Last post!

Just a closing post to say how much I've actually enjoyed the first year of media! hopefully everyone will do well enough to get through to A2.. Big thankyou to Miss Foster and Mr Saunders for all their support and time. Maybe not a thanks to Miss Foster for embarrassing me majourly in assembly, but here's the last bit of work she put together for the assembly, last use of iMovie for the year!

Media Presentation

Today everyone got together in the media department and we all saw each others videos, all of year 12 and 13. A load of others from the school also viewed them.. After the embarrassing speech Millie and I pulled off and the horrific embarrassed giggling the whole way through our film, we all got through it and it's sad to say that the film is finished for this year! After watching all of the year 13 music video's I'm looking forward to what we'll get up to next year.. Well done to everyone for getting their films done and they actually all looked really good.

Evaluation

Here's the final piece of footage we filmed as a group for AS media.  Here's the questions we answered
1. In what ways does your film opening use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

2. How does your film opening represent particular social groups?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your film opening and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your film opening?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this film opening?

7. Looking back at your prelim task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final film opening?


It was extremely hard to keep a straight face, and the amount of outtakes we had were ridiculous, but we finally pulled it off, and Millies great editing skills topped it off. Thanks to my group for putting up with me for the last year!

Evaluation's

Some point this week we're hoping to create our evaluation to finish off AS course of media! After watching a few others it may be a challenge for our group as we're not the type to sit there and be serious. We'll have to answer some questions and record ourselves discussing them in detail.



Here's an evaluation that will be similar to the one we will film. Hopefully we will edit parts and sounds of our film in to the evaluation, and hoping it will be just as much of a success.

Prey For Her

'Prey for her' was chosen by us all. It's a bit of play on words as we have a religious meaning with the bible quote at the start of our film although it's about a young girl being 'preyed' on. So we did not make a spelling mistake as a couple of people mentioned! It was simply a play on words that we thought would be effective.

Final draft

2 lessons to go and less than a week until the deadline.. I cannot believe how fast that has gone and how the number of days have dropped at rapid pace on Ms Foster's 'countdown' on her blog.. So after thinking the video was not uploaded, it is! so here's our final draft.. I personally thought we should have some sort of sound of the title but I've been voted against and it is true that the silence creates an eery theme and tense atmosphere... the silence definitely puts me at unease. I think we're finally done now, no more tweeks to be made.

Questionnaire

 A while ago I carried out a questionnaire through facebook messaging and other social networking sites on the subject of film and genre to ten people. I asked people who was within the suitable age group of around 15-30 (our film's target audience) to get a correct perspective. I asked 15 questions in regards to genre and films etc in order to create a successful film opening. I made sure to ask a mix of female and male to keep a fair balance of gender.

  These are the questions I asked:

1. Male/Female?
2. Age?
3. Favourite movie genre?
4. How often do you watch films?
5. Least favourite movie genre?
6. Do the actors in a film influence you to watch a film?
7. Which age certificate do you mostly watch?
8. Name three elements you think a film must ideally contain:
9. Where do you tend to watch most films?
10. Does the advertisement of a film matter before you watch it?
11. How important is the first 2 minutes of a film to you?
12. Who do you watch films with?
13. What is your favourite film?
14. Why is it your favourite film?
15. If you could go behind the scenes of any film, which would it be?

Here are the least favourite Genre's I found most common, mainly being sci-fi, which also balances out the reflection of the Favoured genres.

Here's the favourite Genre's. As shown, Comedy and horror were the most favoured and Sci Fi rarely was used as a favourite.

Here I've used two pie charts to reflect the Least and Most favoured genre's throughout the ten people I questioned. The majority were split between horror and comedy for their most favourite but also were split between action and Sci-Fi for their least favourite between the genders. The majority of males seemed to choose Horror or Action as their most favourite. 

 The majority said they watched a film around 1-3 times a week of which was their favourite Genre with mainly an age restriction of 15. All of them agreed that the opening to a film is the most important part as "otherwise I will fall asleep" and "It's what attracts me to carry on watching".

 A huge mixture of responses on the advertising side of things. Most of the younger people I interviewed agreed it is important but doesn't change their opinion on the film, although some said "It doesn't make a difference, although it gives me a bit of a background information to the plot".

