New Location Reflection.

As Jacks previous post stated , we are now using the area under our school stage as a location for our hostage scene. The scene itself is ideal , with 3 different lights allowing us to play with the lighting displayed on our footage. This is helpful since the light can convey feelings and add atmosphere to the footage.

I hope we can edit this new footage successfully into our older footage and have confidence in our ability to make this opening work. Some of the shots we have captured are superb , and I feel we are in a decent position to make a very good go at our final piece.

JC - Wednesday lesson progress update

Playing back the footage and beginning to edit our piece yesterday was an arduous task; it raised questions about our idea, and about the length of time that we had given each shot on the screen. One positive that we were able to draw from this was that we had plenty of footage, and so we could in effect cherry pick the best of it.

Today was a much more successful day than tuesday; we looked at our footage again and found that the parts of the narrative with which we were pleased had footage that we would be happ to use. We also consulted with Miss Fernandez, and found her advice to be helpful. She suggested that the hostage scene - the part that we were least convinced by - could be filmed in school under the main stage, erasing the need for us to make another trip to Sevenoaks to film.

Mr Fiveash also reassured us that our idea would be fine, and helped us on the editing front. During the lesson Timo and Simon went on a reccie of our new hostage location, and filled out the required call sheets and risk assessments in order for us to use the equipment tomorrow. I continued to edit the footage that we intend to use still, and we have collaborated to make sure our filming tomorrow is seamless.

We may struggle to produce a rough cut by tomorrow's lesson, however we will go into that lesson much more confident within our project than we did today, and our aim will be to continue that for the rest of the project and end our coursework particularly strongly.

ST - Monday Shoot - Afterthoughts

The shoot started very well, at a good pace, with quick succession of successful shots involoving Jack. The advantage of shooting on a Monday evening were clear,with less people on the street, meaning we could quickly film without waiting for the public to be out of shot, also the weather was slightly overcast and darker, adding to the atmosphere.

As the shoot continued insiode the warehouse, it was harder to get as quality shots in quickly, due to the small space. However there was good a good momentum in filming. Unfortunately Timo had to leave before the filming was fully done, which meant we had to film as mush with Timo as possible and film other scenes with Timo later on after he had gone. This was fairly hard and made the continuity very muddled and caused us to miss time certain shots and missed some shot entirely, which if left out, will leave the piece not making any sense.

After viewing the shots, many of them are not enkeeping with the genre and the story and continuity make no sense. This leaves us in a difficult position as to how to change the shots, script and location in under a week.

Group - Animatic

Following what we believed to be a successful storyboarding session, we decided to make our animatic; this involved us filming the shots on our storyboard, and then exporting them from our camera to the computer, where we then edited them.

The whole process of producing and editing our animatic has been extremely useful. Drawing out the pictures allowed us to get an idea of what our idea would look like on screen when we have filmed our footage, whilst the editing stage of the process was helpful because it not only gave us more experience with using premier and the editing tools on it, but also because it allowed us to time the shots as to how we long we would expect each one to last for - this was helpful because we timed each one to be as long as we wanted it to be, and our film came in at two minutes and two seconds, close to the allocated two minutes we have for filming.

Whilst there is a shot that seems as though it is too long (the shot of the protagonist walking to the warehouse), we actually planned this shot earlier in the process to be of short length, but during the editing process decided to make it longer, as after a group discussion, we decided to add in more shots during this sequence, as by this point in our narrative we will have swapped to a linear sequence, meaning that the time we spent in this area needed to be as long as the time we would actually spend if we were to go through the route taken in real time.

The final noteworthy point from our animatic is the final shot, where our title appears. Once we had found our font and applied it to the title slide, we applied a red colour fill-up, connoting blood. Although this was somewhat experimental (as shown by the white border), it is a technique that we may consider when we finally produce our piece.

Planning Shoot for Monday

This evening we plan to shoot the rest of the clips near Jacks warehouse , hopefully this will be our final shoot unless we are not happy with our results. The shooting will consist of the hostage / kidnapped person being held in the warehouse. All shots tonight are either of Jack walking to the location or of the hostage trying to make a getaway afterwards (and the interrogation).

Group - StoryBoard

We have finished our storyboard and will be uploading an animatic of it shortly. We have taken the storyboard on both of our shoots and we feel it has helped us plan our shots , and helped us plan our time more effectively. Jack and Simon drew the storyboard by hand , allowing flexible adjustment with the shots we chose. The final storyboard is a reasonably accurate reflection of what we hope our real footage to contain.

Feedback

Guys - have you not filmed yet? where is the evaluation of shoot? No posts since Wednesday - therefore what did you do in the lesson on Thursday during my absence? You need to get on top of this to achieve a L4

How we decided on our Font

We found the font we have chosen on the website http://www.dafont.com/

The font we chose is called Trashco , a very urban and bold font which is symbolic of the crime infested underworld that is Murder Inc. We feel the font also conveys our thriller style opening , being splattered across the screen , while also holding shape to signify meaning of the title. The title with this font will appear at the end of our clip , when the car boot is sl

ammed to darkness , a very quick transition from the view of the hostage in the boot.

