less attractive house, i think people may feel sorry and understand that the knife is more of a safety thing. It could also string back to him hanging around in the wrong crowd too and he has been led to think by them that he needs a knife with him.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
I reckon a company like Revovler Entertain would distribute our media product because they were the company that distributed "kidulthood" and they are also distributing a new film called "shank" which is again of the same sort of genre at our media production. I think that if they already have had a history of distributing similar drama productions to ours and they were sucessful that they would consider distributing this one. They already have the right distributing techniques for this type of film so i believe it would be ideal with them.

Who would be the audience for your media product?
The niche audience we aimed for people that were about 15-25 years old. We think they would be the most relatable to the piece as they are know more about "chavs" and how they are sterotyped to be. However the term chav is so common now and is unstood by lots of people i think are target audience could be extended and interest more people depending on how well the film was promoted. If it wasn't promoted in a good enough way then i reckon it would stay with the niche audience but done properly and well i think it would have a good chance of extending and getting a wider range of people interested in it.

How did you attract/address your audience?
When addressing out audience we had to consider different things like their interests, problems which they can relate to and also something different to the current films out at the moment to add some more variety and to help encorage them into watching our production instead of one of the others, which is why we went with the theme of knife crimes instead of the usual drugs and drink. We thought it would be good to zone in on "chavs" and troubled teens from a different persective for a change.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
I think i've learn't quite a bit about technologies through doing the main and preliminary excercises. However i didnt learn more when doing the main excercise especially where i was doing the camera work. I really liked doing the camera because it was new to me and it was a learning process. I practiced in the lesson and then i carried on setting up the camera in different places so i was ready for small places etc. I also learnt more about the editing process, although i didnt personally edit myself in either productions i was still able to help and put my own input into the piece and i was also able to voice my opinions about what i thought. I also briefly learnt abit about photoshop when we were trying to sort the problems we had with the ranelagh road road sign. Another thing i have come across whilst doing my coursework for AS media is this, blogger. I 've learn through this how to make links from my blog to google documents (another technology i am new to using) and the make them links open in a new window so whoever is reading doesnt lose their place when reading it. This was easier to do then i expected, all you had to do was enter target="blank" into the correct place of the HMTL code. I have also been able to embed video's and pictures into my blog, which i couldnt originally do. I've learnt how to make some of the pictures into links as well and i starred the ones that are link so people know when to click on them. So all in all i think i have learnt a fair bit about technology by doing this.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
An obvious thing i have learnt since the preliminary is the camera because i as i said i was doing the camera work and i've never used anything more then a digital camera for taking picture so this was new to me and i really enjoyied it. I had to focusing on framing a lot so make sure i got the right sort of thing. I think i did the framing quite well but i know theres always room for improvement and some shots could have been done better.

I know how much more paperwork and planning is needed as well now since the preliminary. We had to go into alot more detail then before and it wasnt easy at first, but when we found a good balance it got easier for us and we were able to work at a better pace.

Some i learnt during the preliminary but was able to take onto the main piece in my new group was the importance of how much time we had to start filming etc. In the preliminary we gave ourselves an extra week in case of problems which came in handing and i think our time management was quite good in this group for the rate we got things done. We shared the work load well and did work in and out of college time which worked in our favour.

The final production of our main excercise "Ranelagh Road"

Any use of music in this film complies with 'Fair Dealing' under the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act (UK), Sections 6(i) and 6(ii);
Fair dealing is a term used to describe some limited activities that are allowed without infringing copyright. Briefly these are as follows:

Section 6

i. Research and private study

Copying parts of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or of a typographical arrangement of a published edition for the purpose of research or private study is allowed under the following conditions:

· The copy is made for the purposes of research or private study.
· The copy is made for non-commercial purposes.
· The source of the material is acknowledged.
· The person making the copy does not make copies of the material available for a number of people.

ii Instruction or examination


Copying parts of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work or a sound recording, film or broadcast for the purpose of instruction or examination is allowed under the following conditions:

· The copying is done by the student or the person giving instruction.
· The copying is not done via a reprographic process.
· The source of the material is acknowledged.
· The instruction is for a non-commercial purpose.


