THE MOTHERLOAD!

Alright, so here is the bulk of the project, which seems to have piled itself into one MASSIVE blog post.

Storyboards

First up is something that should have really been done during the planning stages, but due to technical difficulties, deleted itself.

But I have now redone it, and so I proudly present the storyboards for the opening. The clips in the video are nowhere near the planned lengths, this is mearly me explaining the boards. They are however in order XD.



Example Shots

Next I have some shots evidencing my work in the actual making of the film, so I'll embed the clip, then comment on it below (These comments are mirrored on the information on the videos page on youtube, in case something isn't working properly :S).




Alright. So in this clip, I was manning the camera, and trying to get our actor, Emma, to put as much effort into breaking down that door as possible :P.

This clip shows two takes of the same songs, along with my comments to Emma between. I feel that shows that while using the camera, I was able to give effective feedback as the director to convey to our actor how to get the most out of the scene.




This clip may be long and silly, but it is still a good shot in the end.

I feel that this shot shows a nice contrast to the previous clip, Showing that i can work in a much more versatile way. Whereas the last clip was static, being shot on a tripod. This shot is freehand, and I'm taking orders from the director at the time, Phil. This shows that I am able to work with others well.



This shot shows my editing skills. The original clip wasn't nearly atmospheric enough, so editing the brightness, contrast and lighting to create a much darker tone.

Test Screening

Upon getting a roughly finished version of our film edited and rendered, we put together a test screening one lunchtime. At this screening we gave out popcorn and drinks, screened our film opening, and gave out

Test Screening Results

And now time for an in depth analysis.

Age + Gender

These sections were put in to determine whether our test audience fitted within the target audience that we planned the film for. The majority of our audience fitted into the mid region of our 15 - 23 years target. However we had more females than males. This isn't perfect, because our intended primary audience were males, with females being a secondary. But it all still gave us useful feedback.

1. Do you enjoy watching films?

This question was really put in to separate the wheat from the chaff. If someone didn't enjoy films, the answers to certain sections would probably be biased due to a dislike of the medium. However if they said they didn't like films, but enjoyed our opening, it would have been brillaint :P.

2. What is your favourite genre of film?

Looking at the results for this question meant that we could determine whether people from the test group were already fans of the genre we were aiming for. I was suprised by the amount of variation from person to person, but overall just over 50% of our audience were already fans of thriller or horror films.

The reason for it being thriller AND horror is because our film is a hybrid genre, if that wasn't already made clear by previous blog posts.

3. What is your first impression of the film.

With over 80% of our test audience giving the film a Good or Very Good rating, and none below moderate, it's safe to say that our film opening definitely sparked an interest in our testers.

4. Would you go to see this film in the cinema?

With 58% of our tester saying they would see the film in the cinema, that still leaves nearly half saying they wouldn't. At first glance, this would seem negative, but looking back at question 2, it can be seen that we have converted 5% of the audience into liking the film without it being of a genre they usually like, which i think is an achievement.

5. Is the plot clear so far?

With nearly a third of our test audience saying they didn't understand the plot, I can only say that this is understandable. With it only being the opening 2 minutes, it is safe to say that the plot wouldn't be completely clear so far.

6. Do you think the setting was appropriate?

A quarter of our audience said that the setting wasn't sinister enough. When planning the film, we tried to choose a setting that the audience would be familiar with (which one tester saw as being a negative trait) so that the audience could empathize with it. However, we did try to alter this familiarity with low key light, and edited this even futher after receiving this feedback.

7. What did you think of the music used?

100% of our music feedback was good, with only one comment made about a section of diegetic sound towards the end. This was the first thing to be fixed when we got back to work XD

8. Does the editing make it flow?

This was the area that I feel got the most useful feedback from. The points made here were the parts of the film which we hadn't managed to perfect before the screening, and with the testers pointing out key areas, we were able to fix most of the areas through re-edits and spare clips.

9. What age group do you think this film is aimed at?

This question was pretty much added in as an after thought. The reasoning behind it is that if the age group we screen it for don't think it's for them, then there's something wrong somewhere. Interestingly it worked out that most people thought it would be aimed at a slightly younger age group. But seeing as this is only the opening, more adult themes would have been introduced in the full film that would probably increase this.

Final Cut

So after all of this careful planning, hard work, feedback and more hard work, we come to a final product. Enjoy.



But like any good project, there needs to be an evaluation.

Evaluation

This is probably the only time the whole team appear in one segement :P.So I hope you enjoy it, and the prject as whole. Wish us luck!

Window Shopping

This will be edited later in the week. I'm too tired to type atm...

Ispiration for Lucid

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Hit the Ground Running

Alright, so having neglected this poor thing for so long, I HAVE RETURNED!