We have not yet decided on the colour of the font , as we are conflicted to what we each feel looks best.

JC - Production Update: Two weeks to go

With just over two weeks left to film and produce our project, here is a brief summary list of the things we will need to ensure are completed in order for us to reach this deadline:

• Produce a script for our film opening, so we clearly know what each character is going to say
• Edit animatic and post blogs on how we created our storyboard and animatic
• Film footage
• Review footage and post what we think could be done to improve our work
• Edit footage

This is a small list of what we need to do, however they content of each point is essential to the completion of our work - in particular, the filming and editing of our footage. In order to make sure this is successful, we will need to shoot more footage than we need to use (and if it comes to the point where we have too many shots, we can cherry-pick the best shots) and make sure at the editing stage that all the footage fits continuity-wise, and that our sounds and titles work well in the piece.

Feedback

While all necessary posts are here, there are 2 vital pieces of feedback:

1. You must demonstrate "excellence in use of ICT" to achieve a L4. You need to redesign your blog, create your own images from your shoot, and go back though posts, visually illustrating research - from simply putting in bold key terms, to images, imbedding clips. Think about web design and how to lay out your research

2. This month - all posts are by Jack?! You should all be posting and also commenting on ALL research submitted

JC - How we upload our footage

Having spent some time mastering the cameras, I thought it would be useful to produce a post on how we upload our footage.

Once we have collected the footage we want to use, we connect the plug to socket and the lead to the charger. the charger then clips in at the end to the camera. Once this is done, we then connect the camera to a USB lead, which should be plugged into the computer.

Once this is done, we turn the camera on. An option menu will then appear on the screen and we select the 'PC' option. The camera will then be recognised by the computer, and we can access the video files on the system (although at this point we cannot view them).

Following this, we select all the shots we wish to use, and save them to a new foloder on the D-Drive. Once these have been saved onto the hard-drive, we can then open up a new project in our editing programme, 'Premiere 8.0'. From here, we select the 'get media' option, and then go to the relevant folder in the D-Drive and select our footage. We then import this, and once this has been done the footage can be played back and edited.

Group - Murder Inc, Film Treatment

Below is the treatment for our film Murder Inc:

"A reimaging and modernising of a vicious real life gang originally from New York during the 1920s, called Murders Inc. (title). The main protagonist (Jack Renwick) is a member of the gang and has generally enjoyed his moral ambiguity along with the respect and money that comes with being a member of a notorious gang, who is hired by crime bosses as cheaper and less suspecting hitmen.
At the beginning of the film it is clear that he doubts whether or not he can ever have a normal life and what his future will hold if he carries on killing for money, despite this being a secret identify for him and everyone in the gang. He comes to the realisation that he doesn’t want to continue, and needs to distance himself from the gang and his closest friends. "

Group - Group 8 Preliminary Task

This video was our second take at the task  - after we were unable to complete it before half term and I was subsequently ill for the first three days of this term, leaving Timo and Simon to make a new version. Whilst it is a simple piece, we feel it is continuous, and although the acting is a little wooden (ahem), the piece fits the purpose.

As was said in the previous post, Windows Media Player was the first place to export the piece that came to mind. I will change the file type once back at school, and hopefully will have re-uploaded the footage by the end of the week.

NB: This piece has now been re-saved, and can be seen at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAS1Y0NVOak&feature=relmfu

Group - Practice shoot, Wildernesse Woods

The reason for the late posting of this work goes back a long way; originally, we had a lot of footage to choose between, and therefore the editing stage of our process was delayed. Following this, we also had to dedicate lesson time to the production of our preliminary task, and because we failed to complete this before half term, there was no opportunity for us to edit this piece. I was also away for the first three days of the new term, and therefore we took the decision to simply edit the footage and add music to the piece. However, when Timo and Simon got to the stage of uploading the video to Youtube, the video had not been converted into a file suitable for uploading, and therefore for a couple of days we were unable to diagnose why the file would not upload.

When we realised our error, I saved the piece as a Windows Media Player file. As I was away when we were briefed about saving, I was unsure as to what to save the piece as, and therefore went for the one that I have previously used on projects I myself have uploaded to Youtube. Once uploaded to Youtube, we found that the picture quality, as you will see, is poor. I will therefore look to go back and re-post both our Wilderness Woods and Preliminary task pieces in the next few days.

As for the content of our piece, we are pleased with the outcome. The opening sequence, in particular, where the character flashes out of shot as the water ripples was our favourite shot. Our conversation could be seen as unconventional, however we still found the shot reverse shot practice to be a useful piece, as we are looking to include it in our film opening. We also thought that the montage clip towards the end of the piece was successful. We found this exercise to be useful, as it was our first use of the cameras, whilst the list of shots we were given at the beginning of the day to try out also gave us the foundations for how we might frame our opening and acted as a catalyst for us to try different shots of our own choice.

