Evaluation complete

We have now completed our DVD extra and I believe that it could be improved in some ways because as Jamie said in the last update, we were both quite disappointed as we were unable to say everything that we wanted to in the evaluation because it would have made it ridiculously long. We also struggled to find enough footage to go with the speech but I think we did quite well if I am entirely honest. We exported it as a DVD file into a folder within the main datadisk of the computer. This meant that we were able to backup the file on the computer and we would be able to take a copy of it for ourselves so that we could watch it at home. This is because it is a PAL file and it is compatible with many forms of technology and it can be used as a default for our work.

Rounding off our coursework

We are now in the final week of our coursework and today I am working alone as Scott is ill.

I've done plenty of moving around and adjusting titles and subtitles as they were placed hanging off the image, so I've corrected that.

I don't know about Scott, but I expect he will feel like me and be disappointed with the Evaluation task. We neither had the time or the footage to commit to this section as we did for our filming pieces. This slightly disheartened us but we battled on and managed to cover our timeline, which seems to fit quite well with what is on our oratory section.

some sections dont neccaserily flow with what is being said but the subtitles give a clear description of what the audience should understand which makes it work.

I feel if we had more time and more footage we could have made it so much better, but we have worked hard with what we have to produce a piece to the best of our ability.

Evaluation starting

We started evaluation work as soon as we had finished the main coursework piece.
We wrote the script and had it checked and made it better a few times before we decided to go ahead with the piece. Our initial place of filming was in the original building of the school, in a language room. We found that this was not very good as there was much background noise and voices echoed.
This disrupted our time left to capture footage and sound. We decided to start putting images and sounds onto our premiere file timeline where we thought things would sit on the script.
Eventually we used a small room that was practically silent. This worked wonders for our sound, so we decided to do the voiceover there and then. Our technician suggested putting the camera in a hat so that the microphone didnt pick up all round sound, this made it sound like speaking directly into a vocal microphone. Somehow though, it made my voice sound odd. I'm part Scottish (distantly) so haven't really got a southern accent but it is still very much english, however my voice didnt sound scottish it actually sounded like Cornwall in Scott's opinion. We carried on in this light, knowing that it might sound odd but in the end it seemed to be success.
We didnt have as much footage as we needed to cover our timeline, so we used shots that we didnt include in final pieces and repeated some scenes, leaning on different parts of it each time.
Eventually we covered our whole timeline and seemed to have covered all neccasery areas, as jumbled up and non flowing as it may be.

Dare To Dream-Done

We have finished our main coursework and it was handed in on time.
We are very pleased with the results and it also means that we had a clear run into our DVD extra evaluation.
People whom we have shown the video to are very impressed with it and now say they can understand what is happening, as such have asked if we are making the rest of the film (which we are not).

Evaluation begins

We have started making our DVD extra for our evaluation to the project and as it stands, we only just have enough footage to cover the entire voiceover. The voiceover is about eight minutes long meaning that we now how to find just over eight minutes of footage for it to work to. We also need to put parts of the footage in the right place so that it coincides with the part of the voiceover that has the description of the effects used and also explaining what we really did. This is difficult because more than one piece of footage can relate to the content of the voiceover at some points so we have to decide which part is most suited to the voiceover.

Evaluation of the Rough cut

Last Friday we ensured that we had a rough cut so that we were able to find out what the other people in the class thought of what we had accomplished so far. This allowed us to make an evaluation of how much we still had left to do. We found out that at some points it was difficult to follow what was going on on our opening sequence because there were parts that did not link together very well and they jumped a little bit. We realised that we still had to add a title and also add the soundtrack to the opening sequence in order to make it flow better and to make it easier to understand what is going on in the storyline.
Some members of the class said that it was difficult to tell whether or not the character was in the dreamworld so we added blurring and ghosting onto the points of view shots to make it appear as if the character is disorientated and also to add the effect that he was confused and had no idea where he was. This helped us to portray our idea of confusion and also worked quite well because it kept people guessing at where he was going. We have also added the soundtrack which contains exerpts from several films, with piano and drums which allows us to use the idea of eerieness and also to build tension.

Preliminary task

This is the preliminary task that we made in order to get used to continuity editing and using the cameras properly. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5p8j2Hu6tKQ

who did what during the shoots

During the shoots we decided that it was best for us to stick to the roles that we were better suited to in order to minimize the possibility of somebody ruining the shot. For this we decided that it was best for me to do most of the camera work because of two reasons. Firstly, I do not like being on camera and secondly, I have a habit of looking into the camera. This meant that the camera work was the best thing for me to do as I was unable to look into the camera and get camera shy.

