Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?
FILM OPENING - ELIJAH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEZMU7B-hVM
PRELIMINARY TASK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9sGUytJkGs
Firstly I feel that from our previous film we've made progress within the area of location.
As you can see in the screenshot below, we filmed our preliminary task in a classroom in college, which wasn't very authentic, but was very secure.
We was provided with an open range of ideas which wasn't revolved around college, this ultimately meant we had to focus on getting more permissions to film in particular places.
Holly's dad is in the police force therefore we were lucky to be able to film in a real police station in Croydon. I also learned that establishing shots can be extremely helpful when trying to create the illusion that you are somewhere else entirely, however this illusion didn't really appear in our opening product.
We were also lucky enough to have Holly's dad act for us in our film which made it more authentic. One of the places that we were going to film in we weren't able to which caused a problem for a while - because we weren't quite sure what to do without that scene. We worked around that by improvising and using the back of a golf course at night. This taught me how to use lighting effectively in darkness, and how to improvise when things don't go to plan. A lot more planning went into this, character building and plot building, whereas our preliminary task was completely spontaneous and last minute.
PRELIMINARY PLANNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iAbh9vHDDY
Myself and Alex made a vlog explaining our preliminary plot, and how we are going to create it, however, our plan completely changed last minute. This was really the only sort of planning that was done, so we thoroughly looked into how to do our thriller opening.
We got some useful feedback from our class and teachers when we watched the prelims back. This is what we received, which helped us when considering what to do for our next film:
To improve.Framing - some of your medium shots have the top of head out of frame. This does not work. It is fine with real close up work, but not in medium framed work.
Tripod was not used on the CU of door and the shot wobbles as a result - a shame. Always use Tripods unless you have real reason not to.
You MOA of the door opening has too much of a time delay. Holly opens door at pace, and then you have a reverse shot to Alex and then on return to Holly, she is still opening door. Watch again to see the error.
A very good effort - just be careful in how you frame shots in MCU or MS. bring the tripod down a bit to ensure all the subject is in frame.
[You can find these comments on the PRELIMINARY FINAL VIDEO blog page]
You can see with these two shots that our framing work has improved and we tried to "fill the frame" with the important visuals instead of blank space. It's also hard to see, but we used tripods at all times - apart from when it wasn't necessary, when Elijah was walking down the police station corridor.
In our prelim task, we actually didn't include any titling, which obviously makes a huge difference when creating a film.
We created our title "Elijah" through the arts of Photoshop, and then made it shake with one of the effects on Final Cut. This worked well as it wasn't too over the top, but also had conventions of a thriller movie.
We used a black background with rather slender text with glowing red around the white font. This has connotations of being evil and dark. Red symbolises lots of things, such as, passion, love, anger, hate, evil and blood. But in this instance, we tried to get across the evil and bloody side of the colour red.
This has been a major improvement as we didn't have any sort of titling in our prelim.
As you can see in the screenshot below, we filmed our preliminary task in a classroom in college, which wasn't very authentic, but was very secure.
Holly's dad is in the police force therefore we were lucky to be able to film in a real police station in Croydon. I also learned that establishing shots can be extremely helpful when trying to create the illusion that you are somewhere else entirely, however this illusion didn't really appear in our opening product.
We were also lucky enough to have Holly's dad act for us in our film which made it more authentic. One of the places that we were going to film in we weren't able to which caused a problem for a while - because we weren't quite sure what to do without that scene. We worked around that by improvising and using the back of a golf course at night. This taught me how to use lighting effectively in darkness, and how to improvise when things don't go to plan. A lot more planning went into this, character building and plot building, whereas our preliminary task was completely spontaneous and last minute.
PRELIMINARY PLANNING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iAbh9vHDDY
We got some useful feedback from our class and teachers when we watched the prelims back. This is what we received, which helped us when considering what to do for our next film:
To improve.Framing - some of your medium shots have the top of head out of frame. This does not work. It is fine with real close up work, but not in medium framed work.
Tripod was not used on the CU of door and the shot wobbles as a result - a shame. Always use Tripods unless you have real reason not to.
You MOA of the door opening has too much of a time delay. Holly opens door at pace, and then you have a reverse shot to Alex and then on return to Holly, she is still opening door. Watch again to see the error.
A very good effort - just be careful in how you frame shots in MCU or MS. bring the tripod down a bit to ensure all the subject is in frame.
[You can find these comments on the PRELIMINARY FINAL VIDEO blog page]
In our prelim task, we actually didn't include any titling, which obviously makes a huge difference when creating a film. We created our title "Elijah" through the arts of Photoshop, and then made it shake with one of the effects on Final Cut. This worked well as it wasn't too over the top, but also had conventions of a thriller movie.
We used a black background with rather slender text with glowing red around the white font. This has connotations of being evil and dark. Red symbolises lots of things, such as, passion, love, anger, hate, evil and blood. But in this instance, we tried to get across the evil and bloody side of the colour red.
This has been a major improvement as we didn't have any sort of titling in our prelim.
Good, keep this going. What about the improvements that you made in your titles? or use of sound foleys? Non Diegetic sound?
ReplyDelete