Friday, 1 May 2015

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Over the experience of creating a small film I've learnt a lot in terms of production film and even planning. this whole project has been a good learning experience from the start and as helped me improve my skills with all of the main aspects of making a film.

for planning, this is where i was the most unsure of what to do. i knew that things such as scripts and storyboards had to be created in order for everyone involved to know what to say and do but the research part was very new to me. i particularly enjoyed the part where we had to analyse other media products such as films to get an idea of how films were made and how editing was done etc. But, looking at other media really inspired me to want to create. The main thing i struggled with was writing them down in a way which was readable, it was a little too easy to over complicate something in ways which became hard to understand witch was a bad way to start my research, but after time i managed to simplify my work in the best way possible. Another thing that i struggled on in the planning area was research on specific parts of the film like characters, places, costumes, props and other things. This may have been because i was unfamiliar to the film noir genre so everything felt brand new and not something i could write of the top of my head so a lot of time was spent making sure my research was corrupt and could helpful towards my final product. The part i enjoyed the most was creating a scripted and a storyboard, even though the one i wrote was not the final one we made i still had a interesting experience writing on. I learnt a lot about how scripts and storyboard were written and drawn in a professional way, especially in the script part. creating the setting in the script and drawing the storyboard alongside was a new thing that I've done when creating a project like this, it was a good way to have everything that ended to be done written down so people would know what they are doing but for seeing improvements that could be made before they were filmed. deciding on the final idea for the film was easier than anticipated, we went with the one that was way more practical to film rather than the version that required more props locations etc. with that however i learnt how a film could be changed in a way to fit a budget or a set back which couldn't be over come. It's very easy to have a perfect vision on a project that you want but actually getting there can be difficult especially through not having the right thins to fit the job, so creating something more simple is definitely better of when starting out. hopefully in the future i can manufacture something that requires something that has a lot to it. Also while planning it was very important to keep the viewer in mind, forcing your content around a particular group of people is something i have done before when creating content but however this time it was for a very different set of people so this was again quite new to me. Being able to create something and people who are into the genre enjoy it is a great feet, it was well worth the research that came with it. We looked at what common things were put into film noir and brought it into our own with a slight modern twist. we ant over the stereotypical things that made film noir famous to begin with and included them into our final piece, things like the femme fatal, the suits that the detectives wear ever right down to the attitude of all the actors. another thing as well were the actors themselves, picking the right people to play the write parts was especially important in the planning stage due to wanting to make the characters believable in every way possible. The actors we chose we knew well as friends so working with them was very comfortable for people because working with complete strangers would have made things harder then it needed to be and could of taken longer as well.

After the planning stage we of course moved onto recording and editing parts which i had a lot of experience in doing as of working on things similar to this before. recording was quite easy, we had a lot of help with camera and audio to make sure everything was done in the best way it could be, we even created a homemade boom mic stand that could be held under or over near a character to hear them better. our location was also well picked as it didn't have a lot of traffic with people disturbing the area allowing for us to have the whole day to record without stopping for anyone. we were also lucky in terms of the weather which allowed us to complete our recordings in only a few days. We didn't have many problems when recording our project, in fact there was only just one shot we had to re-record and that was it. After all of our recording was done we went onto the post-production stage which was the editing of all the videos, adding things like backing tracks, effects etc. This was the place i was mostly familiar with, editing videos and audio is stuff I've done before even starting media so this is where i did my best. Even though I'm used to editing though, i was completely new to the program we used which was called "Adobe Premiere Pro." This, even though being completely knew to me, was in fact not hard to learn. It was quite similar to the other program that I've used before so there weren't that much that i had to learn other that a few things when waiting to add or remove audio. We first started the editing with syncing all the audio we collected, because of not being able to connect the mic straight to the camera we had to sync the audio manually through the editing software. This was done by syncing up the camera and the voice recorder when shooting, we had someone stand in front of the camera while it and the voice recorder was capturing and had them clap. This is similar to what a clapperboard does which is give the camera a visual and sound that can be synced up together in editing to match when the recorder and video started recording. we could have just not used the recorder to record the audio for our film but we wanted the audio to be the best it could be because bad audio is one of the main things that puts people of watching a clip. After the audio was synced for all the clips and in their respective places in the film we started altering the look of the film. we improved the lighting in some shots by highlighting and darkening some areas to make parts stand out form one another, we also added the black and white filter over all the shots in the film to give it the classic look that the older film noir movies had. Another thing we did while editing is add music into the background. this was done to make the scenes where it was just silent less boring as there were a few moments where they were quite dull without sound.


In Conclusion i have learnt a lot in the process of film making and wish to try and make something longer, however this time improving in my research and over all shooting of the shots in the film. 

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