Re Editing

The editing of our latest footage was long and arduous, after deciding to lose our original ending. We eventually found something that would work, putting everything in reverse and speeding it up and back to the final shot of him at the funeral. After deciding this we then got on in a much more uplifted mood.

Shooting New Scenes

After reviewing our first cut of the production a gaining our feedback, we decided to shoot some new scenes thats would make the video that little bit more stranger. We decided to get some shots of some leaves falling up, a shot of me being run over by a car and of some of me going crazy that we could show quick flashes of. We couldn't find a thin enough tree to shake and hope leaves down so we had to gather a large pile and threw them off a tall enough ledge and it worked successfully. The car shot also proved tricky as we had to be quick as to not block any cars from the road as we needed it to look authentic as if it was a road. We managed to get all the shots we needed and added them into our editing line.

Production

During this week we had two days off school. On the Thursday we decided to film our remaining shots. We drove to school and set up our shots including the car crash scene where we see a body lying in front of a car.

We parked the car in the middle of the car park and quickly got in place to film the scene as there was another car coming up behind us and probably wouldn't of wanted to be held up. We successfully got the shot and i had to get in and move my car.



The other shot was of the leaves falling around are character to put in reverse so they look like they are falling off.

Production

After receiving our first cut feedback, we needed to get back into editing and making new shot to film, so we spent most of the lesson planning through them and creating a schedule for the new scenes.



I mainly focused on editing the shots that were deemed good enough to remain in the final cut whilst James and Jon were drawing storyboards and doing the schedule

!st Cut feedback

We displayed our 1st cut of our music video and we were given feedback by our teacher of both the positives and negatives of our production and it was as follows:

Holding Shot Steady


-First zoom out shot on Ashley - re do without the camera jerk, or use montage to cover the unsteady look.


Framing a Shot


-Good shot to open with (close up of Ash)


Appropriate Material


-Use beat at start of the video to link to suitable visual.

-Corridor shot - emphasise that it is strange - use empty corridor twice

-Improve sots by hedge.

-Approaching pump house, interesting - develop this further.

-Ashley's house boring - change.

-Add shot (school) to blank sheet of paper (dinner table shot) - reference to the "streets" video.



Selecting Mise en Scene



-Good noir shadow as Ashley leaves bed.

-Pictures are good ideas, but don't come across them.

-Last shot - good however, perhaps cover Ash with the sheet.



Editing for Meaning



-Start the music after captions.

-Stress the drama of the eyes opening - sound effect beep.

-Sitting down at the table scene - cut out the empty chair part.

-Good transition to school corridor.

-Good effect - paring action with beat in music.


Varied Shot Transitions, Caption and Other FX


-Use reverse effect - Ash moving in one direction, other people moving backwards?

-Leaves falling upwards?



Use of Sound with Images/Editing



-Some good ideas



Overall Comment



-"Good overall idea, but some shots lack impact - go for more strangeness/ weirdness, build up uncertainty in viewers - can they trust what they are feeling? Colour in last shot is good, use spot colour at other points".

1st Cut

Editing

We started editing by setting up a few shots on there own and going through various video effects to get the right kind of sepia we neededfor the whole video. We found a way by putting a tint over the shots and changing the colour and reducing opacity. As i had come up with most of storyboarding ideas i edited most of the shots, where as Jon, returning from his ciesta in the USA, would put the special effects in certain shots at home.

Filming

We eventually got to filming the country scenes and got plenty of shots of the sky to allow Jon, when he returned from his Disneyland romp, to edit in planes flying in every direction.

Filming on Location

After losing Jon, the director, to the charm of DisneylandFlorida, it was left to me and James to recover any chance of finishing filming within the times we had set. We drove out to the industrial estate of Hertford to find the right place to find our wide shot of an open country. We found a bank that elevated us over the road through the grass and we set up camera and set up the tripod, but as we went to turn on the camera, it had not battery, so wewent homeWe then started filming the in-house scenes. We managed togetmost of our shots done within two takes. We found it tricky to get the scene with the television in the background, to get it within the frame at the precise time we needed it to. We also had to put pictures in frames to give the illusion of something being wrong.

First Day of Filming

On our first day of filming we filmed all our in school scenes, we managed to get good cinematic shots, but what we hadn't predicted was that there would be a lot of students moving around the corridors during lesson. As our shots are meant to have the main character on his own, this caused lots of takes to ensue. We also had to make sure that we kept the same shot for each part of the scene when we cut in-between scenes.

