Planning

We are nearly finished all of our planning, we only have the stroyboard to finish and the photos of location and actors to take; we should have this all finished very soon. We are looking forward to shooting our video as we feel that it will be very interesting.

Call sheet

Holly has made the call sheet which we will find useful when filming our piece

Name
Photo
Contact Number
Meeting Times

Production Schedule

Production Schedule

By:

30^th November – Plan genre and ideas, decide group.

14^th December – Research into existing opening sequences, analysed in detail, notes on how it may be useful to you.

11^th December – Pre-production planning completed. Must include: storyboards, production schedules (this), call sheets, script etc.

1^st February – all material shot and uploaded onto media server.

17^th February – Rough edit completed and uploaded to blog.

15^th March – Final edit completed and uploaded to blog and media server.

22^nd March – Group presentations of video and evaluation.

15^th April – Blog entries answering evaluation questions, plus a video commentary.

Wednesday 5^th (first day back of term) – Book Camera.

Week beginning January 10^th  and week beginning January 17th – Shooting Footage.

Week beginning January 24^th – Edits.

Our final movie pitch

We have all decided on a pitch for our final piece which hannah has posted on her blog http://hannahharveyasmedia.blogspot.com/ We have decided not to write a script for this film as we have found that we never really follow them and we would like the dialogue to seem natural. We have thought that if the dialogue is natural then we will have a higher verisimilitude which would be useful in making our film seem more professional and realistic. We all have something to do over the christmas holidays - I will be doing the storyboard, holly is doing the production schedule and hannah is doing the detailed storyline plot.

Opening sequence of 'Night of the living dead'

Nothing really happenes in this opening sequence which will make s want to see what happens next, the black and white colours that are used make it seem quite spooky and eeire, this feeling is reinforced by the music as it seems quite peaceful which may be used to signify that they are going to a graveyard which often are places that seem peaceful. The time that the camera is folowing the car seem like quite a while which builds tension and makes us feel like something is about to happen. Without the eerie music the film wouldnt seem spooky at all, the graveyard could also been seen as something significant in the story as it is the first place they go in the film. The lack of editing and special effects sort of makes the film scarier than normal horror films as it seems real and adds a feel of emptiness to the film.

Opening sequence of 'Clockwork orange'

The opening sequence of this film is really effective as the close up of the main characters face is very scary and makes the audience feel extremely uncomfortable and gives the feeling of being watched. This lasts for about 15 seconds which is slightly too long which gives an even scarier feel. When the camera zooms out and wee see all of the naked women it is very creepy and almost makes the audience cringe. The music is quite soft and gives an eeire feel to the opening sequence, we get a feel for what the film will be like from the first close up of the man we realise that the group of people may be abit deranged from the close they are wearing and the strange eyelashes he has on his left eyes; then this is reinforces when we see all of the naked people in there 'den' this makes the audience want to see what happens next as we want to know what the people do and why they are like that. However the creepy feel of it may make people want to not watch the rest as it is quite scary and we may be frightened of what is about to come as we do not want to know what they are capable of. The short title sequence consists of the colours red and black; both of these colours connote death, danger and blood which also adds a creepy feeling. Similarly the pace of them is quite slow which allows the audience to take more notice of them.

Opening sequence of 'Scream'

The opening sceme of scream is quite scary, however nothing really happens we are just expecting it too which gives a very eerie feel; which sets the scene staright away. The 3 main colours used of the title sequence are white balck and red, red has connotations of danger and death which tells the audience straight away about the genre of the film and what they should expect, the sound at the start of this clip also is effective as it consists of screams, a heartbeat and a telephone ringing which are all the things that happen in the film as the whole film is about the girls phone ringing and the scream mask. The screams signify torture and terror where the heartbeat signifies panic and being scared. This feeling is also felt by the audience as we feel part of it. The fact that the girl doesnt know who is calling her also adds to the tense and edgy feeling of the opening scene. Also the phone rings alot and each time it adds even more suspense. Sfter the phone has rang twice the camera shows a shot of the house which makes us feel like the house is being watched by the person who is ringing her, then we are assured that the girl is being watched by the caller as he is asking for her name and says " i want to know who im looking at" which causes the girl to scream  - adding more fear to the clip. There are lots of big windows in the house and therefore when she is going around trying to lock all of the doors it feels like a long time which makes her seem exposed and vunderable. There are quite a few close ups of her face which adds the to the sense of fear and emotion when she sees her boyfriend struggling in the chair. This film is aimed at an older audience as the film has a high age rate, the genre is teen horror which is useful to us as we are planning on doing a teen horror opening scene.

