Tuesday 31 January 2012

Ideas

We were talking about typography last week and I had the idea of having the words of Enigma disappearing or appearing one by one to go in with the missing element of the film. One of our group members has done exactly this and is working on making the rest of the titles to suit our title sequence well.

Journal 31/1/12

Today we are exporting the video as many times as we can once we have cut it because final cut wont let us view the actual video, this makes the process of us editing our video a lot harder than it would be for everyone that is able to use final cut as I have to export it see what is not tight enough, go back to final cut and estimate where I should cut it based on the export, then I have to export it again which takes another 5 minutes and then I have to go back and repeat until it's all done. The music is finally on the video and works really well, even better than we expected and the credits are just being finished then they will be put on the video. Even though the macs are slow we're all working really hard to get as much done as we can today.

Wednesday 25 January 2012

Journal 24/1/12

Today I finished putting all of the videos into final cut and editing them into the right place, making them the right length etc. However, after putting everything together and putting the effects on, final cut started to play up. Right now after every cut the video jumps ahead and hesitates slightly and considering we have a lot of quick cuts the video is quite hard to watch at times. After speaking to several teachers about it I'm quite confident once the video has been exported we wont have this problem, but for now we are going to put it on one of the other group members personal laptop. Though I am confident once the video stops jumping it will look really good.
RIGHT NOW I AM NOT FEELING THE LOVE FOR MEDIA.

Friday 20 January 2012

Filming

Filming was very interesting because we shot everything outside of the school, which was something I personally had never before done. I didn't think about some of the problems we would have filming outside of school other than the obvious ones like weather and having to find the time when we could all do it. When it came to filming we soon realised that we hadn't quite thought through everything we could have and we faced a few problems.
First of all when in the church, the flooring was uneven which we had not anticipated so the dolly would not work sufficiently. We had to then go back to the church and I had to move the bottom of the dolly whilst someone else held the camera part and as a result we had to film from a different angle and ended up changing the shot completely. 
We also didn't use the tripod at one point where we should have and it was very noticeable so when we went back we had to reshoot that as well. 
We ran out of batteries in the church and had to borrow some from the priest who had only an hour ago told us how organized we all were... slightly embarrassing.
In the forest we didn't realise just how awkward it would be to get a straight shot without the camera tilted at an angle. Luckily we learnt from the previous trip to the church and used the tripod for everything that wasn't POV.
overall, though we did have some trouble we most definitely learnt from it and it will help us for when we ever next come to film. 

Thursday 19 January 2012

Journal 19/1/12

Today we shot the missing girl poster part of our title sequence, we had some trouble with the weather but we worked around it. Once we got back to school we began putting everything in final cut. We chose what we wanted and cut it down, now we need to finish it and add effects. We've now got all of the shots we need to begin making our title sequence. We have converted it all into final cut and have out around half of the video in the correct places, leaving space for where the title sequence will be coming up on a black background.

Wednesday 18 January 2012

To do list for our group

Our group need to:

1) shoot the missing poster image shot, rethinking how we are going to use it
2) now we have uploaded the video we need to put it all together on final cut and cut it so it is tightly together without jumps or skips (with the exception of where the missing girl poster shot will go)
3) play about with the effects on final cut and decide on what would be best or our video (we know that we will definitely be using black and White at some point)
4) download the typography we have decided on and put it on our title sequence in the appropriate places
5) edit the music together and put on our video

Once we have done all of this we will be ready to hand our video in. This should take approx two weeks at the very most though we're hoping to finish it all by next Thursday.

Missing poster sign

This is the poster we will be adding into our video very shortly, we need to do a couple of shots with it in and then we will be completely finished with the videoing.

Tuesday 17 January 2012

Journal 17/1/12

In todays lesson we learnt how to use final cut properly. Jack gave us a tutorial and we got a chance to test out some of the final cut on videos and upload our own ones and started to convert them and get ready to edit, my group are now ready to begin editing, we just need one more shot of a missing girl poster to add in and we can work around that for now. We discussed animating it but realised it would have been too hard and could have ruined the realism of the rest of the piece.

Journal

after our dilemma at the church we thought carefully about the forest and using the tripod to keep as much of the footage as steady as we could, though it was inevitable that some of the footage would come out shaky because it was a POV shot, we came up with a slightly different way of using our title sequence to make this all much less noticeable. We used Dawn of the Dead as our inspiration to use faster cuts between each shot and have the credits come up on a blank screen, we also are considering effects we could use to make the shakiness less visual to the naked eye.

Journal

We got all of our shots done at the church which took roughly an hour. We checked the shots on the camera and they looked good enough quality to use but once we had got back to school and uploaded them to a big screen we realised it was too shaky. We had to return to the church and change some of our original shots to make the dolly possible to use on the uneven flooring. After using the tripod and dolly differently we came back with even better shots and our end video will have made a lot of progress thanks to this.