This left Jamie to do the acting because as we saw in our preliminary task, Jamie was better at acting and he really knew how to act. This made it easier for us to shoot because we had a capable actor on set. During the final shots, we realised that there was a difficulty in us both being in the shots because I was a dead body and Jamie was supposed to find me laying between some rocks. This meant that we used our make-up artist to shoot the final parts because neither of us could operate the camera from the angle that we were shooting from. This worked out quite well because we decided that a hand grabbing Jamie's shoulder would work really well because it adds eerieness to the shot because nobody knows were the hand is coming from. This meant we could overcome these problems by using the extra person we had with us.

Problems during the shoots and who did what

During the shoots, we had minor issues like people walking through our shots in the woods, vehicles in the background and people laughing in class.
Such issues were overcome by taking multiple shots of each frame, giving us three or four copies effectively of our storyboard. This was incredibly helpful, as not only did it avoid problems, it gave us options to choose from when putting our sequence together, which meant we could choose which piece of action we prefered, the shot with the better framing and gave us the opportunity to remove anomolies without having to reshoot or cut ourselves short.
Rain was a problem on one of our shoots, but we made sure we protected ourselves and the equipment by using its bag and covering it with jumpers etc where appropriate, we made sure we had protective clothing on whilst traveling through the woods, to keep us warm, dry and safe from extending branches.

During the woods scene, I directed the shoot and was the main character, Scott did almost all of the filming as he was usually off camera. I did some shots for example the POV shot walking towards the fist shaped rock. Most of the shots I did were taken out, as we prefered the shots of my character in the sequence, rather than when i was not, so we only kept my shots where appropriate. The shots where I find Scott dead in the rocks, were shot by our makeup artist, whom made scott look dead and me gradually more worn and scared.
(Scott did most of the blood on me, and when attempting to do my neck, he applied to much pressure and it shot down my shirt, I was not impressed as I thought it had ruined my shirt (which it didnt) but when it came to it, it actually looked really good.

In the school scene, again I directed it, I set the room up how I wanted it, put all the props in correct places and directed the extras where they had to be and what they should be doing. Scott filmed this section as he did not want to be on film and decided he would like to use the more advanced equipment we were given to work with.
We had a couple of problems with this scene which was overcome by the fact that we took multiple shots, one problem was unsteady panning shots, and another was too much light coming through the windows, which we overcome by pulling down the cream coloured blinds, which look good becuase the give a silloutte of the surrounding building.

Editing wise, I have done most of it, Scott captured the footage and it was my role to cut and edit what we had. We removed the entire sound section from our woods shot and decided to add sound in ourself. This was neccasery because we had a railway crane and a car in the background that sounded really stupid within our footage. It was a shame becuase it is difficult to make sounds follow the footage we have, as movement changes pace often and rapidly.
Scott and I have found soundtracks that we like, and have sought advice and criticism from Jason the technician which has helped greatly.

These sound track will be downloaded and captured by Scott and then we will work together to insert them with the work we have so far.

Our deadline is friday so we are both putting in whatever time we have to ensure that we have made our opening sequence the best we can. I am editing furiously, chopping up film and trying to conform to the conventions of our hybridised genre.
Scott is working hard as the producer, ensuring that all our paperwork is in order and advising me on what he thinks would look better and how to improve certain things.

Music

We have decided to use multiple sounds tracks in our piece. We already have continuous downpour where apropriate, footsteps for the appropriate surfaces during walking, and wildlife sounds where acceptable. We have a couple of sound effects to go in, that we will make ourselves such as gasps etc.
Music wise, we have an idea that we are looking at for the teen sections, and as we go into the horror "dream sequence" we are going to use the "halloween" or maybe "hellraiser" theme. We also have a track from the matrix soundtrack that we intend to chop up and use, as this will be ideal for certain sections within the piece, such as building tension and working towards the enigma.
Our sounds will blend in together to sound diagetic where needed.
Music will be in appropriate places to the action and some tracks will need to overlay eachother.

"Dare to Dream"

We are now in the process of making our title graphic to go on the end of the opening sequence. It needs to be catchy and look appropriate as it is at the vital point of our explosive enigma. This screen needs to flow well and be easily accepted by the audience.

