Research and planning provisional mark

Name of student: Catherine Cowley

	Done?	Comment/target
RESEARCH
Genre Research and mind-maps	Yes
Uploaded YouTube videos of openings - analysed	Yes
Opening titles analysed in detail – font researched	Yes
Uploaded YouTube videos of similar genre openings analysed in detail	Yes
Costume and location research – google earth and pictures you’ve taken.	Yes
Actors and props photos and interviews	No	Upload ASAP
Soundtrack research (non-copyright music)	Yes
Audience Research and Profiling (typical audience member and similar films)	Yes
Institution research (Paramount etc)	Yes
Certificate research	Yes
PLANNING
Own film idea brainstorm	Yes
Own film treatment	Yes
Relevant Online Tutorials and Comment	Yes	Add another tutorial that you watched/practised – include the YouTube clips on your blog post
Documenting of influences on production	No	Upload ASAP
Shot lists	Yes
Consideration  of representation in your film and stereotyping – use theory from G325.	Yes	Refer your analysis back to whether your chosen ideas conform or subvert the stereotypical representations in your genre
Questionnaire (and feedback) Get some feedback on your initial ideas!	Yes
Diary of filming/editing etc with photos and screen grabs	No	Upload ASAP
Mood board	Yes
Script	Yes
Practice titles created and uploaded	No	Upload ASAP
Storyboard – animatic.	No	Upload ASAP
Time Management Schedule	Yes

 

 

 

Research and planning mark scheme:

 

Level 2

8–11 marks

Planning and research evidence may be partially incomplete;

There is basic research into similar products and a potential target audience;

There is basic organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props;

There is basic work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding;

There is a basic level of care in the presentation of the research and planning;

Time management may not be good.

 

Level 3

12–15 marks

Planning and research evidence will be complete;

There is proficient research into similar products and a potential target audience;

There is proficient organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props;

There is proficient work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding;

There is a good level of care in the presentation of the research and planning;

Time management is good; there is a schedule of filming

There is no animatic storyboard and/or mood board

 

Level 4

16–20 marks

Planning and research evidence will be complete and detailed;

There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience;

There is excellent organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props;

There is excellent work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding;

There is an excellent level of care in the presentation of the research and planning;

Time management is excellent.

 

Research and planning mark      15  /20     Level 3

 

Stereotypes In Our Opening

We have already made a post on the typical sterotypes that you would expect in a drama film. This post will explain how we used them in our own film.
One of the main features of a drama film is the non-diegetic sound. The music plays a key role in capturing the emotion of the film or a specific scene. For example our inspiration for the music was when we watched the opening to Forest Gump. The music was slow and steady making the audience really understand the emotion and seriousness of the scene. We decided to use an instrumental piano track because we believe that this really relates to the emotion of our film. It was vital for us that we included non-diegetic sound in our opening 2 minutes because without it, it wouldn't follow the key stereotypes of the drama genre, therefore making our film unrelatble and complicated to our target audience. I think the pace of the music we have decided to use will make our target audience really understand how emotional the scenes in our film are.
The narrative of drama films always have to relate to real life situations along with realistic characters and settings. Our main character is a young teenage girl with a lot of issues. She is homeless and has run away from her foster home. We believe that we have made our character convey all the typical problems a girl in foster care and without parents would have at the young age of 16. We understand that not every young person has the same amount of issues and drama in their life as our main character but we believe that our character is still able to be relatable to our target audience. Our storyline is quite dramatic and serious, not everyone will be able to relate to how our main character is feeling but we hope that her facial expressions and body language will help our target audience understand her troubles. Being homeless isnt something that all teenagers can relate to but we think that our film could show people what it is like and how young people going through it can feel and act. Our film is set in a busy town centre. These are around in every town, so we think our setting will be relatable to everyone, especially around Christmas time because everyone knows how stressful the shops are at Christmas.
Camera composition is a key convention in a drama film. For example high angled and low angled shots can portray someones weakness or power. Drama films tend to include a lot of close ups showing the characters emotions and reactions. We think we included a decent amount of high angle shots showing her weakness and more than enough close ups showing her emotional state. For example in the scene where our main character is slouching against a wall, we made sure this would be a high angle shot to ensure that the audience understood that she was weak and emotional.
The typical clothing you would expect a homeless peron to wear are quite scruffy and ragged. We wanted this to be the case with our character but we made sure the clothes she was wearing were still somewhat nice. We definatley tried to make her look homeless. We made sure her hair a a bit of a mess and that she was wearing barely any makeup. This would ensure that the audience knew she was homeless.
The props we used also helped us get across to the audience that our main character was homeless. We made her carry a sleeping bag around with her which we thought would let the audience know that she would obviously be needing it. We also made a conscious effort to mention that she had run away in our monologue.
The lighting in drama films are usually quite dim. This reflects the emotion in each scene. We wanted to use dim lighting in our film to make the emotion really stand out. Another reason we wanted to use dim lighting was because it was the evening and we wanted to show the sun gradually setting throughout the two mintues. This would make the audiece feel sorry for the girl because she has to sleep on the streets on her own.

