Evaluation

Here is part one and part two of our evaluation, despite the moments where we get a bit distracted by cats almost knocking over the camera we were filming with!

part one

part two

Unspoken- Two Minute Film Opening- Main Task

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyWQrYu3SbI


Here is the link to our video as I cannot find it on Youtube. Overall, we thought that our opening two minutes was a success and we are very proud and happy with it and it was a very big improvement of our preliminary task.

Music For Our Main Task

Our teacher recommended that we use music from the artist "Moby" who was also the producer of the theme song for the Bourne Identity movie with the song "Extreme Ways". Moby produces free music that can be downloaded that can be used on small independent films that make no profit. Our production team then decided it would be smart to create an account and have a look though any of his songs to see if any of them would have sounded right for the type of mood we were trying to create. We all discussed what kind of music that we thought was going through our heads at the time when watching our opening and we all came up with similar ideas.

We looked through a couple of the choices and found some good ones that we thought would work really well with our opening. There was one thing we didn't want to happen with the music, and that was that we didn't want it to attract so much attention that it would draw attention away fro the visual side of things, and we didn't want to add too many sounds in at once with all the crowd sounds and trains and voice over.

after looking at all the songs, we decided to use the track Isolate which sounded and worked well with our film.

Exploring Our Genre

In our preliminary task we made sure that our genre for our film was very much an action movie, and we followed all the conventions so much, that looking back at it, our task was very cliché. We had the gun shot sounds, and the very action type music. But for our main task, we looked a bit more closer to the narrative, and the types of shots we could use. For our main task, we didn't really want to have a genre on it and restrict us from doing things that we thought didn't convey into one set genre that we chose. So the genre  for our piece is Action/Drama/Thriller. having an open genre meant that we could focus more on the narrative and not the conventions.

For exploring our genre we looked at a few films that we thought could help with types of shots, representing character, editing and just the whole feel of it as a whole. here are some of our inspirations for our opening movie.

The Hunger Games

We looked at the hunger games because we felt the narrative to our opening was similar of the narrative in this. We also felt that Catniss Everdeen was a good representation of our main protagonist Ariadne. They also casted a female lead in a male dominated genre which is similar to what we did in our film- going against the conventions. Catniss and Ariadne also have the same outlook on life.

The Bourne Series

We felt that the fast paced action is something that was included into our narrative, and the types of shots are the same, for instance the short snappy shots which we used in places in our film.

Inception

This film opening was playing on the idea of Propp's theory of using narrative in film.The most important scene is echoed at the start which builds a sense of enigma, and allows the audience to try and figure out what is going on which draws the audience in more. It also introduces the character and leaves it open so there are many different narratives that could take place. Inception is also very cinematic and has the type of shots we wanted to portray such as extreme close-ups, slow motion shots and the contrast between shaky and steady cam

Good Will Hunting

The shot above was inspired by the shot of Ariadne sitting down with the map at the train station we thought that this shot was very interesting and a different way to break up our other shots shown around the time that this one is

Love Actually

This inspired us to add our voice over into our opening of our film, because it's a very personal way to be speaking directly to the audience, and the visuals that match up with the voice over is very clever. We wanted to make sure we got the right balance of attention on the visuals and voice over, and this movie is a perfect example of that.