  It seemed as though the majority of the interviewees found the first 2 minutes very important to their overall opinion of the film. Also a good looking man (Robert Pattinson came up twice) enhances their choice of movie.

The favourite films were a big bundle of different ones; The Hole, Saw 3, Superbad, The Hangover, Mean Girls, Fast and Furious 2, Green Street, Lord of the Rings, The witches and Kickass.

After reviewing the answers and pie charts to my questionnaire, I think it's safe to say we chose a genre that was based around the genre that people generally like to see. As our film would be rated a 15, the right aged audience would be able to see our film.

Film

With just over a week to go I think it's fair to say we've pretty much finished our film. We have all decided that the moving sky shot was a good shot but it had no relevance to our film and made our title 'Prey For Her' seem boring.. So, after a lot of fidgeting around with it, we have now taken out the moving sky shot and bought in the walking shot of Annika walking along the priory steps, slown it down and added our Title seperatley then faded to black with just 'Her' on screen. Overall I think this actually makes the beginning of the film seem less amateur! So I'm happy with our choice.

Here's a couple of screen shots I took after finally working it out on my mac (for any of you confused on your mac its command, shift, 4) and it's showing our new title which we all prefer and agree it works better. I've also included the fading of the title in to the black screen. This is probably my favourite shot of the title!

Film

So it's got to the point when we're stuck on what to edit. With the deadline 2 weeks on wednesday we ended up filming for Andrea and Charlotte which was quite amusing and resulted in us running after 4 busses.  We now have a title that we think we're calling our film which is

Second draft

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After Yasemin, Heather and I edited during our lesson on friday we've got our second draft done... There's still bits that need perfecting but we're definently close to the end. It's nice to get the hole in the middle animation now in our film- hope you guysss like it!

Hole in the middle

Here's our first animation of 'hole in the middle'. We're using the 0 flickering and a voiceover of 'hole in the middle' in amusing voices. The photo was taken by Millie so clearly not copied, and obviously it's my famous face in the photo. So here we have our fun production company along with our 'blocken clock archive' more serious production company.

Animation

Here's a screenshot of our 'indie horror' animation at the beginning of our film named 'Broken Clock Archive'. We've edited the font so it flickers which fits into our 'physiological' themed film. The sound we've used is a scratchy sound that we recorded from the authorised website LGFL Audio Work. The photo was originally taken by Millie for her photography but it fit our theme perfectly and the font was downloaded and then tweeked on iMovie. Our second animation will be on our second draft as we finished it today!

Justification

So throughout our film we have used a flashback of this cat.. It's actually Jades cat which got in the shot whilst filming our initial idea. Once watching back the footage we really loved the shot of the cat and they refer to Devil's these days so it all links in to our film- in a way it's fate forcing the cat upon our film! Also 'The Rite' used cats throughout their film (which I shall analyse this week) which was a weird coincidence.. So yeah, we've used a flashback of this cat which is in reference to Devil's and also childhood which links in nicely to the next flashback of the young girl..

First Draft

Friday's lesson was probably our most productive yet.. Heather, Yasemin and I finished off our production animation and then got the first draft uploaded to our Youtube account. It's nice to finally have a whole film to now work from and nice to know we're heading somewhere! I'm going to have to blog about the sound we used for the beginning, but do not threat, I will get to it!

Car shot

So as you can see to the left we've finally added the last bits to our film now and this shot is a car shot we've added. We've split the clip so the second clip is slown down, and the clips have the same question audio as the previous interview question- it shows what Annika is thinking of. It then goes on to the long shot of Annika on road.

Film

After adding the last bits of our footage today we've decided to have the last framing of Millie (Annika) with no background noise. It shows her isolation and it makes sense, otherwise it would ruin it. We've also put it a car shot of Millie (Annika) looking out the window with the interview questions as the noise-over- it shows a reflection and it's quite a nice shot to break down the hectic beginning. We've also decided on our logo which we'll hopefully put in during the week which can then be blogged about!

New footage

So tomorrow Mac 1 are finally going to add the remaining bits to our film. I hope for all of our sakes that it's good footage and it wasn't a wasted 30 minutes being scared of intimidating people outside a priory.. hopefully we can get a first draft up this week or next

Devil

Very very disappointed.. Last night I made my friend order 'Devil' off of Virgin Media (which cost 4 pound) and after watching the credits (which I've already seen...)fell asleep! Very disappointed.. but I WILL watch it soon!