Opening sequence of "Halloween"

There is very little sound in this opening sequence which adds to the sense of fear already being created by the camera work. The camera is very effective as it puts us in the point of view of the killer and gives a sense of somebody watching; this makes the audience feel quite scared and weary as we dont know what is about to happen next, also the sound adds to the tension as we expect there to be a big bang or something to happen, so the quietness causes us to feel edgy. However we start to hear a very faint piano in the backround which suggests that something is wrong and something is going to happen. Also to add to the audience being in the intruders position the mask that tge intruder puts on blocks our vision of the scence which adds even mnore to the sense of being suspicioius as we cant see the whole frame. There is also a close up of the knife which shows the audience its significance and it causes them to think of thigns that might happenn this causes the audience to be thinking all the way through of what might happen and what he intruder might be like, we are totally shocked when we see that it is a child and this makes us want to watch more to find out what happens.

Research into our chosen genre

Our chosen genre is horror and we have started to research that, we have found that there are many sub-genres to horror and these are; teen horror, slasher, satanic, vampire, alien, evil children etc. Horror is often crossed with other genres, we have found that the most popular one is science fiction. Horror films have been around for along time and the very first ones are in gothic styles that were usually set in big houses and haunted castles or mansions and they were usually based on mad-scientists, monsters, vampies and devils.

Evaluation

We are quite happy with our continuity task, as we included all of the required criteria. We are also pleased as we know that we have improved many of the skills we need for our final video, such as editing, being more aware of the 180 degree rule, getting action matches right and being able to do shot reverse shot. However, there are many aspects of the piece that we could have improved for example at times the camera is shaky, we discussed how to overcome this problem and decided that we need to make sure that the camera is loose enough on the tripod for us to move it easily and carry out fluid tilt/pans. But if we found that we still had this problem we could cut between shots instead of filming continuous movements. When evaluating our film we also realised that we put in a fade between the conversation which is used to suggest a passage of time - we did not intend this. We are also aware that we must improve our framing as one of the characters head is cut off at one point, we will ensure that this does not happen in our final piece. Also after evaluating our video and reading other peoples comments we realised that there is a slight break of the 180 degree rule, after making this mistake we will know not to make it again. We were happy with our song choices as we thought that they were good at representing the type of environment that we were trying to portray, however there are times when the audio wasn't very clear, to avoid this happening in our final piece we will include effects such as cross fades to make it clearer. We regret using zooms in our video as they seem to be quite jerky and we feel like they don't look professional, we are not going to use any zooms unless we really need to. We are now aware of all of the errors we have made and will be sure not to make them in our final piece.

Continuity task final video

We have finished editing our continuity video, we used cuts and fades, also we added the songs we picked last week; we had to edit them as we only needed a few little sections of them. For this task we used all 3 of the criteria (180 degree rule, shot reverse shot and action match) We are pleased with our final video as it looks more proffesional than our prisoner video and our continuity is much better. We are looking forward to doing our final piece as we are more confident using the software.

Log sheets and our hand drawn storyboards

Soon we will be uploading our hand drawn storyboards and the log sheets which will show the evidence of our planning. Both the log sheet and our storyboards were helpful as the log sheets told us what clips we needed when we were editing, this saved us alot of time when editing because without it we would have had to go through each clip and see which ones we needed. The storyboards helped as they showed us which shots we had to do next and how they should look.

Editing the footage for the continuity task.

We have just finished editing our footage and it is now rendering, we will watch it back and if we find that we need to make any more edits we will make them. The edits we have used are  -
- cuts
- fades to black
- dissolves

Production Schedule

Week 1 (20^th October)

Book the camera on Friday 22^nd for week beginning 1^st November.

Begin basic planning.

Week 2 (27^th October)

Finish planning (location, actors etc.)

Week 3 (2^nd November)

Shooting over the full week.

Update blog.

Upload footage on to the media server by the end of the week.

Week 4 (9^th November)

Shoot version two.

Upload to the media server.

Edit the footage.

Complete and upload on to blog by the end of the week.

Week 5 (16^th November)

Present task, and evaluate.

Update blog.

 

This is our production schedule what we used to keep us organised when filming and editing.

Script

Script

Chloe Carr

Location: classroom, corridor, common room

Actors: Holly and Chloe

Camera woman: Hannah

Holly walks down the corridor and opens a door into the classroom. music is playing and fades out when she opens the door (action match)

Holly walks across the classroom and sits down at a desk next to Chloe. as she opens  the door another song fades in as she walks across the classroom, then fades out once holly sits down(180 degree rule)

Chloe is in detention.

They begin talking. (shot reverse shot)

Holly: Hiya.

Chloe: Hi.

Holly: What are you doing here?

Chloe: I’m stuck in stupid detention.

