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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.



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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.


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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.

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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.