NB: This piece has now been re-saved, and can be seen at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcd0aV12xMg&feature=channel_video_title

JC - Audience Research results

We conducted audience research both information about the people we were surveying and therefore what age and gender we are likely to gear our film towards, and what their likes and dislikes were within the thriller genre, what they thought of our concept. In total, we surveyed 21 people.

Primarily, we asked our audience which age category they belonged to and what gender they were; we found that 95.2% of the people we surveyed were aged 10-21. We also found that 61.9% of the people we surveyed were male. These two background questions were extremely useful to us, because they suggested that the majority of people we surveyed belonged to the target audience we had set aside - male teenagers.

Following this, we asked people about their generic expectations of thriller films; we gave them a list of locations to choose from and asked them to rate them according to how appropraite they thought they were for a thriller opening. Strangely, they thought that a lake was the most appropriate location. However, their second most popular choice was a warehouse - which we intend to use in our opening. Following this, we asked them which type of opening they preffered: Character exposition; location exposition; random sequence; linear narrative, or other. We found - as we wanted - that character exposition was the preffered choice. Finally, we asked them whether they preffered linear or montage openings; 63.2% said that they preferred a linear opening.

Our final area of reserach was to test our product on the people. When we asked them what they thought our title connoted or symbolised, none of them thought of the same idea as we had. Whilst this could be seen as confusing, this may also draw more people to see our film as they would be uncertain as to what the idea was behind our film, and may be enticed to find out what it was about. Our final question asked the people to read through our treatment and rate it out of ten, giving a reason for their choice. Despite wording the question appropriately (ie. stating 'ten being best'), some people were still confused as to whether or not to rate the film as a 1 or a 10. However, despite our mixed bag (an overall rating of 6.29%), the most selected score was an 8, which was encouraging for us.

Our audience research was useful, because on the whole, it reflected what we want our audience to get from our film. Furthermore, it provides us with legitimacy to carry on with our plans, as the audience's views tend to agree with the style, form and conventions of our opening sequence.

JC - Murder Inc pitch and response

On thursday, we presented our pitch for our film, Murder Inc, to the class and miss Fernandez. Given that I had been off for the whole of the week previous to thursday, we were pleased overall with how our pitch went. We felt that our concept was explained well and we had clearly shown that we had considered the ideas we were going to use, in particular the location reccies and how we felt they would connote ideas about the genre, especially given that the we had little time to collaborate and fully understand each others research.

Having received feedback suggesting that we should reconsider our location, we still feel fairly confident that our locations are justifiable. However, on the same evening whilst walking into Sevenoaks I stopped and decided to photograph the Tubs Hill House compley, consisting of two office towers and an accomodation facility right next to it. If we did feel the need to change location, provided we had the required permision, I feel that this would be a useful location for us as it is in an urban, high rise location, conforming to the generic conventions of thriller films.

There are some areas of our work that can definitely be refined; for instance, we still need to nail down what music we will use; how this willv shape the audience's experience and how it will anchor the mood; what we expect our budget to be; which bankable stars we will include in our film.

In conclusion, whilst there were evidently areas in which our work could be improved, I found this exercise to be extremely useful, as it not only allowed us to share our idea with the rest of the group and reinforce the ideas in our minds that our piece is well thought out, but it also gave me a confidence boost, as I felt I was able to perform well in front of an audience where I usually struggle in such a situation.

Whilst I am unable to embed our pitch, here is the link: http://prezi.com/hsminym7ep0u/group-8-pitch-murder-inc/

Location Reccie (2) - The Shambles, London Road, Southpark

Following our intial reccie and a group discussion about the plotline, we have decided to extend the location shoot to the Shambles, a courtyard just off London Road, the Southpark junction by the Stag and Southpark itself.

Our initial photo is from the junction, looking back down towards Beaux Bagels Pronto. This is where our antagonist will run to after fleeing the scene. Once we have finished our footage from Beaux Bagels, our action will cut immediately to a long shot, one similar to that which can be seen to the above right. As the character turns, we will cut to the other shot to the right. Following this, there will be a POV shot along the road. Currently, this is where we plan to end our footage.

Our discussions also led to us changing ideas for the opening of our film; instead of opening with an establishing shot of the courtyard at Beaux Bagels, we will instead have our victim dragged through the Shambles - the old slaughter houses in Sevenoaks, now with a courtyard in the place where the market once stood - and initially beaten up, before being dragged off to the warehouse.We also hope to add in a transition at this stage; as the victim falls to the floor, we will cut to a POV shot of his head hitting the groud. As he looks up, a name will appear in the clouds, and we hope that as they move out of the frame, we will be able to move the name out of shot at the same time.

JC - Audience research questionnaire

Audience research is a vital part of our planning process, and therefore we as a group created a set of questions to test our target audience on both what they expect from the genre, so further down the line in the concept development process we can analyse our results and either break with or conform to their expectations. To take the questionnaire, click here.