This is a link to the copyright information we gathered about the CD we used in our main production for "ranelagh road"

***

This is a link to the scans we made of the CD case we used in "ranelagh road"

***

Filming and editing the main excercise

Originally we were going to film at the girl's location at first but she was busy in the end, so instead of wasting our time to do the piece and having to rebook the camera, we decided to film at the guy's location on the tuesday evening instead. Mia and Kyle met at the train station first of all and as they were on their way Mia rang me and i met them because i live near the location. I had the camera and tripod with me already as i'd been practicing with it before hand at home. I met them near my house and we walked to the location where we were going to film.

When we got there i started to sort the camera and the tripod ready to begin filming. When i was finished setting up we went through the kitchen to the bathroom to prepare for our first shot. Because of the layout in the bathroom i had to stand in the bath with the tripod and the camera. We made sure the the shower head wasnt in a position where it would be able to spray the camera if it somehow turned itself on. Then i had to postion the camera so you wouldnt see me in the shower with it. I had the shower curtain pulled across for a bit of extra coverage just incase but it was fine and you couldnt see me in the mirror. The rest of the filming in the house went quite smoothly. Then we had to go film outside. Filming outside wasnt too bad, we were still able to see which was fine but seeing the ranelagh road sign was quite difficult. Also it was a bit of a challenge to pan with him as he walked across the road and past the sign. In the end we had him walking out of the shot and the camera continuing to pan onto the sign. I tried to frame the sign according to the rule of thirds because it is the title of our production and quite important for it to be noticed. After we were finished I watched the footage through to make sure it was ok before we left and then i packed up and we went home. I watched it back a few times at home and made notes on a copy of our script as i watched it.

***

We then filmed at the girls location the next day when we would have been filming at the male location. Unfortunately we could only film during the day and we needed it to be night so be had to blackout her windows as much as we could. After we'd done this it was fine to start filming her. Filming round at Harriet's (the girl) house went really well. We made sure we had enough takes and we were really able to take our time to get the shots right. At both locations I made sure if it was a still frame, unlike walking up the stairs, that i had tightened the tripod up to prevent the camera shaking loads. The only part i couldnt film with a tripod was walking up the stairs at harriets with the camera. I tried my best but honestly i know its quite shakey, but i think it gives the audience a feel of them walking up the stairs and watching. Another thing that was difficult to film was Harriet pulling down the latch of her door and opening it because it was daylight so as soon as she opened the door it was obviously daylight. There was a moment where we noticed harriet was walking out the house with no shoes on so in the second and third take we did, we had some shoes ready at the bottom of the stairs and you saw Harriet putting them on.

On thursday when we went back to college, we put the footage from the camera onto the computer and went through the footage deciding which shots we wanted to use. Then we put them into order on movie maker so we had a rough edit of what we were going to do. The next lesson we were tightening the edit up but it was still a rough edit. We took a couple print screens of the editing process as well.

***

The Ranelagh road sign was still difficult to see when we were editing, but when we were filming if looked alright on the camera. So we took a still of it of that shot and edited it on photoshop so we could fade from the clip to the photo. The way we did this was alright, i think we could have tried doing a few more things to the picture before inserting it into our film. Because we made the writing of the sign quite white, we decided to fade into white and then the next shot would come in from a light if we had decided to film further.

When our piece was near to complete we sat and wrote some notes on the edit. We went through shot by shot explaining different things.

When comparing our work to the opening sequence of A way of life, the girl is the main character and it really gives the audience a sense to who she is. After discussing our piece in comparisson to a way of life i think we should have used more the of male character because he is more of a main character then the girl. In a way of life you see a man getting beaten up and ultimately it is the girl who kills him by stomping on his head. It then goes to her and her daughter sat in a cafe eating scraps and it then makes you kind of simpathetic to her and helps you to understand why she did it. Because we see the guy with the knife you know something is going to happen later in the film. To make him more a of a main character, we thought about putting in a voice over when he was looking in the bathroom mirror at himself, but in the end we didnt have enough time together to do this but i think it would have worked really well and helped it more.

Mia and me decided to make a sound bridge between the shot of the male character walking out the door and then down the street. To do this we grabbed a bit of the sound on premiere of the door slamming shut. We then opened it up in adobe audition 1.5 and made it echo on for a bit. When we did this we inserted it onto our piece on premiere and made it all line up.






PRODUCTIONS STILLS OF THE FILMING AND EDITING PROCESS


This is a picture of the males locations we decided to film at, we did some filming in the kitchen and also in the bathroom with is at the end of the kitchen.



This is a picture of me in the bathroom getting ready to film. I was getting the framing etc right first, this was also the shot i had to do whilst standing in the bath tub.



