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| Monday, 2 March 2009 |
| Reflective Analysis on our Film |
For our group film I took on the role as director. As director you take on the responsibility of the general making of the film. A good director listens to the other members of the group and takes on board their views and constructive criticism. I felt I coped with this micro element well and I made a positive impact on the rest of the group. When being director you sometimes can find yourself taking charge of everything as you feel that is what is expected of you. However I thought it was important that the entire group felt they could have just as much say in the film as I did as it is a group coursework project, not just mine. My actions in the role of director were substantial enough to get the film finished yet I was disappointed with the outcome of the film. If I were given a second chance in this role I believe I should be a lot more forceful with my group. We should have gone out again to re-shoot but because I didn’t pressure the group into doing so we never did. The role I played didn’t stop after we had shot the film, I had to make further decisions when we were editing. I did however make sure that Bella, Esther and Alice had an equal choice in what we edit/ change etc. Another job in my role was to make sure that we all worked as a team throughout the coursework. I think above anything we did this extremely well. Every person in the group was eager and enthusiastic throughout the film.
The genre of our film was decided almost immediately. The whole group felt that the most rewarding film would be a horror film. Firstly we thought it would benefit us if we put our ideas onto paper. There were many good ideas collected on paper but some of they would be too hard to develop into a film as we didn’t have sufficient enough money/ resources to make it. We decided upon a short sequence that would be a penultimate scene in the film. It shows three girls being abducted by a serial rapist in the middle of the night. One by one they go missing without a trace. The audience never actually sees the killer and this is intentional. It makes the sequence mysterious and the killer unique from the rest of the characters. We also wanted the killer to be unidentifiable. The aim of our sequence was to give a brief example to the audience what this particular killer was all about. This scene would have been taken from the part in the film just before he gets caught by the police. The audience may have been repulsed by the killer’s actions. Our aim was that they felt disturbed and this would then lead them to be terrified. With the genre we chose we you may expect some blood and gore, however we didn’t want to show this as the killers actions after he had kidnapped the girls were supposed to be secretive.
Throughout our filming and editing we encountered many problems such as finding a suitable time when would all be free to film and finding the best place to film. However these were just minor problems. One of the biggest problems we were faced with was casting. We had cast the roles weeks in advance to filming so that everyone knew what to wear and say etc. but unfortunately on the day of filming one of the cast members was unable to participate in the filming which meant we had to find someone else last minute. This effected us greatly as the only person we able to get was male, meaning that Alice, who was the camerawoman, had to then take on the female role that was missing. This had an impact on the whole group and film itself. The film was then shot in a way we didn’t particularly want it to be but we had no other option. After we ironed over this problem we hit another. Due to the fact our film was a horror film we thought to make it even scarier we would film it in the dark. We thought we were equipped enough with a large torch but we underestimated the strength of it. We started to shoot and found that the ending was just too dark and we were not able to see anything that we shot. This was a huge disappointment as we knew we only had one day left until the deadline, which meant we were unable to re-shoot. So we kept filming that night and just hoped that when we returned to college the following day it would be suitable. It was still dark when uploaded to the Mac but lighter than we thought it would be.
Being director i had to decide what I thought people should be wearing. I decided we should all wear the lightest colours we could if we were going to be filming at night so they would show up on camera. This turned out to be the best plan as had we of worn any darker colours we would not have bneen caught on camera at all! All three girl roles wore stilletto heels. This was a very
successful idea, as when we ran away from the killer the camera picked up the sound from the heels. This made the whole scene alot more effective and realistic. The audience can then picture themselves with the girls.
I have included some clips of our sequence that i felt were whether good or bad.
Clip 1
I have chosen to show this clip as it is a perfect highlight of how blurred/distorted the camerawork was. We found this throughout the whole film and this if anything is the best clip of the film in terms of quality. The only light we had was the light coming from the cars and street lamps. In some respect this was effective and made it look more realistic. But we were annoyed that we were unable to get better quality footage. The other reason that this part of the sequence is dissapointing is because the person who filmied this part was not someone in our group, meaning they didnt really understand what we were aiming to acheive.
Clip 2
This clip is still blurred but it helps make this clip more effective and mysterious. I like the contrast of the white coat and the black background. We thought that it would be better if we all wore light coloured clothes, such as white and yellow so they would stand out in the black night. This clip shows the first og the three girls getting snatched from the rest of the group, she is further behind than them making it easier for the kidnapper to capture her. This particular part of the scene was filmed well and did look very effective. The lighting was an issue but we used this disadvantage to our advantage.Labels: aliss |
posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 03:54  |
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| Evaluation of Film Clip- Alice Monteath |
We planned to make a short clip of a thriller film, we thought this would give us a wide selection of music, camerawork and storyline choices. Our film was about the life of a serial killer who had been killing undetected for a number of years. Our clip was one of his last killings, but more importantly, the one that brings him to the police's attention leading to his arrest.
My role for this film was the cinematographer. I took some of the shots in the last parts of our clip, in the opening scenes I play an acting part as one of the victims. When we were filming in the dark i helped create the lighting which involved holding a torch to find an appropriate angle.
