Media update from South Africa

In the last week of term, we managed to add a voice over to our film and it is now on YouTube.
I think it works really well and we all had an equal amount to say, after editing our film we found it fairly easy to just drop the voice onto the original film, making sure we created a new copy first! We also had to insert a break at the start (the black bit) in order to fit it all in! This gave us extra time to read so we didnt feel rushed.
This went towards our evaluation, we are still deciding on the next element to put into our film. Some other groups have decided to do a DVD of outtakes. We would do this, however we do not have enough footage to make it worthwhile.
We are still contemplating different methods to use and working out which one would be the most worthwhile.
When we go back after Easter we will have to come up with a quick decision to make it as good as possible as we don't really have much time left!

On the other side of media, we are going through the different film industries, in the exam, we are supposed to stick to one film industry that we have studied, either Working Title or Film 4. I personally think i am going to stick with Film 4, as i think that they are easier to evaluate in the four sections, audience, distribution etc. I also prefer some of the films they have produced such as Yasmin and This is England.

This is the directors commentary version of our film.

FINISHED!!!

We finished our film the other day and it is on YouTube, we managed to finish within the time allocated and we are in the process of recording a voice over for our film, like a directors commentary which will be added to our DVD of 'extras'. We will also put in outtakes that we could have used in our film, then probably talk about why we didn't use these particular shots.
I am not quite sure if our film turned out how we had all imagined it, I like it, and i believe that it works quite well, however i do think we could have added another element to add more suspense to the film, for example, a heartbeat? This seems quite popular amongst the rest of my class and works quite well.
Other than this I think our film turned out very well, and I am looking forward to making the DVD of extras!
Will post link to film as soon as possible!

Progress

We have made some progress since my last post

Liv (girl in my group) has found some music that fits in perfectly with our two minute clip, so we are planning on using two different tracks and combining them to give it a bit of variety.

Had a play around with Live Type today, we are trying to copy the style of This is England, where they open the film then have a black screen with the name of production company etcetera.
We managed to get the first one done "Unknown Pictures Production" - the reason for the name of this is our film is called L'Ignoto, which means Unknown in Italian.
It looks good, and also we can use them for the boring bits, just to add some different things to look at so its not a straight two minute clip with no distractions.

We will hopefully finish putting music on by the end of the week, if not then by next wednesday.
Still have quite a bit to do though. We are going to do a voice over, or a "Directors Commentary" which should be fun, then once thats done we will have to put the dvd together and add a few more bits!

But everything is going okay so far :)

L'ignoto - Progress

Since publishing the story board, we have filmed, edited and are now currently looking at music to go with our two minute introduction.

The Filming

The filming went surprisingly well. All of our group had a free one wednesday afternoon, so we headed to the train station and started straight away. We tried as well as we could to stick to our story board, however in practice, we found that the camera angles we had used were now not the best ones. So there have been changes to our storyboards however we believe this was for the best. For example, we were going to have Joe (Santo) walk outside the tunnel by the train station, we then saw bikes inside the tunnel and decided that this would be a nice angle to get. When Joe was planning on walking down the corridor inside the train station, we thought that this was too long, and needed altering, so Liv was quick to notice a dripping pipe, which we got a shot of, which followed on nicely from the shot of Joe.
When filming strangers on the platform, we asked for permission then began filming, this was quite successful as they acted very natural. We managed to get the shot of Joe getting on the train in one, just as well as we only had one chance, and this worked well, just as well as a few minutes later we were asked to leave the station!

Editing

This was the quickest part of the process, as we made sure that when filming, we had plenty of film to filter through. I believe that the clips follow on very well from each other, and it all goes together very well. We still need to add the credits and titles to the end of our film, however i believe that this will not take long.

Music

This is what we are currently doing now. We started on the sites that our media teacher; Mr Van Straten recommended to us, however, this took a long time to go through and we did not actually find any that we thought were appropriate. We then went onto MySpace. We began to found this very long and time consuming. So we ended up using Garage Band. I have never used this before however i think it is quite simple. We began looking through suitable sounds today and are quickly picking up appropriate ones.

So thats what we have been doing for the past three weeks, hopefully within the next three weeks we will be finished :)

L'ignoto final information

This is all of the information on our film: L'ignoto

Get your own - Open publication

Preliminary Task

This is my preliminary task.

We had to film someone walking in, sitting down, having a conversation, and walking out again.

I tried to vary the shots i used, mainly mid shots, wide shots, establishing shots and close ups.

I really enjoyed doing this, though our group suffered some problems when transferring it to the computers and had to re shoot three times, however overall all of ours turned out well.

I look forward to doing the two minute introduction task which we have already started preparing for...

Storyboards :) And Christmas Holidays

Got my storyboard up, excuse the terribly bad drawings.

This is the storyboard for our "walk in - walk out" film.

Its the end of Christmas holidays now, sadly!

I have watched a fair few films over christmas, but yet again i have been noticing many mistakes in films, especially Love Actually and Sex and the City, its terrible!

We also had to write about our two minute group films. I enjoyed this as it was interesting expanding our film. I also had to write a review on This is England for Mrs Francis, which i also enjoyed, though i found it hard to find all the facts and figures!