Week 8 - finalising, credits & music

We'd finished our editing by this week, and now had to fully concentrate our time or tweaking miner details, the credits and also the music. Because we lacked dialogue we needed our non-dietgetic sound to really pull together our piece and enhance the action. we'd previously experimented with different tracks, and shortlisted the ones we felt could compliment our action well. Using garage band we eventually selected a few that we liked, and then worked on adding them to different stages of the film, overlapping tracks, altering the volume and so on. We then began to work on finalising the credits, we used a series of photographs of scrabble pieces and imported these into a final cut express project, then exported them into a quicktime file so we could import them at the beginning and end of our opening sequence. We wanted to edit the shots as well to make them seem more menacing, so we played around with altering the lighting and contrast of the images. Additionally we had to speed up the shots and reverse the footage as we had previously taken the easier option of beginning with the name and then moving the clips outward, and this wasn't the final affect we were after. 

Our audience feedback,

 

The constructive criticism we received from our audience, enabled us to pull together focus upon the areas they thought we could improve to make our opening more effective. Therefore in our  last editing sessions we concentrated more time on areas, like sound, because we knew people had found parts mismatched and ineffective, and we wanted every area of our opening to be equal in standard and create the same continuous, eerie, thriller effect. It was really helpful to receive pointers from non-bias viewers because we'd seen our film so many times and had just become accustomed to it which made us unable to really highlight the certain areas that were good or in contrast were weak, and i think it really boosted our concentration to get positive feedback  as well as it made us so much more motivated and determined to meet all deadlines and create a high quality piece of media work. 

Week 7 - editing & music

Once we'd cut all the clips down to just the sections we wanted to use, we then ordered them into a chronological sequence, that then pulled together a 'rough' film opening, that made sense in terms of narrative and structure. In order to make our film more realistic (in parts), more dramatic, and appear seamlessly, we had to then alter certain elements. We began  to speed up and slow down the timing of certain clips, in particular the flashbacks were we wanted to create a tense and exaggerated effect. The shots we had of young girls acting frightened we had to fit together into a 'flashback' montage, but found the time frames to be far to long, so we cut the clips, partly because of timing and partly because it seemed a lot more climatic when they were at a greater pace. We also began to work on our music, we took turns on who was controlling the editing as if we ever all attempted to do it at once it was too crowded and hard to accurately do. Once we'd all decided upon the major decisions, the other group members would explore garage band for music that could either run parallel to our shots, to create a dark and eerie feel, or could juxtapose our action, highlighting its extremity and the corruption of these children's youth. 

Week 6 - Editing footage and discussing music

Group meeting 6

During this meeting we continued to edit. We started to alter the speed of the shoots, slowing or speeding up movement, we continued to cut shots, to create seamless footage,  and we also started to fragment some of our shots to create a disorientating montage of flash backed clips. After the bulk of our editing seemed to an acceptable standard we then started to discuss what music we would include in our opening sequence. As we had chosen to not include a vast array of dialogue we really needed to have powerfully pragmatic music to enhance the performance of our actors and our style of filming. 

Week 5- filming & editing

Group meeting - 5

During week five we visited 3 different locations in order to film our opening sequence, all of us participated in the filming and directing in order to balance out the work and the creative ability. After the filming was 'roughly' complete we had the chance in our fifth group meeting to uploaded the filming we had done during the week. We then began to think about editing the shoots, fitting them together in chronological order and cutting out the parts we didn't need to use. 

  
 

Shooting our project

Above are some  photographs of us filming some of our foundation task (at one of our shoot loactions) . We tried capturing each piece from as many different angles as possible, as we intended to  allow ourselves extensive versatility when it came to editing the clips together, to create a continous effect. We also wanted to develop a wide range of shots for our montage sequences aswell, to make them alot more dramatic and have a much larger impact on our audience. With heinsight we realised that our ‘Feed The Fish’ preliminary task, perhaps lacked a varied and creative range of different angled shots, for example : high, low,canted,point of veiw,reverse  and so on. So we wanted to learn from our previous mistake, and try to take a more challenging approach to our filming.

Week 4 - costume and props

Group meeting - 4

Today we continued planning our opening sequence, but this time focused on costume and props. We didn't want to just use any old t-shirt and jeans for the characters, but have costumes that would all symbolic and have strong stereotypical connotations. We chose to protagonist in a dressing gown, partly because her sketch was based around  a bath time scene, but also because we believed this attire made her seem more vulnerable, innocent and easily harm-able. For our 'pedophile' or antagonist, we opted for a luminous jacket, scruffy jeans, white top, and muddy boots, to create a dirty, rough looking character, but also by use of the jacket to show he was meant to be somebody this girl could 'trust', a professional, but clearly contradicted this expectation; the 'disguise' of this workman's jacket also to us screamed out bright colours, flashing danger in the girls face, additionally the associations people generally have with builders or work men would make the character immediately give off a the sort of impression we aimed for, rather than if we had placed them in a suit. We also decided that the other children where to wear school uniform, once more to highlight their age and innocence, and set them apart from our main character, in order to show and establish her importance within the opening sequence. 

Week 3 - storyboarding our ideas

Media A Storyboard Again

Group meeting - 3

We fitted the content of our  roughly marked out plot line, into a storyboard format, using post-it notes so we could easily play around with the order of the sequence, and enabling us to see the different stages, and how they could be manipulated. This really  helped us to clearly visualise how we were planning to film each shot, and what location it would need to be filmed in. This meant when it came to actually filming, we immediately knew what angles we needed to capture for each part, and what action was needed for each part of the story. We got quite a lot done, but felt it was a task that should be done in depth and we continued this planning in the next group meeting.

Filming Schedule

We devised a filming schedule, so that ourselves and our cast were a hundred percent certain, of the locations they were needed in, and on what days they were needed. We needed to be overly organised because of pre-booking filming equipment, and the access to certain locations for our shoots and in relation to timing as well, for we had to make sure the slots fitted in with the cast's school / work times, and fitted in with our own availability and the availability of the locations. 

Week 2 - planning our cast and locations

Group meeting - 2

In week two we looked back over our notes and ideas and started to realistically decide what was achievable, and what we would need to plan in order to create a high quality thriller film. We started to think about casting, discussing firstly what we wanted our characters to be like or look like and then secondly we considered what contacts we actually had. Our chosen plot like was based antically around the story of a  pedophile and a teenage girl. The idea was to create a piece that hinted at quite brutal issues, but did so it an appropriate and subtle way, because of this we decided to cast girls from between the ages of 12-16 rather than opting for younger actresses, we also chose to use people that we knew, because we felt they'd be able to play the tricky roles in a more natural and relaxed way. We didn't want 'stiff acting,' or for the actor to feel uncomfortable and therefore that awkwardness consequently shine through in our film. We also started to think about available, interesting locations that would run parallel with our storyline.

Week 1 - Planning and storyboarding for our Foundation Task

storyboarding

 planning ideas

Group meeting - 1

Here I have enclosed some photographs of our first group meeting in which we planned our foundation project. We started by brainstorming,  writing down the different film genres and then cutting them down to the ones we felt we could possibly develop an interesting story around. After narrowing down our options, we finally selected thriller as our genre, and begin to throw around lots of different sketchy stories we could maybe adapt to make our opening sequence.  later after developed those suggestions,  we fitted together the different ideas into a more a structural plot line, giving us a good indication of what we would need to include later  on, on a story board.