Time management

We planned to film our opening two minutes on the 20th Dec 2013. This was harder to plan than we thought because we had to consider each others time. It seemed as though when one of us was free, the other two had other plans. It being so close to Christmas, only made it harder for us. It was really important for us to get the Christmas lights to be a main part in our opening so we really needed to get the filming done before they were turned off and taken down.
We finally were all free on the 3rd January. So we took that opportunity to go out and get all the scenes filmed. We were battling with the light that was quickly fading so that gave us even more pressure to get a good result.

The first hour or so of filming went really well. We filmed the first 5 shots without a hitch. We were having a lot of fun playing around with the tripod and the angle at which we would shoot the scene. It all started to go wrong for us when we started walking to the high street in Guildford. When we got there we realised that the Christmas lights were not turned on. This really worried us because the lights were one of the most important aspects of our opening. We decided to leave filming the Christmas lights for the time being and focus on our main scenes because Lauren our actress had to get home in a rush after we had filmed. Another worry we had was the light. In between takes, the light was fading really quickly. This worried us because we didn't want it to be light in one scene and dark in another. When we realised this, we make a bigger effort to get the shots done. Looking back this hurrying may have made our actual scenes not as good as they could have been, but the rush was necessary. The last few shots we filmed went really well because they were mainly close ups, so we didn't need to worry about the light.
We were really worried when we were planning our filming because we didn't think we would have enough shots to get 2 mintues. But this was nothing to worry about because we filmed for extra time than we had planned to give us some leeway.

Overall we are pleased with our filming but we would have liked to not have to worry about the light fading and the Christmas lights not being on. We had a great time filming and it was even more fun that we aticipated. Were happy with the results and hopefully the editing process will be just as fun.

Comment from Miss McKinney

Well done Catherine - you are using the tick list efficiently to complete your remaining research and planning tasks. The deadline is January 27th.

Editing- Hour 1

 When using Sony Vegas Pro 11 for the first time we came across various issues however we expected this as this is our first time using the software. Firstly we uploaded the monologue into Sony Vegas Pro 11 and listened to it without anything playing over it. We were really pleased with how good the quality was and how clear it sounded. This made us glad that we decided to go to a professional recording studio as we are not including any dialogue in our opening, therefore we needed to make sure that our monologue was perfect. When listening to our monologue you could clearly hear the breaths that our actress was taking. To get rid of these we split the sound file before and after every breath and deleted them. When we played the monologue back, the pauses still remained but the sound of the breaths did not. This made it all the more clear.
The next step was adding the music. Sony Vegas Pro 11 has grids to allow you to seperate different sound and video files so you could edit them individually. This therefore meant that we could have each individual component playing at the same time. When we added the music, at first it didn't fit well with the monologue, so we cut out certain parts of it and moved it around so that it would fit with the pauses and the volume adjustments in her voice. When we listened to this back we were amazed at how it fit together perfectly. The music really brought out the emotion in her voice.
Our next step was inserting the video files. We decided to preview it in full screen before we started any editing, the quality was not good. We found that the video was pixleated. We searched online how to overcome this issue and we found that after rendering, the video quality will come out better. We decided to render our project with only one unedited video file inserted. This would then indicate to us whether what we found online was infact true and we certainly did not want to spend hours editing our project for it to fail on us at the last hurdle.

