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!

Character Types

For Mrs Francis, we were told to search for a British Film and write about the types of characters that appeared in the film.

Theorist Valdimir Propp looked at the characters in stories, and stated there were eight basic characters in the traditional narrative that we can transpose to film.

According to Propp, the characters are:

• The hero - the seeker, the major protagonist
  
• The false hero - tries to trick the hero or audience
  
• The donor - helps the hero with extra information
• The princess - the prize and possibly the victim or target of the villain
• The father - gives out an award at the end of the quest
• The helper - gives the hero information to help them complete the task
• The dispatcher - sends the hero out on his quest

When put into pairs, we were not sure which film to choose at first, as there are so many to choose from. We looked on a website for a list of British Films, and chose The Golden Compass, as this has a big cast therefore we were sure that we could find one character for each one of Propp's characters.

The Golden Compass

• The Hero - Lyra, as she seeks to begin an amazing adventure in a battle to save her friend, and other missing children.
• The False Hero - Mrs Coulter and the Jordan's vice-chancellor secretly give Lyra a magic golden compass capable of revealing the truth. When Lyra finds out that Mrs Coulter is the leader of the Gobblers, she escapes from her house.
• The Donor - With the help of Lorek Byrnison, Lyra goes ahead of the Gyptians to a village, where she finds Tony Makarios and learns that the Gobblers are cutting children's demons away from them.
• The Princess - Roger Parslow, the Jordan College kitchen boy, who is Lyra's good friend and playmate. Lyra believes he has been stolen by the Gobblers.
• Billy Costa - Ma Costa's son, who appears to have been taken by the Gobblers.
• The Father - We could not find such a character.
• The Helper - Master of Jordan, the ranking scholar of Jordan College, who feels responsible for raising and protecting Lyra.
• The Dispatcher - no one, Lyra goes herself to find her friends and is not sent by anyone.

I enjoyed this task very much, as it was interesting to see how Propp's theory is actually true, and i will certainly not be watching another film without looking out for each of these character types!