Welcome to Oliver Loom's AS media blog. This is where you can find all of the tasks i have completed between September 2015 and January 2016 for my AS Media Course Work.
We have been set our Preliminary task which is to produce our own film opening which must include certain shots and techniques. Going into this task i have thought about what i need to do to make this film better than my Juno task. I have decided that i am going to use more still shots and make sure that my story board is detailed so that when we start filming, the process is more efficient.
In our first lesson we started by deciding on our film genre, we thought we could make a 'Gay romance film', as this would be controversial and moving for the audience. We changed this idea after we realized that people would over see the serious side to our idea and think it was funny. We changed our idea completely to a story about two best friends who fall in love with the same girl, the genre will be 'Rom-Com'. We decided to set the film at our school and aim the film at secondary school students.
We also made our story board in this lesson. We started by looking at the shots we needed to film and the best places to film them in the school. We decided to use our schools music department for the made part of the scene as we wanted to use a high shot on the stairs.
In this lesson we also went around the school and took pictures of possible places where we could film and reviewed them in the classroom as we were making the story board. These photographs are blow along with the story board.
Below is my groups completed Juno remake. In this blog i will analyse the process.
The filming process was moderately accurate. The actor had a slightly slower walking pace than the woman in the original sequence. Some of the camera work was quite shaky, this was because we foolishly did not use a tripod for most of the shots. We also found it difficult to do the tracking shots as we were using a person sitting on a desk chair and the ground was quite uneven. However, apart from the shaking the camera work was quite good, we used the right type of shots and recorded for the right lengths.
We found that our story board was a big help when we were filming. We had the right time lengths and the correct shot names, a problem we did face was that they did not know what was actually happening in some of the scenes, however this was overcome as we had the video on someones smartphone. This made it even easier to copy the scenes.
Our group had a confident actor who was comfortable with playing the role, he used good facial expressions and took the process seriously. Lots of other groups had problems with filming due to in-confident actors. An initial weakness we had was that one of our group members wasn't with us for the planning session this meant it took longer to complete the story board and it would be difficult for us to film in the next session. Despite this the member adapted really well to the circumstances and worked really well directing and filming some of the shots.
Our group managed to get all the footage we needed. We tried to make sure we got at least three good shots of each scene, this started off well but we only had an hour to film so we had less shots to choose from towards the end of the clip. We also knew that the clips weren't going to have any sound so we were able to talk to the actor whilst we were filming, this helped us get successful shots.
In this task we were introduced to a tracking shot, I now believe that this is the hardest show to make look good. I think that in future we will try and avoid this filming technique in future because it is difficult to do effectively. When editing the piece i learned how to place a clip on top of another one and play them simultaneously. I didn't learn any other editing techniques as i had learned them all during my introduction to Adobe Premiere. The main editing tool i used was the razor tool which i used to chop up different clips. My piece has the same shots as in the original clip however adobe didn't have some of the transitions, and i didn't know how to apply the special color effect to the piece. Overall my piece does not compare to the original as the camera is too shaky.
The timings went really well for this piece and i found that our shots used the right frame. However, in the next production i will try to avoid hand holding the camera and use a tripod more. I will also avoid using a tracking shot.
During our Pete Fraser talk we looked at how to make a successful film opening. He gave us top tips on what works well, what we shouldn't do and some examples of good and bad film openings. We were introduced to the use of 'Foley' which is the recreation of sound and how it is used in films. The tips he gave us included, how to plan, brainstorm ideas, editing and how to shoot.