Here is another shot of me doing the bathroom clip. Here it is easier to see how small the space was which i had to film in. I had to use the shower curtain in this shot to help hide myself from being seen in the mirror when recording.



Here is a picture of Kyle on moviemaker during one of our lessons editing our piece.


In this picture you can see kyle is still doing some editing and im doing some post filming paperwork.

The First Reflective Main Exercise Blog Entry

So far I really like the main excercise. I've been moved into a new group which could potentially be a threat because I know how to work with my old group, however I dont think it will be. I like my new group, we have one less person compared to other groups but i dont think we have a disadvantage in the slightest. We all have quite strong personalities which is good to me because sometimes during the preliminary excercise, i felt i was too overpowering to the other members and had to work on that. In my new group i dont feel as if I'm being too pushy. At first i was worried about the group swap, but now i feel fine about it.

I've noticed how much more detail is required in the main excercise compared to what we had to do for the preliminary. This is also quite worrying because ultimately i want a good outcome for the final production and all the paperwork.

***

By being in a new group we are able to discuss things that went well and wrong in each of our preliminary excercises. We started off our first lesson mostly adapting to having a new group and we started our initial idea blast. We started with the genre for our film opening sequence and then decided on the type of audience we wanted for it. After that we done we discussed possible things we could do for it, they werent definate but by doing this we had a good idea for what we should be reseaching and other similar films to it.

The next lesson Mia was ill so me and Kyle decided to make a start on the research, we began to discuss similar films to our idea and try to watch some of the opening sequences. We also decided then that we wanted to use a social realist theme for our piece and we did the SWOT analysis. I think we should try to develop our SWOT a bit more then me and Kyle did because more things could potential go wrong with the main excercise and we need to be more aware of that.

***


We've now finished our research. We all did our own independent research for the piece on different things and shared what we did with one another through google documents. I researched three films that we said were similar to our idea. I ended up watching the opening sequences from Kidulthood, Green street and A way of life.



***
Here is a picture of the film green street which we used as a reference to ours and it has been linked to the clip of green street that we watched on youtube.


***
We watched the first few minutes Kidulthood when doing our textual analysis as well. I think this is the most important one to us because it is the one we mostly referenced to when doing our. The clip we used was about 9 minutes long so we only watched the first few minutes.




We struggled to find an opening sequence to this on youtube, so I put a picture in here. However for the textual analysis we were able to watch the opening sequence on our college website.

I thought all these opening sequences were good in their own ways and they were all quite different but at the same time there was a similarity between them. I found my bit of the research quite interesting to do. Kyle then looked on the internet about chav's and their stereotype and Mia did more research into the genre of drama and a bit on kidulthood and adulthood. I think all the research we've done is really important to our work and could most likely really help us.

We have also had a together about our production and our research etc. I think this was good becuase we all have a pretty good understanding of what we are doing now and what we need to do. have also been decided and this time my main role is going to be the camera.

Now we have done our and which i am quite happy with and i think our production is going to turn out quite well. We've sorted and actors as well as the will will need. I was also absent for a lesson so Mia and Kyle went to the male location and did a and risk assessment of the house and Mia is going to do the second location for us. All in all i think the whole thing is coming together well and i am happy with what we have done.

For my section of the research i did a text analysis of a few films but we decided this wasn't detailed enough so we all picked one of the films i did each and re done the textual analysis for it. I re done Kidulthood because it was the one i understood most and i thought i could analysis it better, Mia did a textual anaylsis of Greenstreet and Kyle did a way of life. I think this is better because now it is more detailed and can help our piece more.

***

Another lesson me and Mia wrote about our locations and props. I did a brief write up about the locations we're going to use and Mia wrote about the props we need for it. The final lead up to filming was fine because we had most of what we had to do already done, i booked the camera ready for the two days we needed it and mia did a call sheet for the second location and kyle did a call sheet for the second location. We also spent a bit of one of our lessons in the library looking for a suitable song to use for our work because we decided to just have music and the library has a section of uncopy writted cd's. Unfortunately were unable to use the track we chose because the college has no proof that these are available to us to use, so because of this we are trying to get people we know to compose something for us and we were hopeing it would work well with the piece. About a week later we were new that we could use the song which we orginally intended to but because we had already started the edit the dont think it works with the piece as much as it could because its harder to edit along with the music now


