Planning Time

We liked our group and decided to work together for our main project! - Claire Brooke, Cindy Wellings, Chloe Byerley and Myself.

In the first lesson we just mind-mapped some ideas and looked at the genres we would like to go with, just a basic outline of what we wanted our opening to consist of. First of all we thought of doing a horror/thriller but we wanted to go with something a bit different and unique so we came up with the idea of focusing on performing/arts which is something we are all interested in. I was ill for the next step of the planning process but was kept informed on what was happening through facebook and contributed some ideas.

The idea which we were all keen to do was the story of 4 characters; a singer, actor, dancer and the stereotypical school geek. The outline story of the opening is how the school geek is trying to get pictures of the 3 students for the school yearbook but they aren't interested, and the fact that we are looking at stereotypes means that we want to add comedy into our clip too. We also started planning the different transitions we wanted to use in the filming process. We were thinking of showing a short clip of each character which freezes of them in a pose which suits their character and then a commentary runs over the top explaining their role in the school.

We also got inspiration for the credits from the film Napoleon Dynamite. In their opening credits they use food and props to show everyone involved in the production, so we had the idea of using the year book opening with presenting all the credts with year book photos. For this project we also have to make sure the mise-en-scene is appropriate to the character so we also had the idea of using a polaroid character for the geek character however because they aren't largely available we might have to just use a video camera.

Our group have already cast most of the characters for our opening of the film. Cindy is playing the part of the dancer, Claire is going to play the guitar for the band and we have asked our friend Connor to play the drums for the band and  lastly Luke to play the part of the geek because we thought he'd be best suited for the character. The next step is to meet up and produce a script and compose the music ready to start filming straight away.

Media Studies Brief

The set brief for our Video project is to create the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes. This blog will document the pre-production, production and evaluation stages of this project.

Preliminary Task Assessment

This is a link to our short clip that my group (Claire, Chloe, Cindy and I) created :)

For our preliminary task we were instructed to get into groups to produce a short clip that included the 180 degree rule, a shot/reverse shot and other specific criteria. We were also told it had to include couple of lines of dialogue between two characters. We decided to keep our clip quite basic, with a simple storyline, this way our main focus was on camera shots/angles sound and transitions etc. In our group, considering we had to film within the school we decided to base the story on a two students, one waiting in a classroom while the other is running late and arrvies just as the school bell rings. Chloe and Cindy were cast as the two characters while me and claire did the filiming. We used a variety of shots including an eyeline match, with a shot of cindy which cuts to the clock ticking to emphasise the time passing, and a mix of camera movements including Hand-held where we felt it was necessary.

After we planned and finished filming we imported it onto the mac computers and started the editing process. Here we looked through non-diagetic sound, linking a soundtrack to a character which I felt was very effective. We then put in credits, transitions and deleted stuff that wasn't needed. I thought that the process was really fun and our clip was successful!

The next lesson we sat in our groups and as a class watched all the clips. Then we recieved feedback on the positive things and things we could improve. Here is the feedback we got back:

Positive

• Well edited
• Smooth transitions
• Good choice of music (relating it to character)

Steady camera shots and good choice of hand held shots where Chloe is running down the hall




Here is the handheld longshot of chloe running

• Make sure the dialogue can be heard
• Consider the setting of where the filming is taken place, as the lighting was too harsh and the faces of the charcaters couldn't been seen clearly
• Change the last shot, making sure the rule of thirds is used



Here is where the lighting was too bright and both cindy and chloes facial expressions were unclear