Jasmine's A2 blog :)

Friday, 6 September 2013

Who you need to make a film

In this post I will be saying who is needed to create a film. I did some research and this is what I found:

Producer
Director
Executive director
Planning and scheduling
Distribution
Product designer
Editor
Distribution company
Actors
Second unit
Stunt doubles
Casting director
Film maker
Film editor
Sound designer
Hair and make up
Costume designers
Legal and financial
Accounts and payroll
Camera operator

These are most of the people you will need to create a full length film. However, it would be a completely different situation if you were to make a short film. In the case of making a short film, one person may take on many different roles in order for the film to happen. There is a lot less budget, so often, all the different people can't be paid. The Director may also take on the role of distribution etc.

Final choice of task

My final choice of the task I want to do is a Horror movie trailer. I have decided to do this because it sounds more appealing to me than a music video and a short film. I have already came up with a few ideas but am currently working on a Film front cover and a DVD case, which are the tasks that come with this main product.

What I now need to do is to research on some existing movie posters and DVD cases, to do with horror and understand the conventions and add them into my two tasks.

As well as doing this I need to think and plan my main text, creating a storyboard and ideas of what to include in my trailer. This will mean to search existing trailers and to take some ideas and to post them up.

Developing knowledge on genres

I have been researching around genres , looking in further detail, giving myself ideas around different genres, enabling me to make a decision on what genre of film or music to chose and create the text.

Understanding Genre

Genre is something that confines a film buy its conventions and Mise-En-Scene. It concludes what sort of film should fit into each category(genre) depending on it's content, for example if a film has cartoon characters with unrealistic features, and unrealistic story lines then we would categorise that as a family film or an animation.

Short film evaluation

1. Story Boarding/Scripting: On reflection, the story board me and Rebecca created was rather brief so we didn't really have much to go on and as It was only one minute long, there was a lot of editing and cutting down involved. We weren't really expecting there to me as many problems as we both faced, as this was new to us. For instance, some places around the school didn't want us to film their classrooms, so we had to find other locations to film. When it comes to planning my main project or either a short film, a trailer or a music video, I will ensure that I do both a thorough storyboard and script, so I know exactly what I am doing for the time I have to create my project.
2. Locations: As we had to shot out short film in the school, we were restricted to where we could film and had to make do with what we got. This meant I had to get permission off of the teachers, and sometimes had to film after school and the main problem was getting the students to act normal with the camera there, which they wouldn't. To to overcome this, we had the camera under our coats, which did work successfully for us. otherwise if they saw it they may try to ensure they weren't in the film, which would ruin what we needed for our piece. Overall, we planned well on what locations to use for our film and did come across some problems, however, managed to overcome these.
3. Talent: We decided on me being the particular talent, as I was willing to act on camera. The one problem I had was that I didn't turn up to school the next day in the same clothes. To overcome this problem, we planned out when we were going to film and I wore those clothes, during the duration of the filming.

4. Teamwork: Me and Rebecca had really good team work and organisation skills, as we both created a schedule to stick to when we were going to be filming, as well as editing, planning an researching. We worked really well as a team and made sure that we both stuck to deadlines.
5. Editing: this was probably the hardest part for us, however, we both were familiar with the editing stage, as we have done this before in out BTEC. We had a brief idea of what to do, however it did feel quite new to us, as we struggled to find out where everything was. However, after getting use to, we found everything much easier and could do a lot more, which was good as we were going to do a lot of this for out main task.

6. Overall, we were pleased with the final product considering the complications we had during our filming stages and the rushing of the editing to get it finished on time. Hopefully, with my main project, due to the fact I’ll have less restrictions on locations and talent, I’ll be able to create a bmuch better film or music video depending on what I chose.

Problems faced whilst filming

Whilst editing, we did face a few problems, as we haven't really had much experience with Final Cut Pro and didn't know much about it. One of the problems we faced was getting the beat of the music in time for the change over of the titles. This took us a while to get right but in the end we worked out how to do it and successfully added this to our video. We also had a problem with the lighting in a few of our scenes, the sun didn't help with our filming, as it shone straight into the camera, making everything look dark except the sky. To remove this problem, we got a big piece of cardboard and blocked the sun from getting in our shoot, without it being in the way of the camera.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

'A day in the life of...' Short film

Our task was to create a short film in the title of 'A day in the life of...' and decided to make it about a school girl, summarising what she gets up to in just over one minute.

This is our finished video, which took us two days to record and around six or seven days to edit...................