The reason i have left this blog inactive is because our Media Studies exam took place over New Years, so i was busy panicking for that. But with it now done and out of the way, I can once again get back to te fun stuff :P

The Task at Hand

So, i should probably tell you what my task is. Well, in our groups we need to make a 3 minute opening to a new thriller or social realism film. Before evening thinking about that, we needed to first get into these groups. So within our intended team, we put together a presentation explaining why we would be good working together. This can viewed below (I recommend viewing all PowerPoint's full screen, otherwise some of the text is unreadable :S. To do this, click the menu button in the bottom left corner of the window)

01. Team Awesome Sauce

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Upon our groups being confirmed, we were then set the separate tasks of looking at screenshots from separate films of our chosen genre (Thriller, but you should know that from the PowerPoint :P). So upon looking through a slew of screenshots and getting distracted far too often, I stuck together the ideas that I think make up a thriller.

02. Conventions of a Thriller

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And that is all I have for now :D, I will probably try to update a minimum of once every fortnight, if not more, so stay tuned.

A Quick Afterthought

This post was originally going to come a lot sooner, with an extra PowerPoint and another video. However, the 6th Form systems have been down, so i can't get the other PowerPoint atm, and my webcam refuses to record video (sounds still good). So I will have a separate post as soon as i fix those problems :/.
I would also like to point out that i love SlideShare, as without it, i would have had to convert my PowerPoints rather than just click an upload button :).

*EXTRA* 5 Second Films and Storyboard

HELLO!!

After some tinkering i can finaly post these extra tidbits that have been floating around this past week.

5 Second Films

A short time ago i discovered http://www.5secondfilms.com/, a website i have begun to visit most days. Each weekday, a video 8 seconds in length is posted onto it's front page. These videos manage to convey a joke in 5 seconds, sandwiched between a 2 second title screen and 1 second credits. Here is an example:



Taking this idea, myself and 2 of my fellow media classmates decided to make a couple of these in our spare time. Here are our efforts:


Sangwich




Toffee = Death



I think that these are quite good :P

I think we used a good range of shot types, and fitted very closely to our storyboards
However i think we could have edited the sound ("Are you guys flming?") and added in some non-diegetic music or sound effects.

Spooks Storyboards

A few weeks ago we were asked to storyboard a one minute sequence from a british drama. I chose to take the BBC drama. Spooks. After recieving the work back, i decided that I would like to do something more with it. So taking the audio from the orginal clip, i placed my storyboard frames over the audio to show how they matched up to the orginal thing.



The link to the orginal clip is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lehPpgcBLqQ

And that is all!

Over the half term i will probably be doing more stuffs that can be posted here, but until then, i hope that you enjoy this!

Preliminary Task Evaluation

This is my evaluation for my prelim video task. Our task was to edit a short video, including a number of different shots.

The first job for my self and my partner was to draw up storyboards for the video. This, in my opinion, was the hardest part of the task. When drawing up the storyboards, we had to think about how our actors would be blocked, and how long each clip would be. A lot of the clips were a lot faster than we expected, mostly due to the length of time it takes to say a sentence seeming a lot longer in our heads. But some clips were also cropped to help our videos continuity.

I feel that when I do this again, it would be a good idea just to time how long it takes to do something, or act something out, so as to get the timings more precise.

When it came round to our turn to film, the room we had planned to film in was occupied (with people editing their videos, no less!) so finding a new room was in order. After changing our storyboards to suit our new environment, we began filming. This took a lot of patience, as many scenes had to be re-filmed (The establishing shot was filmed at least 8 times) due to background interference and giggling fits.

When behind the camera whilst filming and directing, it was quite fun discussing how to best get a shot. Whether it was best to use a tripod (0:23-030) or to hold the camera freehand (0:43-0:49).

Overall I felt that the filming side of things went relatively smoothly, we included all the shot types we needed (and a few extras). However, I would have liked to have re-shot some clips, just to make them flow more smoothly in the final product.

Editing was the part of the project that took the longest, requiring a few free periods to finish up the project. Between Adobe Premier crashing and files going missing, we learnt how to deal with the various problems that faced us.

Editing the video was fun in itself. After laying out the clips in the order we wanted them, we began to crop them to flow into each other. Where we had several clips, there would always be a discussion of which one fitted in with the clip before it better.

Once we had our continuity in check, we did some slight alterations to the clips. A few of the shots had a reddish tinge to them (0:29-0:39). But this was easily changed with a slight change of the colour balance.

Once the video was finished, we experimented with which file type to save it as, finally deciding on .wmv, due to it’s quality an versatility.

Overall I felt that this first task went rather smoothly, the occasional hiccup now and again only helping us to improve on what we were doing. If I were to do something similar in the future, I would probably focus on making sure that the clips were the closest they could be to the storyboards before taking them to the cutting room.

And that’s about it. Hope you enjoyed that :D, and when I have time (probably tomorrow), I will post some of the extra pieces I have been playing around with alongside this.

ME-dia (Vlog 1)