Pictures For Our Animatic

We are going to be uploading these pictures in order to make them into an animatic.

These are our storyboard pictures:

We decided to draw the pictures on post-it notes so it would be simple to arrange the scenes in any order we wanted.

Continuity Sequence - The Visit

As a preparation to the main task of our AS Media coursework, we had to produce a Continuity Sequence.

Preliminary Exercise: Continuity task involving filming and editing of a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue.

This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.

For this task, I worked with Emily Peachey, Lucy Hart and Chris Johnson. We agreed to do a prison visit and the title of the film is "The Visit".

Lucy is the prisoner, Emily is the visitor, I am the guard and Chris did the filming.

The Plan:
- Prison Visit;
- Any room;
- Long shot of the prisoner walking through the door, go to shot from behind inside the door;
- Shot goes to the person sitting down;
- Visitor comes to visit the prisoner in the room.

This is our Continuity Sequence:

Music

In our Media lesson this morning, we have added the music of our choice onto our film opening.

* We looked at this copyright-free music website: http://www.audio.lgfl.org.uk/, searched and browsed through some thriller tracks.

We looked at 10 thriller tracks by various composers :
- Men In Black/Action Hero/In Memoriam by Paul Mottram and Gareth Johnson;
- Espionage 2 (60) by David O'Brien;
- Hidden Threat by David O'Brien and Johnny Lithium;
- Mysterons by David O'Brien;
- Driller Thriller by Matt Hill;
- Gumshoe by Mike Stobbie;
- Covert by Tom Quick and
- Silent Pouncer by Orlando Jopling.

* By process of elimination we narrowed it down to either 'Hidden Threat' or 'In Memoriam', as both had slow-paced music which creates and slowly builds up suspense which is suitable for our thriller film opening of a stalker.
* We believe our audience will find this music mysterious and creepy.
* After listening to it, they would notice that the film is going to be about something eerie.
* We agreed to select 'In Memoriam' as we preferred this track and it would go better with our opening after listening to it a few times.

* We imported this track on our opening title sequence and watched and listened to it.
* We were impressed with the music, although we preferred Granite by Pendulum, which was our original choice but we were not able to obtain it from a copyright-free website.

* Scene 10 - volume of the music is quite loud and the audience will not be able to hear the conversation clearly as it goes over it.
* Need to sort out the music's volume so it is quieter in this scene and the conversation can be heard clearly, but the music can still be heard in the background.

This did not take us long to do and the music is now finally finished.

Things Left To Do

We are nearly finished with this Media coursework but there are some things which are unfinished and needs to be completed:

* Add the music on our film
* Put our Continuity Task on the blog
* Upload our Animatics and put it on our blogs
* Put our finished Opening Title Sequence on our blogs
* Evaluation

We should have all this finished soon.

The StoryBoard

I have included my storyboard before in a previous posting in writitng, but I did not scan mine on my blog because I was embarrassed by my pictures.

This is our storyboard; drawn by Emily which is so much better than mine:

Finished Re-Shoot of Scene 10 and Editing

Emily and Lucy successfully managed to re-shoot the scene last Saturday morning in Emily's back garden.

* When we uploaded the new scene onto the iMovie in our next Media lesson, it came out so much better than the original shot and not as bright like it did last time.
* We had no problems with the camera or the tape this time fortunately.
* However, the weather was different this weekend to the weekend we filmed in January; when we oringinally filmed it was cloudy and raining but when we re-shot over the weekend it was sunnier and brighter.
* The audience can see the sun's reflection in the umbrella which is unavoidable but does not affect the scene.
* In this scene, the weather change is noticeable but it is not a drastic problem and the audience will not be able to see much difference.
* Apart from this, it went fine; Emily and Lucy wore the same clothes and used the same umbrella in the as before so the continuity will not be affected as much.

Last time we did not take any pictures but we took some pictures of us filming on Saturday:

We have edited the new scene 10: there were 3 re-takes in case we had any problems. We decided to use the second take as we agreed that this was the best shot of that scene out of the three. We edited out the unnecessary bits and put this scene into our film and deleted the old scene 10. Behind the unbrella, the scene resembles a lot like Abbey Wood Ruins so it is not recognisable that the location had changed due to the close-up shot with the umbrella in the background held by the victim, Lucy. This final editing process took at least an hour to do and we have now successfully edited all our film opening title sequence.

All that is left to do is to include the music of our choice which will be suitable with the stalker theme of our film - we will be doing this on the following Friday in our next Media lesson.

Why Opening Title Sequences Are So Important

A graphic artist, Saul Bass once said, "making a main-title was like making a poster, you're condensing the event into this one concept, this one metaphor a back-story that needs to be told or a character that needs to be introduced".

Within the film industry, the opening title sequence of a film is considered to be the most important aspect in a film. Apart from the marketing elements, the title sequences are the very first images the audience sees. The quick clips lasts about two to three minutes long, in which the filmmaker's intentions and sets up the expectations of the audience. Most films last about 120 minutes, so the first two or three minutes are crucial.

Title sequence is what tells the audience who created the film and based on their past work and what the audience can expect from this film they are about to watch. If someone thinks the title sequence is not very good; their first impression would be that the film will not be good so personally I would consider the opening title sequence of a film the most important part.

Re-Shooting Scene 10

Whilst me and Emily were editing our title sequence, our Media teacher Nina said she liked our film and was very good so far as she gave us positive feedback. She also suggested that we should re-shoot scene 10 which is a close-up shot of Emily and Lucy's chracter and the big colourful umbrella in the background.
The problem is that this scene came out extremely bright - we could not distinguish the faces and it would look strange compared to the other scenes we have filmed.

Due to this, on Saturday 7th February, Emily and Lucy will be re-shooting this scene, wearing the same clothes so that the continuity will not be ruined. After the re-shoot, our opening title sequence will be completed.

Tomorrow, the re-shoot will take place which will definately be better than last time.