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.