For the main excercise the 5 main things i want to improve on are:
1) Camera skills because this time i am doing the camera work, to do this im going to book the camera and tripod the night before we film at a location and again for the other. This way i can make sure that i capture some sequences good enough for editing. Also where i have never filmed before, i think it is important i practice, but i am looking forwards to trying something different.
2) I think my communication skills needed some work where i can have quite a strong characer at times and i want to produce a good piece so i may get stressed at times. So far i think i've done a god job at learning how to talk in both of my jobs to remain on the same level as the others. But obviously i could still improve but i think as the lessons go on i learn more and more about how to respond to my group and how i should talk to them.
3) My organisation skills have never been the best but i know for this i need to be organised, get things done within a certain time limit and keep things together and tidy. I think this is another thing i have improved on over doing the main and preliminary excercises but all the time i know i've got to push my self more and get more done.
4) I could put more time into the work i do. Before i thought i should do as much as i can in lessons but ive learnt especially with the main excercise that you need extra time to do things, for example, i finished off my textual analysis of kidulthood at home so it was one less thing to worry about my next lesson and i did the script over a weekend from the stroyboard we did together as a group.
5) Finally i wanted to improve on my input to the production, during the preliminary i think i had too much of an inout where my character was strong then some of the other but i think i have a balanced input into the main excercise and i've been trying hard to keep that becuase i dont like feeling like i've intimidated other.

Filming and Editing the Preliminary Exercise

I was looking forward to the start of filming because I've never done anything like this before. We had a set time and place to meet, which we all did. We were also supposed to meet the actors there but because we wanted to go down to the TV Studio and start, I sent them both a text asking them to meet us there as soon as they were ready. Not long later I found out that one actors was at home but they said they were going to come in for filming and our other actor hadn't bothered to tell us that they were ill and weren't in college at all. Although we were down an actor, we had to carry on getting ready for filming. So whilst we were all helping to get the scene ready to film, we were trying to get another actor. In the end, we had one of the actors turn up and Rhiannon managed to get her friend to fill in for the Warren (the other actor). Because we now had a female and a male instead of two males, we were able to go to our original idea of having a female dominant character over a male, and play around with the usual male dominance stereotype. So in a way it was good that Warren didn't come in, because we were able to be more creative with the piece. However next time we've decided to have extra actors with us, in case some people are ill, or again didn't turn up. Also because we didn't get Emily (The replacement) until the last minute, we had to ditch the dress code we had planned on.

Preparing for filming wasn't too bad other then that. The main difficulties of it were things like adjusting the lights. We weren't able to do this ourselves because we never have before and we had health and safety hazards to consider too, so our lecturer Lee was going to help us with that. Unfortunately Lee was in a meeting during the time when we were setting up and instead of delaying our production anymore then finding another actor did, we asked another teacher from the media block to help us. He also gave us some advice as to how we could set the scene, but we decided to keep it how we planned, we did leave the table and two chairs how he positioned them though. After he'd gone, we then sat our actors at the table to see how the lighting worked through the camera, we also used abit of time to get used to turning the lights up and down. This proved useful during the filming period because we had to change the lighting in places because the camera was getting a glare and it made our scene look hazy and blurred, we didn't want this effect in the final piece.

Some other things we had to do before filming was make sure we weren't seeing anything through the camera that we shouldn't have, that could therefore affect the continuity of the clip. There were some wires near the door that didn't look right, so we place a black board in front of them, this helped to blend the black background, however we lost alot of the black brick effect that we really like when room searching by doing this. Also there was a sign which you see as Emily walks in the door. First of all we tried to remove this but it was glued up, so we looked at it through the camera and the words didnt seem to be very distinguishable. Later during the editing process we realised that the writing was easier to read, however, this was unavoidable. We couldn't have stopped this without ripping it off the wall, which we clearly aren't allowed to do.

Finally, before we started to actually film, when we had the lights etc how we wanted them, we tested out all the different shot through the camera, e.g. the ots of Emily walking through the door. Then we were ready to start filming. During filming we did a few takes for each shot and watched the first couple so we knew the camera and sound were working fine. We ended up having to play about with how bright the lights were in the filming process because we found that the camera was getting a glare from the light in places and at other times it was too dark, leaving it hard to see the characters.

When we were actually filming i felt more relaxed and as the director i made what i thought clear, but not in a way that i overpowered the others in my group. We decided that we work well as a democracy and put our idea's through one another before going ahead with things. Also we were quite lucky about when we chose to film aswell, we filmed on wednesday afternoon when college is at it's least busyiest, so we only had Lee (our lecturer) coming in and out.