Title of the opening sequence

Our original title did not work very well because it was more like a sentence so we were unable to use it. We each decided to put new titles forward and eventually we have now decided that the new title will be Dare to Dream. We have also split up which sections of the evaluation we are doing because there are some sections that one person in the the group did that the other didnt so we assigned the parts to the people in our group who had done the relative parts. This means that the person who did camerawork and selected the location will evaluate the mise-en-scene aspects as well as the parts that bear reference to semiotics and aural and visual effects.

continuation of editting

We have now added our titles to the piece and we are in the process of adding osund effects in order to give the effect of a horror but also using school bells in order to conform to the conventions of a teen movie. We experimented with a red colouring for our font but it did not work very well because the red did not stand out against the scenery and white only stood out a little better. We changed the shots that the titles were om so that it was possible to read what was being noted down on the screen because on one of the scenes that we were using, it was difficult to read the subtitles underneath because of the scenery because of the leaves in the foreground.

evaluation of our 2nd shoot

We have now done our in class shoot and we are relatively pleased with what we have as we are now able to place together what we have because we have all the footage that we require for our opening sequence. Now we have to create a title sequence to go with the footage and we also have to add the audio track, along with the song that we have decided to use. This will allow us to complete our edit and we are sure that we will meet our aim to have the edit completed within our two week deadline. With the script for our second shoot, we decided to use the media technician as our teacher as our regular teacher decided that she preferred being behind the camera than being captured on camera.
We tried to create a script for our acting teacher, but we required a little bit of improvisational work as we struggled to think of ideas for the script and we also did not want to make the teacher seem too strict and only wanted him to seem as dull as students often see some teachers.

Editing

We shot our footage, not only in reverse order of location, but also in jumbled up frame sequence, IE. We shot all footage in each area and condition together so that our edit flowed. We made sure each frame was clearly marked which made it easier to find what shots go where. We also doubled all takes so that we had more than one to chose from.

Shoot #2 - "Classroom"

We shot our in class shoot last week. This was the only part of the footage that we wanted to keep the natural sound of. So we found the appropriate looking classroom that did not have computers buzzing in the background.
Our teacher decided that she'd rather not be in our shot, as it was unfair to have skilled actors in one shot but not all the others.
As such, our media technician was the acting teacher and was given directions on how we wanted his performance, but we asked him to talk naturally to make the sound flow. We got the class to act as we wanted them to, but had to retake shoots as we all laughed at the unexpected topic that he spoke about.
At the end of the shoot we captured the footage and were very pleased with what we got. We now have all of our footage and have almost finished our rough cut. So now we can piece together what we have, Scott and I are very happy with out footage and we feel positive at the prospect of our two week deadline.

Beginning of editing for the finished piece

We have begun to edit our work and we have managed to experiment with a blue wash to give the effect of the sequence being set in a dream. This allows us to use our idea of being unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality. We did encounter a problem when we realised that we had left the camera running without realising, which added extra time to our shoot. We editted the shots we were using and personally I thought one of our shots of blood looked like rhubarb crumble so we decided that we could not use the shot because it did not look right. We also realised that there we some scenes that we were unable to use because they looked as if the actors were not ready and also scenes where we left the camera on and we were speaking randomly and what we were saying was picked up by the camera resulting in us having to remove the scenes.

The shoot

We were pleased with how the shoot went, we learnt a lot on the day about surroundings and techniques that can be used with the camera.
I was pleased with the performance from our cameraman and director as a dead person. Our makeup artist did her best to make scott look dead but to be honest, we all agreed a brick would have given a better appearance.
We used fake blood and natural scenery to give the affects that we wanted. Rain made my hair look appropriate and being as it was a damp day, shoes and trousers etc became muddy naturally.

The weekend Shoot

We did our shoot at the weekend, of frames 4-12 of our storyboard. Leaving just the first three frames to be shot in school this week.
We shot the footage at the locations we had planned to do, but there was some variation from the storyboard, mainly in the mise-en-scene region.
We were pleased with what we got on the day for a number of reasons:
I as the main actor had very little sleep the night before, so looked appropriately worn.
We started filming in the afternoon, and the rain gradually got a little bit worse, but as it got worse, we were in a section where we shot scenes back to back, so hopefully in the edit you wont notice any jumps in weather.
We managed to get shots that we wanted, and the outtakes we have, mostly can be used as filler shots as they are mostly appropriate to the filming that we needed.

Write-up of shoot.

We decided that we would shoot our opening sequence on Sunday day and in our opinion, we think it went relatively well. There was a problem though. Halfway through our shoot it started raining which caused problems when shooting because we were trying to keep the camera dry. It was difficult and in the end we had a break just so that the rain could ease off slightly so that the camera would not get too wet. This allowed us to prepare for the next shot and to have something to eat. We all had a couple of cases where we forgot to turn off the camera and where something went a little bit wrong and we both started laughing. This delayed one of our shots as we had regain our composure before we were able to shoot again. We also had to avoid background noise but it was awkward because there were cranes and people moving around in the background. We did stray from the storyboard a bit as we realised that there were some parts of it that we were unable to do either due to weather or because we decided that there was a lack of practicality about some of the shoots that we were aiming to do. One of these was the blood in the river shot because what we were using got washed away in the stream, making it difficult to do the shot. So we improvised by using a shot by the stream as if somebody had fallen and left a bloodmark by the edge of the stream, adding to the idea of an attack.