The Rite

So looks like as a Media group we're going to see The Rite... I'm quite scared to be honest and I refuse to sit next to Heather as I know she'll end up digging her nails in to my arm. Here's the trailor.. I'm quite bad with horror films as I have a tend to scream and jump out of my seat, so this shall be fun......

Archive from Southgate filming

Heather and I attempting to film from the middle of the street...

Millie being Southgate's worst actor

Probably my favourite shot of the day..

Where the magic happened

Us all looking fine on a tuesday morning

The priory!

Filming

So finally we got to The Priory in Southgate and filmed the last of what we needed.. It was not easy I must admit- apart from the fact 3 of us were very tired from the night before, Yasemin's dad drove us there and had more courage than any of the 4 of us put together. Embarrassingly enough, we got out the car looking all shifty and got the shots we needed and pretty much ran away as people asked us to stop filming as its 'confidential'... Hopefully we got shots that look good and a big thanks to Aldo!

"Art of the Title"

So I've just woke up and thought I'd watch some film openings on "The Art of the Title"... Well i've come across 'Halloween' and I'm pretty stunned with the difference in technology.. 

This is literally it... It's simply some eery typical horror music with a pumpkin (being zoomed in on) and a slight change in colours of font sometimes.. It's very very very basic; I'm going to blame technologies!

This one clearly has better credits- It's more interesting to watch and actually has something moving around the screen.. It's clever how they've done it as it looks like an underground themed title..

Outtakes

  Came across this on Heather's blog- So here's some outtakes which (to echo Heather) aren't very funny but just showing the struggle what working with Millie is like...

Labels

So Ms Foster had a chat with all the groups on Friday and from now on my blogging will be consistently amazing- like myself... She mentioned Labels so that's what I spent my Friday afternoon/Saturday before work doing.

Narrative so far

1.) Black screen with bible quote and Mr Saunders' voiceover- goes on for about 7-8 seconds


2.) Flicker effect, lights turn to Annika (Millie) sitting on a stall in the interview room with credit to the right of her face- currently this is Millie's name.


3.) Shot of black and white sky- transitioned so it's faster with the title of our film.


4.) Straight into first interview question with English subtitles. Voiceover's are heard than straight into Annika's thoughts and flashbacks with reversed noises. Flashbacks include Annika walking in the snow at night, her hand shaking with a cigarette on the balcony- this one is out of focus then goes back to focused to show she's coming back to present moment. Credits appear throughout shots.


5.) Back into the interview with another question and English subtitles


All of our film is in black and white in Swedish but with English subtitles.


 We're using a font that we downloaded which is similar to one from Se7en with similar 'flickering' credits. We have 2 more scenes to shoot and then we're done shooting !

Narrative so far

1.) Black screen with bible quote and Mr Saunders' voiceover- goes on for about 7-8 seconds

2.) Flicker effect, lights turn to Annika (Millie) sitting on a stall in the interview room with credit to the right of her face- currently this is Millie's name.

3.) Shot of black and white sky- transitioned so it's faster with the title of our film.

4.) Straight into first interview question with English subtitles. Voiceover's are heard than straight into Annika's thoughts and flashbacks with reversed noises. Flashbacks include Annika walking in the snow at night, her hand shaking with a cigarette on the balcony- this one is out of focus then goes back to focused to show she's coming back to present moment. Credits appear throughout shots.

5.) Back into the interview with another question and English subtitles

All of our film is in black and white in Swedish but with English subtitles.

 We're using a font that we downloaded which is similar to one from Se7en with similar 'flickering' credits. We have 2 more scenes to shoot and then we're done shooting !

Filming

So today we've finally decided to film on tuesday in the half term. We've placed a slight bet with Ms Foster so we actually do get to filming, and I refuse to let her have 2 hours of our time after school so here we go with filming outside Southgate Priory on Tuesday. You all have something to look forward to now!

Animation

So after the numerous lessons our group have spent deciding which animation to use, Millie has put together this






Also we're looking for a suitable one to come shortly after that fits into the indie thriller type genre we're going for so we may look into using this or something similar which Millie and Yasemin took at forty hall

Religious Quotes

  After Ms Foster made the class watch the beginning to 'Devil', our group found it very appropriate to look in to religious quotes as 'Devil' used.  


