Friday, 25 February 2011

Thriller Opening - Malice

Preliminary exercise


Criticisms of Preliminary Exercise
  • There is not enough variation of camera angles, more camera angles should be added to make it more interesting.
  • There are lots of continuity errors. If it was filmed again we would check that there are no major continuity issues such someone's feet being in the shot.
  • Consistency in sound is also a downfall in this production. Next time we should check to make sure that there is complete silence and no background noise before filming.

Thursday, 3 February 2011

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?





How does your media product represent particular social groups?



What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Who would be the audience for your media product?
Both Hayley and Dave are good examples of the audience for my film. My target audience age range is between 15 and 25, which both are. I found out my target audience age by doing a research questionnaire. Hayley and Dave both have part- time jobs and therefore would have enough money to watch my film, both also enjoy thrillers, which is also important.

How did you attract/address you audience?




What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?



Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Saturday, 1 January 2011

Filming and Editing Diary


Day 1: We arrived at our filming location, Dan's house, at 5 o'clock so we had time to set up our equipment and plan what we were going to film. Nigel, our main character, arrived late home from work which was unexpected and delayed our filming. Luckily we had other shots we could capture before Nigel returned home. It had snowed during the afternoon and there was snow on the ground so we refrained from filming the car scenes until the snow had cleared.

Day 2: We arrived later on the second day of filming as there was less filming to do. We filmed the remaining outside shots and shots that involved Janet as her scenes were the shortest shots and the easiest to do. There were no major problems and everything ran smoothly.

Day 3:  We exported the tape to the Adobe Premier and logged our tapes and filled in our logging sheets. We then began cutting each individual shot and getting rid of the unusable footage.

Day 4: We saved each individually cut shot to our bin so we they were saved properly and all in one place. As we moved shots to the bin, 2 members of the group would be looking at titles to use for our Thriller opening.

Day 5:  We began watching each shot in chronological order and deciding which shots were best to use. We then dragged them onto the line to begin building up our rough cut. At the same time we also focussed on finding appropriate sound effects for shots where the sound was not clear enough such as the door slamming.                                                                                                                               Day 6: After submitting our rough cut, we began trying to cut our production down to 2 minutes. We did this by getting rid of unnecessary shots which we thought did not add anything to the finished product and would not affect the storyline. At the same time we constructed an audience feedback questionnaire.

Day 7:  We then collaborated the royalty free music, sound effects and film for our final product. We then watched  the film, made sure it ran smoothly and polished any minor errors. We dealt with continuity errors, which should have been done earlier but were only noticed at the last minute. We then added the titles, which we later changed to suit the narrative better.

Day 8: We polished our final product and changed the size and font of our titles again to make the opening sequence flow better. We added a zoom effect at the end of our film as we felt there wasn't enough tension built at the end and it was an anti-climax before the zoom was added. We then saved and exported our final product and uploaded it to Youtube.