Pre-Production

This is us filming our animatic, we set up the tripod to get steady shots but found it was difficult to move around well without missing shots, also whilst in time with the music so we did it handheld instead.
We needed to get good light on the sketched shots so we used our schools new gallery as it has galss roof and we were able to get over cast light on the shots
After filming the animatic we decided we need to edit the song in order to reduce it to the time length we are required to have as it went over the end of our animatic.

Location Spotting

Locations

When we went searching for locations we traveled along some narrow roads out of the way from the main town to reflect the feeling of loneliness we are trying to get across in our music video. We came across a convenient piece of graffiti that says 'Lost Your Way', this fitted our music video so well that we decided touse it in our production.We also used these shots of the road and of thescenes we want to film in reverse to create the effect of something not being right. We decided to uses the small weir to do this as you will only notice the water falling up it if you concentrate on it.

pitch

Stranger things have happened

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production schedule

Production schedule

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Blog feedback for Mrs A 26.09.11

1. Your skills development post needs to have visuals - stills from you Knebworth shoot


2. Your PP pitch is missing


3. Your prod schedule needs uploading


4. You need to blog a summary of progress made last week (week beginning 19th Sept)


5. Your prof product analysis looks good - apart from there instead of their - but needs to show better institutional knowledge of production company - who, how big, what else do they do?

Review of Skill Development June-July 2011

Documentary Skills

As part of our skill development in the documentary genre, we watched the film 'Bowling for Columbine' by Michael Moore. We observed for techniques used by Moore that are common of most documentaries and also for any other personal techniques he used, for example his way of getting in the people's faces about any issues he thinks they are not sorting or taking notice of. We also learnt about the techniques for Vox Pops which are:

- The subject must not look directly into the camera

- The camera angles must switch from left to right

- The subject must be centered in frame

- The subject must answer the exact same question given to other subjects

As part of own research we were instructed to watch a documentary of our own choice and identify the style of it and any techniques we had learnt. For my documentary I chose the Oscar nominated 'Food inc.' The film uses mainly archive footage and has an unseen narrator throughout, with various vox pops of different people with different opinions.

Music Video Skills

As part of our second are to study, we viewed different types of music videos including Chris Cunnighams video for the group Aphex Twin, 'Come to Daddy', and Bjork's music video for 'All is Full of Life', as a way to observe the more obscure and different styles of music videos. For part of our study we used a green screen in class to film us lip synching to The Kinks, 'In the Summertime' as a way of practising the idea of green screen and also to help us with out ability to lip sync successfully.

For our own study we had to watch a music video of any band or group and identify the reasons for its style. I decided watch 'All my Life' by the Foo Fighters. It is a basic rock style video as it features the band playing to a crowd less room on a stage as the lights and special effects provide the awe of the video.

Film Opening - Inspiration

When deciding on a film opening, we watched some clips in class of somefilm openings from two different films, one was 'The Silence of the Lambs' and 'Arlington Road' and this gave us an idea to make the opening shocking or to place a lot of enigma codes. Another influence for our idea was the film 'Se7en' by David Fincher, this film is dark and gritty and also quite psychologically demanding. As this made for a powerful film we wanted to follow this.

For our opening credits we use blood dripping played in reverse as the titles go over the top. We got this idea from something similar in 'Let the Right One In'. It seemed like quite and odd and disturbing opening as seeing something like blood and moving up instead of down is unnatural and would reflect the film as a whole.

We also wanted to make this film quite vivid and gory to make an impact on what the audience remembers, similarly in the opening of 'Arlington Road', this lead us onto thechoice of using Twisted Pictures as out distribution company. This company are famous for the 'Saw' franchise, and so we wanted people to recognise what kind of film this might be.

Props and Locations

Props

• Cup
• Sink
• Phone

Locations

• Ashley Morris' House
• The Chauncy School

Film opening evaluation

Film opening evaluation

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The Break Up

During production of the film opening there were some problems with one of the team members, it caused the rest of the team to fall behind and then made the choice to split into a team of 3 and a team of 1. James, Jon and I continued with our work whilst Sam used the same footage and similar ideas and work from us to use as his own production and so this is why we have the same type of product on both teams.

Film Opening - Rough Cut Feedback

Our feedback from our rough cut gave us these points:

Good Points

* Sound

* Cuts

* Choice of Mise en Scene

* Interesting camera angles

Bad Points

* Out of frame shots

* More Sounds

* Lighting in some scenes

From this we will try to incorporate the feedback into our continuing edit of the production.