Journal 21/2/12

We got feedback from the rest of the class after they watched our title sequence. Some of the feedback was:

• generally positive - mostly three stars and some two stars
• They liked a lot about the video such as typography, storyline, music, quick cuts
• We could improve it by trying out some slow motion on parts and speeding other parts up
• making some of the quick cuts slightly longer so as not to confuse the audience too much

we have taken all of these into consideration and have tried out slow motion and made the fast cuts a little bit slower - though not too slow.

My Journal

After feedback we realised some of the aspects of our title sequence were not quite right, for example the beginning credit was 'Directed By Maddie Carragher' and the first credit was supposed to be 'A film by Maddie Carragher' we changed this and made the beginning part with the distributor slightly shorter as before it was 12 seconds long. We moved the voice over from right at the end of the sequence to just before the music ends - this makes it sound more professional.

Journal 9/2/12

We've just been adding to the finishing touches of our project recently, for the first time since it had all been  put together we let shaun see it, he advised us to change the music and add some bits.

Journal - audience feedback 2

We have put the video up on facebook to be given feedback from and so far we have had some likes but no responses, we will repost at a later date if no comments are made and I will be uploading it to tumblr and vimeo for more audience feedback.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Journal 8/12/2011

For the past two lessons my group have been sitting down and coming up with solid ideas to use in our title sequence. We had a lot of ideas that we discussed and even followed up by trying to come up with a title sequence around it. We eventually came up with one particular idea that we all agreed on and really liked, we were all assigned a few tasks that we should do to try and get the storyboard/planning done as quickly as possible so we could move on to preparing to shoot. I wrote up the storyboard so that another member of the group could draw the shots in, I also researched into other title sequences to look for ideas for music and myself and another member of the group searched different typographies to use. All in all the lesson was very successful and the way we've been arranging the work is helping us to make this title sequence as good as possible.