Signing Off

I'm about to submit my blog to my teacher, who will change my password so i can't access it while its being marked.

I've had a lot of fun this year,
i hoped you liked my blog :)

Goodbye

More Feedback

I decided to post our film to my Facebook wall, asking for people to review it.


Here are some of the things people said:


Editing 8
Sound 7
Camerawork 8
Control of Narrative 8.5
Characters 8
Good shot variety, good continuity style editing, good use of non-diegetic sound (especially that jazzy piano tune).


 Editing 8
Sound 9
camera work 9
control of narrative 10
characters 9

Editing 8
Sound 10
Camera work 9
Control of Narrative 9
Characters 9
All in all, it's an excellent concept and you pulled if off very well
There were some lines of dialogue that were a bit off, like when the main character left the house, the delivery was a bit off
And it could've done without the last line, I think that it might've been a more powerful image if there had just been the main character with his smile on etc.
To be honest, better than I imagined it might end up

All in all I feel we achieved our goals. Everyone seems to like it, and the views are moving quite fast on youtube (unfortunately on our first draft as its been on there for longer.)   

Even though i can't physically watch it one more time, because of the amount of times i've seen it already, i'm proud of it. 

        

Evaluation

We Evaluated our project. We had some initial issues with rehearsing the questions, but we managed to get it filmed and edited in one day.

The Delivery Boy

We finally did it!

Its been weeks and weeks of sheer effort, but its paid off.
I genuinely believe one of the most stressful things anyone can ever do is make a film. Nevertheless, the stress and emotion doesn't matter anymore because we can call this film our own, and we're happy with our creation.

Render

We're done.

The film is rendering in high quality. the only thing left to do is film the evaluation, and then we can close the project. I cannot describe how exited i am

Shot List

This is the shot log of every clip we used in the opening sequence. On the day of the shoot, we went back to mine and viewed every shot, making a note of which ones to use and which ones to dismiss. This made the edit considerably easier.

Pictures

Georgia Hard at work

Luke working on the writing side of the group blog

Daniel's sticky note approach to research

Alice in the studio

Editing face

Luke caught off guard in the studio

Showcase

This is just one of the 8 reveiws we got back. The rest can be found on the group blog ( mediagp.blogspot.com )

Most of the reviews were pretty much the same at this one,

but we did gather some criticisms which lead us to change  part of the film.

It needed music, 

The voice-over needed to be redone, 

and the clips have to be cut down considerably 

We thought that all points that the class made were constructive and insightful.

Film Ident

Me, Luke and Alice made a film ident for our opening sequence. Georgia couldn't make it to the studio today.



We've decided to call our film production "Phantom Productions" because was electrocuted by a "Fantom" powered microphone in the studio on the first day of the edit. It has a nice personal feel and a backstory, so we decided we'd name it that.

Narration Transcript

This is the transcript of the narration i recorded for my film. We later decided it needed some serious work and we called this one our "first draft"

First Draft, film

We kept on editing in school and in the studio, and we've finished a rough copy of the film.




When we looked at it a couple of times, we realized that it was quite boring. I did the voice over when i was very tired, and it sounds monotone. it also doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
some of the shots are too long, so we've decided to meet up and finalize the edit.

We will change the length of shots, and cut out shots. We'll record the narration again, and we'll record our music and put that on the piece.

Edit 4

We all met up today at the studio, to discuss and make changes to the film

I made a list of jobs for everyone, so that we could move as quickly as possible.
For instance,
Me and Alice spent the first hours creating the soundtrack, while Georgia and Luke checked the edit for continuity and bad transitions.
After we'd done that Alice and Georgia would work on syncing up the music to the timeline, while me and luke rewrote the voice over.
Georgia and me then recorded the voice-over, while Luke and Alice put markers on the timeline.
We all then gathered round the edit station and watched it come together.

We decided to save these changes, and then cut down the actual clips. It took 6 hours in total, plus an extra hour to make an opening ident.

Film Music

I came up with an idea for the music to our film. i recorded this as a first draft

Audience Reviews

The conclusions that were drawn from all these reviews were that the voiceover isn't effective enough, and in some parts it didn't make sense. We need music. Everybody in the class discussion felt like there should be music throughout most of the piece. They also thought that the driving sequence was too long, and we needed to cut out a lot of shots.

On a positive note, everyone loved our film. There was lots of talk about how good it was, and how the camera angles and storyline were very effective. 

Luke developed a system to work out the average score for the film, which was 8.2.

we were all extremely happy with it.

Edit 3

We had another 'editing sunday'.

This was a very productive day, seeing as we can't get much work done in school because the edit stations are shared. We avoided this problem by having the work saved on a portable hard drive, so that any mac with Final Cut could read and edit our clips. This let us work in school and at my studio. We decided to make use of the sundays because everyone was free.

We managed to get down the basic structure of it all, we took it in turns to edit various sections.
Heres some screenshots of what we did

On this picture in the centre box, you can see an audio file as we chop the bad bits out and adjust the volume

We're adjusting the colour on this clip, as the white balance was slightly off, and i wanted to have the shaving foam and the shirt very white to symbolise purity, as if he hadn't done anything wrong.

This is just before he cuts himself. We needed to change the colour again to make the blood look real enough. We had used food colouring on the edge of a razor, and it was far too bright for our liking.

                            This is our entire audio track. As you can see we have a lot to work with.

Edit 2

We edited for another 5 hours today, we managed to get a lot of work done. It was productive as everyone had the same ideas, and it just seemed to click all of a sudden.
We've done about half of the edit now, and we're happy with what we have.

Initial Mindmap

This was our initial mind-map which prompted the first group meeting. We each brainstormed out individual ideas, then compromised with each other as we combined them together. That way everyone was happy, and the film would be equally shared.

Film Idea

Georgia came up with the idea of finding a body in a car boot. This seemed to get everyones attention, because its easy to pull off, with minimal costs, and because i can drive we could film it on location wherever we wanted. I added the idea that we should present him as a normal man, who leads a secret life of murder. Luke added the idea that he worked for someone else, and was meerly doing a job of kidnapping someone, and delivering them to a destination. We combined all these ideas and came up with a script and shot list:

The title sequence opens to a man shaving in the mirror. This presents him as a normal man. He then does his tie in the mirror. this will be a 180* shot, which is extreamly hard to pull off with a mirror. He then grabs his car keys, sais goodbye to his wife and gets in his car. He drives to an industrial state, where he pulls up and opens his boot. Theres a body in the back, screaming and struggaling to get out. this is where the sequence ends.

Edit adjustments

I started to adjust the edited section of out movie. I didn't edit any new footage, because it would of been without the groups consent.
I mainly mixed the audio, recolored the clips, and tightened the cuts. It took a while to render because i used a my own high quality camera. After 4 hours I called it a day

Edit 1, take 2

We got everything plugged in and working, and we began the edit.

The first thing we did was go through every clip as a team and mark every out-take, and eliminated them from the media bin, to make things less confusing.
We began the edit. 5 hours later we had a rough copy of the first quarter.
It was the we started to see the magnitude of the task ahead.