Filming Journel

30th March 2013

So the big day had a arrived and everyone was excited and nervous at the same time. We made sure we had planned from the day before and knew what shots to prioritize by having a written out shot list, we also had our story board with us because so we could visually see what we wanted for the shot and how it was supposed to look like. We had also briefly looked at the weather so that we got the right look and feel for our film.
We were all supposed to meet at the train station at 8:45 am which meant that we planned to have 20 minutes before the train arrived and we would be in no hurry. But then disaster soon struck as we arrived we realized there was coaches outside. Wondering what they were for, we  went to go and buy our tickets and that's when we soon found out that one of the big main tracks which is on the way to Paddington was having work done to it! So that meant that we couldn't take a train directly from Maidenhead to Paddington which is why we chose our location of Paddington in the first place, so we could easily get to it.
So because of this unfortunate closure, the station provided railway replacement service and we had to get a big coach from Maidenhead, to Hayes and Harlington station, where we then got off and had to get a train into Paddington. it was a long trip! And what was only supposed to take 45 minutes, took 1 hour 30 minutes as we arrived at the station at 10:39. But thankfully it didn't put us too far behind in our filming schedule.
When we FINALLY got there, we had to find Cam, the guy that's playing our character of Isaac which didn't take too long thankfully. After we had met up, we had to let TFL (travel for London)  know that we were here and that we were ready and raring to go. So as it said on the email that got sent to us, we went to the McMillan House where they explained to us that we were in the overground office! So we had to take yet another detour to the underground office where we showed them our permit, signed in and got a sticker with our number that we signed in with. This would mean that at the end of the day, we had to sign out before we left.
After that we decided we would have a quick lunch break at the famous and delicious McDonalds, where we discussed what shots would be captured first. We decided that it would be a smart idea to capture all the shots with Isaac in first, so Cam could go straight after. We then went to our first destination of filming which was the underground circle line platforms 1 and 2, there we managed to get a number of shots which included; shot reverse shot of main characters on opposite platforms, close up of Isaac, shots of the map on the floor, Ariadne arriving at the platform, shot from the bridge. The only problem was, is that there were no crowds which is exactly what we needed and what we had drew up in our storyboards. But the fact that there wasn't many crowds played on the idea of isolation, and the faint wind blew Ari's hair which looked very cinematic. All these shots took around 2 hours to film, so we then decided to take a break in the lovely Costa and decide where to shoot next. Cam was also free to go and left us to do our filming. for the crowds entering the underground, we decided that we were gonna shoot it from an outside entrance, and found the perfect cinematic shooting location, but there was no crowds yet again! So we decided to go back to Paddington and shoot people walking down the entrance to the Bakerloo line, the side entrance right by cafe Nero, and even though there wasn't as many crowds as we wanted, we got the shots and they managed to look alright.We filmed the shots such as Ari walking down the tunnel, a down the stairs,  the bag drop close up, Ari looking up close up, and Ari getting up and collecting her stuff from her bag on the floor and walking off.
After we were satisfied with the footage we collected, we then went on our long way home back to Hayes and Harlington. got the bus to Slough, and then got the train back to maidenhead to retreat home!

We decided not to film to drop sequence on location because it would have taken a long time to get what we wanted, so we decided to shoot that a a different time.

Overall the filming went well and all the long hours payed off in seeing the end results.

Editing Journel

Day 1

So the first day we imported all our footage and it took nearly two hours because we the first group to import and no-one had ever done it before, so we were kind of the experiment group. The SD card wasn't reading, and it didn't read the camera either! so we had to download some software to allow us to import our footage onto the macs. After that was all sorted,we opened final cut pro and basically put in the clips unedited so we knew what was going to happen where. We didn't have some of our shot like the extreme closeups, but we weren't onto that part of our sequence, so it didn't matter just yet.

Day 2

We got round to filming the extra footage over the weekend, so that we could edit it in school.we made sure we had an order, and got our film down to 2:13 minutes, we created our VKLC Productions logo, and imported that onto final cut pro, we also started to think about music and researched the artist Moby.

Day 3

-we started adding music to our film and it was looking good with our sequence
-we decided on a music track isolate
-we weren't sure where the music would start though,  we all had different ideas whether it should be at the end or the beginning or fade in and out though-out the piece
-for now we were just going to add the track in and experiment later

Day 4

-we finally came to a conclusion of the music problem and decided to put it at the beginning of the piece
-we figured that we needed to adjust the levels of the music to the voice over for them to work together
-we wanted to insert more credits, and have chosen to have them in a plain normal style reflecting the practicality of Ariadne

Day 5

- I was chosen to find the build up sound which i had the choice of two, and i think the one i picked works really well
-we wanted the build up to stop and all music to stop when the main title came up
-but we changed it to when  Ari see's Isaac and that worked better than what we originally planned. it creates suspense

Day 6

-finished the main bulk of our movie, which included aspect ratio (2:35:1) and  added in titles and credits, one of the main conventions of film openings
-we also colour graded the film, which proved to be very hard, because you needed to change all to the settings in RGB
-our films quite dark so that means we would have to adjust the settings to fit the feel of our film
-so we went for a bluey/yellowy tinge to the film to make it stand out more
-all our shots look very cinematic and it ties together nicely with the colour grading

Day 7

- we put our video onto to youtube, taking a hefty 40 minutes to load, but all the hard works paid of and we all feel relieved its over!

Posting Our Pitch

Here is VKLC Productions pitch video that shows us talking about our main idea, and explaining the whole narrative if it were a full movie. We also read through the script and dicuss the sypnopsis and the basic outline of what we want to do. Unfortunatly Cary was absent at the time of the pitch, but we managed to cover everything that was needed.