Storyboard



Friday 13 January 2012

Journal 12/1/12

We used today's lesson to film shots 3,5,7,9,11 and 12 which we needed the church for. We were at the church for approximately one hour and used the dolly and tripod, though we realised it would be a challenge to use all of them because the floor had uneven stones on it. We watched the film back on the camera and were confident with what we had, however, when we came back to school and watched it on the big screen it was far too shaky and the quality of the video was overall not as good as it could have been and had previously looked. Mr Grimsley suggested different ways to move the dolly for a steadier shot and gave us advice on how to maybe change the shot completely to make it better. We took the advice and went straight back to the church, once we had re-shot and uploaded we were much happier with the outcome and felt we had really progressed in this lesson with camera work. We also re-shot some of the outside shots using the tripod to again make it steadier.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

Journal

we have now been given permission to use St Michaels Vicarage as our church to film in, we thought we would have a slight issue finding somewhere that would let us use its facilities to film but we luckily ha dno trouble and we will begin filming there first to make sure we have everything we need from them as not to disturb their church too much. We have also found some problems with our calendar so later today we will be having a group meeting to find a way to work around that and finalise our decision for filming.

Animatic Storyboard


This is our animatic.

Thursday 5 January 2012

Journal 5/1/12

Group meeting on animatics and storyboarding:
we have chosen the music we will be using for our animatic and retaken all of the pictures of the storyboard to make them clearer. The storyboard is now complete after adding some different shots and writing on the credits in the correct order for the title sequence. The animatic has been loaded up and the music is being added. We've now completed all the tasks we needed to complete before shooting so that is our next aim. We have also set up the dates we will be filming and editing.

Wednesday 4 January 2012

Sony Pictures


In our group meeting today we decided to use Sony Pictures for our film because they are a very well known film company, though while being well known they offer the chance to make lower budget films that still make a lot of money. They have produced films of a similar genre such as the girl with the dragon tattoo (a thriller that also involves the police to a certain extent and is also about a missing child and a mystery). We feel that Sony Pictures will offer us the chance to make an excellent thriller that will draw in a large audience and make a lot of money.

Journal

Today we focused mainly on the storyboard and animatic. We took all the necessary pictures for our animatic and developed our storyboard even further, we began putting our animatic together and made some important decisions considering what type of music we wanted to use, we had some examples and will most likely be using these to add to the animatic next lesson.

Storyboard

The shots we're using for our storyboard:

  1. POV of sex offender - we see forest (partly blacked out to create an enigma) the date january 2010 appears on screen
  2. Cuts to walking through forest POV shot still - hand of the man in POV moving branches out of the way - heavy breathing - music becomes more tense. Picking up pace of walking, studio name appears
  3. Church flashes up in black and white, not as long as the other shots so the audience feels slightly disorientated and confused about the purpose of religion in this film
  4. Back to man walking through a forest - heavy breathing again more tense, picking up pace.
  5. Flash of the inside of the church -  camera shaky as if it is in POV again - walking down isle and showing actors names across the screen
  6. Back to character, heavy breathing increases, actors name appears
  7. Back to church - cross is becoming nearer as if the man is walking towards it unsteadily - film name appears between the cross having the cross as the 'i' in 'Enigma'
  8. Back to character walking through forest, changing direction quickly as if he is running or hiding from something. Audience in the POV would create a tense, scared mood at this point - another enigma
  9. Close up of cross, still in POV - camera pans to a poster of 'Missing Child
  10. Camera tracks in to the poster so close we only see the paper, when it tracks out we're outside and looking at the same sign on a lampost (we see a man walk out from the forest, wearing the same distinctive shoes as the one throughout the sequence, he walks past the sign)
  11. Cuts to character walking in church (producers name appears, we do not see his face)
  12. Cuts to character bowing at the cross (crying?) name of director appears
  13. Title sequence completely rewinds to opening shot after camera has tracked backwards, an earlier date than the original one appears on the screen. It has been made apparent that the title sequence is set later in the film

Journal

While coming up with the idea for fonts and general ideas to use in the title sequence we started to plan the beginning of the storyboard. I wrote up every shot so that we could assign someone to draw them up while we could all use the hour to do something productive instead of all working on the pictures of storyboard. We all used this hour very effectively and found some copyright free music that we are now considering and testing.

New Film Idea


'Emigma' is our new and final film pitch/idea. We came up with this idea after realising our previous one was not original enough, so we felt this genre and idea would help us to come up with a brand new idea that was more suited to our groups abilities as it has so many different things you can do with it.
We also felt we would be able to make a very original title sequence to this genre and that we would be able to really make the audience feel the police thriller genre with the shots and music we would be using.
'Enigma' was took a couple of lessons to make enough developments on to have a solid idea but we were each given one target to achieve by the end of the lesson to make this idea as good as we possibly could.