I think we've all now agreed on what we're going to use:


Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
and then our Swedish translation:

Därför lät Gud dem åt orenhet genom lustar sina egna hjärtan, för att förnedrar sina kroppar med varandra:

Som bytte ut Guds sanning mot lögn, de dyrkade och tjänade det skapade i stället för skaparen, som är välsignad i evighet. Amen.


This is all to be a deep male voiceover, and I think we're using Mr Saunders...
In reference to the opening, the sound at the beginning reminds me of something like Jaws, but the upside down landscape is just a brilliant idea, obviously not as great as ours though...

One hour photo

So yesterday I resorted to Sky Anytime and watched this film, featuring Robin Williams called 'One Hour Photo'. The plot was pretty amazing, and they couldn't have chose a better actor to play the main 'Sye'. The film started with an interview then a flashback, which I thought was weird as it's similar to my group's idea. I specificly noticed how the director uses white to symbolise 'Sye', throughout, all 'Sye' wears is white, and the mise-en-scene is usually white and simple around him.


This scene was probably the weirdest part of the film for me. The shelves being empty reflects his empty life, and the white resembles how sad he is.

I love this shot. Firstly it reflects the whole theme of the film, and the lens is more of a gun shot. The way 'Sye' is obsessed with this family is extremely creepy.
Kudo's to whoever did the opening credits, I loved the flashing like it was taking a photo of each credit.

Opening credits

So here I am, again, with the opening credits of Se7en on my blog. But as we're looking at editing our film now we're all talking about the opening credits. Personally i'm a fan of how they just randomly have the title 'Se7en' in between other credits, it's less in your face- not sure if others in my group are a fan of it but we'll try things out.
We're hoping to film outside the priory on wednesday, asking millies mum to do a few driving shots shall be fun!

When I don't go out on a friday night

Please don't take this seriously in any way shape or form, i was just messing about with the iMovie on my new mac and came across the voiceover so thought it'd be a laugh
No doubt everyone thinks i'm a lunatic now, but yeah.. sorry for anyone who takes offence that millie smothered her face in poo and wee in advance

Millie's first ever ever ever edit

Found this hanging about on my youtube account and I found it majorly hilarious. Millie has clearly always been the actress in disguise. The editing is also very beautiful..
And also, a big thanks to Ms.Foster who set us up today.. (sarcasm intended)

NEW MACS!

Thank the lord to our AMAZING Headteacher, we now have the most hugest of macs in our media room. I can not wait to watch the final piece on it, the screen is amazing- A round of applause to Ms. Foster for keeping it a secret as I know she was literally bursting to tell us as she made us run up to the media today at lunch..
also, well done to Joely for finalllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy editing the BFI video, and apologies to my weirdness..

Photography archive

Photographic Archive: Filming Day 4 on Prezi

So here's some photos we took during our filming. Obviously in the trademark black and white of ours. Millie put this together so Kudo's to her! I'm still very sorry for whoever's doll that was... the can of coke is still legible to claim.

Interview Scene

So this afternoon, we finally filmed our interview part for our 2 minute opening. It was a very frustrating/hilarious time but we finally got there; it was all archived on a flip (donated by a generous Ms Foster). This is the first time i've edited a whole thing on my own, and on my new mac, so i'll call this rough..... but yeah, here's what we got up to this afternoon. Tears, laughter and swearing (apologies for that).


p.s if this doll is anyone's out there.. we're sorry and we will buy you a can of coke to say sorry ..

Southgate Priory

As part of our 2 minute opening, we're hoping to film outside this priory placed in Southgate. We've now FILMED our interview, after 2 long hours of getting over the embarrassment  of being serious in front of each other, and actually filming without giggling the magic happened. The archiving will be on shortly after I edit for the first time on my brand new mac!

Snow!

Once again, the flip has been treated kindly this Christmas. Here's Millie making the most of the snow and a few extra bits that we thought looked good to be filmed in the snow

Snorricam test

So here's what I call my 'friend' in the snow looking horrificly swedish and crazy. Great invention of hers that we should be using in our film!

Script and Storyboard!

So this is our script draft, and as you can see it's only rough. It's not yet finalised but we have been looking at translation on the internet and what not. So yeah, here it is- hopefully our film will be a lot less rough than this script!

And here's our amazing storyboard! This is also not yet finalised, but as you can see is very artisticly superb!