When it came to the day of filming one of the cast members couldn't come with us to film, she did come with us look for locations with us though. This did mean that we had to change roles. I was no longer the cinematographer for the whole thing, instead i had to play an acting part in the film. This also meant that for the first two or three shots we had to get someone else to do the camerawork. This meant that filming took much longer than we intended as we had to explain to the new cameraman what needed to be done.
Our clip was filmed outside in the dark which we knew would be hard. Our main problem whilst filming, other then being short of one person, was the lighting. For the first part of the clip this wasn't  too much of a problem as there were streetlamps and the area was much more open.
When it came to the much darker scenes we spent a long time trying to balance our light in the trees at a good angle so you could see the characters, but so there wasn't a bright spotlight shining on them. This was very hard as only one person could do it at a time and got tiresome after so many attempts.
Our original plan was to start off on a bus, with the three girls getting on the bus, being brought to the audience's and killer's attention. We then realised at the time we were filming the bus would be far too busy, so we got rid of the idea and just started with them already being followed. This meant that we didn't really get an introduction to the girls or any idea of why they're there.
Our first idea was to film some from the perspective of the killer and some from a still camera over-looking . For this we looked at clips from The Blair Witch Projeect and the TV series Jeapordy as they are both good examples of filming from a point of view perspective. However we didn't have enough people to film and play all the parts so we kept it all through his viewpoint.    I thought it would be quite hard to make look good with it being so dark. But some parts it's quite effective, especially during the chase, the shaky camera makes it feel more real and you can tell what's going on as the streetlamps on either side of the path are bright.
Another aspect we had to consider was costumes. The girls in the film are supposed to be going home from a party late at night, so we had to dress up a little bit. But because we were in the dark we couldn't dress too similarly, that would make it harder to distinguish characters in the darker scenes. We had to have diferent silhouttes so we all wore different styles of clothes. The dark surroundings also meant we had to wear bright clothes, or atleast one bright item to see us properly.
The easiest part of the whole project was probably editing our film. We didn't have too much unwanted footage and we had a good idea of what we wanted so cutting it was quite straigthforward. We only had a problem when it came to making the film lighter so you could see clearly what was going on. We decided the best solution for this was to change the contrast and brightness on the darker scenes. This worked well, but when you watched it within the film the picture quality changed dramatically, we changed all our clips to the same settings so they all matched. This gave the film a much grainier quality, which it makes it seem seedy and sordid.
We had some trouble with our soundtrack on Garageband which resulted in our finished project without any music. Music is essential in a number of films, especially thrillers, so i thought the film wouldn't be able to create the scary effect we were after. However when we got feedback from our class people commented on how the lack of a soundtrack created tension and was very effective.Labels: alice, evaluation |
| posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 03:05 |
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| Tuesday, 24 February 2009 |
| feedback |
sound
diagetic sound is effective, roughness of sound goes with grainyness of video.
sound was too quiet sometimes.
no soundtrack builds up tension
effective ....very.
mise en scene
dark,mysterious atmopsphere
too dark that you couldnt see much
editing
liked first person perspective
shots too long and choppy
camerawork
not enough close up shots
good point of view shots...but too long |
| posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 06:26 |
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| Tuesday, 17 February 2009 |
| Editing |
| Once we had all the parts filmed we put them on to the computer, we looked through all the film and managed to pick out enough useable footage. The last three shots of our completed film were very dark and it was almost impossible to tell what was actually going on. This meant that we had to change the brightness and contrast on those three parts. When we watched the film through again we realised that this meant the quality of the film seems to drop there and looked much grainier, so we changed the contrast and brightness for the whole clip. Labels: alice, aliss, esther |
| posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 05:48 |
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| Problems on set. |
When it came to the arranged day of shooting our film one of our cast members couldn't join us, this meant we had to change some of the roles. The cinematographer had to play a part in the film and we had to find someone else to do the filming for the first couple of shots. This didn't cause too much of a problem, but it did mean filming took longer than it should have.
Towards the end of it there was just three of us which meant the last part was hard to film. Two people were in the shot and one behind the camera, this meant we had no help with the lighting. Our location was very dark, which was necessary, but it took quite a while to get the right lighting with no one to hold the torch. It ended up balancing it on a tree and changing the angle until we could see it through the camera, if we had no light there was no way you could have seen anything.Labels: alice, aliss, esther |
| posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 05:36 |
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| Thursday, 22 January 2009 |
| 20th January 08 |
We decided in our lesson to decide upon our shots and how we would act them. whether to use a script or to improvise the words in each shot. Firstly we decided that we wouldn't use too much speech in our shots so that it would not be a problem when editing to make the sound clearer. Also speech sometimes distracts the viewer from the main issue in the film. During the lesson we went into the corridor and practiced a little so we knew our parts a little better.
In that lesson we also decided on costumes, we thought we should all be dressed very differently, one in a dress, one in a skirt and the other in jeans. This is because we were shooting in the dark and it would help the audience easily tell the characters apart. Another important aspect of the costumes was the colour, the outfits should all be quite bright so you can see them in the dark.Labels: alice, aliss, annabella, esther |
| posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 07:35 |
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