Software choice

The software which we have chosen to edit our film opening on is Sony Vegas Pro 11. For our opening we felt it was important to get the best quality out of the editing so therefore we felt that Sony Vegas Pro 11 would provide us with this. We have not used this programme before but are very excited to try it out. As we have not used it before we will need to make sure that we watch a few tutorials on YouTube to make sure that we use then programme correctly. Vegas Pro 11 combines the power of the Vegas Pro and the elegance of DVD Architect to give a dynamic and efficient editing software. This software contains a full-up GPU acceleration able for video processing, effects, and rendering, for speed ups across editing, playback, and output.

After browsing various tutorials on YouTube I selected this video as it explains everything so clearly and makes the programme look simple to use which is exactly what we need. I learnt that all I need to do to separate the audio from the video is click on the image and press u which causes the movie to be moveable. I was also very impressed by how easy it is to make your video fade out at the start of the clip, all you need to do is click and drag to the right and it is done. This would be a very effective transition from a title to the first clip. Adding effects to your video also seems very easy. No trimming or cutting the video needs to be done as this is what is needed to make space for transitions, all you are doing for editing is adding colour. You go to the video clip then to the effects tab and choose which colour you want your film to be. What impressed me the most is how easy it is to import our work to YouTube, all you do it click file then click upload to YouTube, it is automatically connected to the internet. To us this could not be any simpler, after previous experiences trying to upload our preliminary task using Adobe premiere elements our preliminary task would not let save our work, therefore we were forced to exit the programme without saving our work. This is the main reason why we did not want to use that programme for editing our film but Sony vegas pro 11.

Blog tick list

	Done?	Comment?
RESEARCH
Genre Research and mind-maps (3 posts)	Done
Uploaded YouTube videos of openings – analysed (10 openings)	Done
Opening titles analysed in detail – font researched	Done
Uploaded YouTube videos of similar genre openings analysed in detail (3 posts)	Done
Costume and location research – google earth and pictures you’ve taken. (At least 2 posts)	Done
Actors and props photos and interviews	No	We have created one diary of our filming in which I am interviewed but we need to convert the file format to be able to do so.
Soundtrack research (non-copyright music)	Done
Audience Research and Profiling (typical audience member and similar films)	Done
Institution research (Paramount etc)	Done
Certificate research	Done
PLANNING
Own film idea brainstorm	Done
Own film treatment	Done
Relevant Online Tutorials (on filming and editing) and Comments (At least 2 posts)	Done
Documenting of influences on production	Done
Shot lists	Done	- Finish initial shots- then write about the final shots and how they actually turned out.
Consideration of representation in your film and stereotyping – use theory from G325.	Done	- Talk about how our actress is representing the youth.
Questionnaire (and feedback) Get some feedback on your initial ideas!	Done
Diary of filming/editing etc with photos and screen grabs (At least 3 posts)	We have completed one of the video diarys that we have planned to film. We now just need to get some screen grabs and some more videos.	- We will need to do various screen grabs of our editing process. One of us will have to video interview the other to create a video diary of each process- before and after filming.
Mood board	Done
Script	Done
Practice titles created and uploaded	Done
Storyboard – animatic.	Done
Time Management Schedule – what you did& when, problems you encountered& solved	Done
Codes and Conventions featured in your Opening Two Minutes	Done
Ensure that all posts have a title, detailed comments and relevant pictures which are commented on.	-