Holly: Oh, well I’ll just wait for you in the common room then.

Holly walks out of the room and in to the common room(music is playing) and sits down. (The music fades out as she opens the door)

She puts in her ipod. Camera zooms in on ipod, volume of music increases and then fades out. ( a different song is playing loud and fades out when the film fades out)

Uploading our footage onto the media server

We have just uploaded our footage onto the media server and are now going through and seeing which clips we need. The following files are not of any use to us because of things like actors laughing, wrong actions and wrong dialogue -
- file 0120
- file 0121
- file 0122
- file 0124
- file 0125
- file 0126
- file 0127
- file 0128
- file 0129
- file 0130
- file 0131
- file 0134
- file 0136
The majority of the files were discarded because of bad acting etc, also we made sure that we did a few takes of each clip to ensure that we chose the best one for our final continuity piece.

Review of Shots

We have reviewed all of our clips that we shot last night and have decided to film them again, because we are aiming for a high grade and want to create a high quality clip. In the shots that we shot last night we included everything we had to but we would like to extend our film to give it more of a storyline. We will film the new clips on Monday or Tuesday night. We found that file 103 is useless as it wasnt how we wanted it to be. Also we feel that all of the clips need improving as the camera wasnt very steady, to over come this problem we will use the tripod more. On Monday we will aim to:
- use the tripod most of the time
- include all 3 criteria of the continuity task (action match, 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot)
- we will have to change our script and production schedule
- we will create an extended video

Shooting

Last night we filmed all of our footage for the continuity task and are about to upload the clips onto the media server, we will watch them and if we are not happy with them then we will arrange to record it again. But if we find that we are happy with the shots then we will start to edit them in order to finish our continuity task.

Our Final Video

This is our final video, we have now finished editing it. There were a few continuity problems such as eye level and people being in the background who werent supposed to be there also the lighting match was a problem. another problem we encountered was location as it was hard to find the location that would match the script. When we were filming outside the cameras picked uo alot of unwanted noise from things such as the wind. In our next task we hope to get the continuity problems eliminated and get used to filming more proffesionally.

Continuity

This is our storyboard for the conversation in our continuity task, we are going to do another storyboard on paper which will show the camera angles etc.

Shooting and uploading

We have now successfully filmed our footage using the facilites in school, there were alot of takes so we have gone through them and chose which ones we think are best and uploaded them onto the media server. Now we have to edit the shots to make it flow into a movie.

I have now finished my storyboard I added movements for the characters, camera angles and speech. We were also able to add different settings. I thought xtranormal was a great way to make a storyboard as now it will be easier for us to film our film trailer as the movie on xtranormal will help us more as it is not just a few pictures; which we would have had if we had done a traditional storyboard. Also xtranormal was very easy and effective to use and we enjoyed making our storyboard.

Storyboarding

We decided to use xtranormal.com for our storyboard, we were able to add camera angles, speech and bldy actions such as crossing arms etc.

Movement shots

We found this video much easier to edit and title as we are now more familiar with the software and can use it better than before. the only error we had when editing this video sequence was when we were rendering it, it kept freezing which meant it took us longer to edit than it should have, we evetually got it rendered by closing the program and opening it again.

Still Shots

This is the still shots movie, it is now finished after we encoutered many problems with the software. At first we found it hard to edit and render the video but we eventually got the hang of it and are now more confident with the software. We have edited and labelled every shot ranging from extreme long shot to extreme close up. Hoepfully we'll have better luck with the software when editing our movement shots.

Editing and Rendering

We've finished editing our still shots, we added in effects when each shot changes to the next ones. It was very stressful as the software was quite confusing at first as we didnt know how to do anything but we now know how to do alot of things, we have labelled all of the shots to show what type they are. They are rendering now and next we will do the movement shots; we should find this one easier as we are now comfortable with using the software!

Edits

On Tuesday we started to edit the types of shots that we took outside previously, it was difficult when we started because we didn't know how to use the software very well but we are getting better now and can do different types of edits.

Opening Scene To My Movie

Steve and Dave are studying in a free period at University. Steve is updating his hard-drive, and Dave is thinking of ways to distract him, and steal the hard-drive he wants. Along comes Sally, a perfect distraction for Steve, considering a girl has never properly talked to him before. Steve is taken by suprise when she asks him out on a date, and Dave sees it as a perfect opportunity to steal the hard-drive, now that Steve has an excuse to leave it unguarded.

My Movie Pitch

Genre - geek chic

Steve and Dave are both geeks and live together whilst at university, Steve has an important hard-drive that Dave wants but whilst Steve is on his first date he leaves the hard-drive in his bag at the restaurant. They must find it again as it has the information on how to contact aliens in other galaxies.