After we'd finished filming we watched over all our takes on the camera to make sure they were ok before we started to put things back and let our actors go. Everything seemed alright though, so "it was a wrap". The following lesson we had planned to edit and check the audio of our work. This lesson didnt go as planned though because we didnt film onto a tape, instead, we filmed onto a hard drive because we thought it would be easier. It was a good idea at first, but when we went to upload them onto movie maker for editing, we discovered that there was a problem with the codex(spelt wrong). So because we were unable to edit like was planned, we used that lesson to decided on our final shots for the final piece, because we could still open them with windows. We used some more of that lesson to write our previous blogs to this one.

It started to look up the next lesson because David brought in his laptop for the editing process. He also has moviemarker on his laptop and he checked it before, so because it worked fine we thought it would be best to use that for editing. As Hayley was our editor, she did all the editing for our piece, but then when she was done as a group we watched it over a few times and pointed out the places where we thought the edits could be a bit tighter or looser. So Hayley did as we ask and if we didnt like the change Hayley would sort it out again.

When we'd finished editing we just had a few things left to do. Rhiannon and David watched the clip over and wrote the final script for us and Hayley and me sat and wrote notes on our final edit. We both did separate notes for the edit, so that way we had a range. Rhiannon and David did the script together because Rhiannon is our scriptwritter and David was able to pick out any bits she'd missed.

Over all i'm happy with how we did the filming and editing, but we've also learnt for next time what we can improve on and the places where we may slack a little. It's definately been a good learning process for our final production.



This is a copy of our final edit of the preliminary excercise from youtube.

First skills audit for the G321 Foundation Production

I was looking forward to starting our preliminary exercise when we were first told about it but I was really nervous at the same time because I was worried about how our work would turn out. Our first lesson that we started to work on this was the most stressful to me because the communication within my group wasn’t the best and I thought that we may not get it all done on time, or to a good enough standard. By the end of the lesson we had already done our initial idea’s and decided roles within the group and also in that lesson our communication was better and I feel we really got our group organised. I had the role of the director which I was happy with and I felt I could do quite well.

***

We struggled a bit during the initial idea blast because we wanted something that we thought would fit the requirement quite well. In the end we agreed on doing a hitman/criminal theme. We talked about how we could make the piece work well for the briefing and in general. Our group talked about the different kinds of things we could involve, for example, panning and the rule of thirds.

Me and Hayley did the planned schedule as Rhiannon (our scriptwriter) did the draft script with help from David. I felt like this was good because we were all doing something and I think the schedule we came up with was time manageable and achievable. We also accidentally gave ourselves a spare week on the schedule because we had the half term date wrong, but when we noticed this we chose to leave it, this way we had extra time to correct any mistakes. When David and Rhiannon had finished with the script with did the story board.

***

I started it but because I had to print stuff off David and Rhiannon finished it. I think that was a better idea as where they wrote the script they were able to draw the storyboard better. In the end we wanted to stick with our draft script. As a group we felt it was fine the way it was and so we left it the way it was instead of changing anything, however if i could change something now, i would have added more technical codes and conventions into it. Before we did the script we decided to find somewhere to film so we could base it around the room, depending on angles and what we were limited to do. We didn’t spend too long looking because we have previously decided that because it was the preliminary, to film on college because it was easier to us whilst learning it all. We instantly liked the Media TV Studio when location hunting because of the black walls. We thought it would be perfect for our piece because it was dark and we could use the lightening in there for key point lighting of our dominant character.

I think we got on well with the rest of the paperwork before filming the preliminary exercise as well. We did it all as a group which I think is good because we all had our say. The SWOT analysis went well. We went through each box one by one together talking about the different things that could possible affect our work in a positive or negative way. The risk assessment was good too because we had already seen the room when we went looking for locations and went we were having a look in there for places in the room to shoot, we had a look around and thought about possible dangers/hazards. In the end we managed to pick all possible dangers out and discuss how to stop them. Finally the call sheet was ok to do together. It was too hard to do and we talked about where, when etc to meet and how long to film. We also took possible delays into account and made sure we made time for them, which proved to be useful when we actually filmed.

Later we did some research on youtube of things like, Public Enemies and Pulp fiction. We liked the old fashion style and wanted to base the dress codes on them. However we weren’t too concerned with the dress codes compared to other things because it was part of the brief that was required, but we still wanted to use it to make it more effective.

This is a test

This is a test