Genre Moodboard

A moodboard is a collage of images,fonts,words,films,costumes,locations etc. They are used to display a type of genre and what is related to that particular genre. We created a moodboard to display what we considered to be related with our genre- Thriller. We've already uploaded our moodboard onto a group on facebook to get feedback from our target audience.

First Ideas

For our opening sequence of a film we have decided to work with the genre of Thriller. Our target audience is 16-19 year old's as it will be easier to relate to them. I will be working with Colette & Dom.

From Script to Screen: How does the credit sequence from Dexter work?

The opening sequence of Dexter shows in detail a normal morning routine that a man performs everyday. However, in this sequence it is filmed differently to show what kind of a person this man is through the use of violence.
The creator Eric Anderson got his ideas from re-contextualising mundane things and giving them a sinister importance. He started his ideas from noticing the name 'Dexter' looks the same if it is turned around, this gave him an idea that a person could have two sides to them. He then looked at crime scene photography and realised that the photographs contextualise mundane things and got the idea that a entire situation can unfold from one photo giving it an importance, once the history is discovered behind it eg. the Martin Luther King photo - where he was shot.
To fit this sequence Eric needed a character which introduced two sides to him, showing a man doing normal things in the morning but doing them in a brutal, harsh way to create a side of violence. The final sequence that Eric chose communicated the idea of 2 sides of this character in this sequence as the use of noir lighting and shadow depth of field helped to add a certain atmosphere to the piece. By Eric showing the detail by using shadow depth of field it made the viewers see 'normal' things as violent by the use of diegetic sound and jump cuts.
There are 2 trailers for this sequence. Eric decided to chose the one over the Xploding Plastix track. He did this because the first trailer had sinister music along with fast paced edits to connote tension, but the other creators thought that this clip gave too much away to the viewers rather than leaving a mystery - Bart's enigma code. The final sequence that he decided to select had a more playful soundtrack throughout it -the 'Rolfe Kent' track. By the use of this track it connoted tension but in a more mysterious way and set the clip to have a more humorous light whilst introducing subtly that this character could have a violent side to him.

Research: Analysis of the opening of Juno

Research: Key Conventions

The main point of an opening to a film is to introduce the main characters/cast and crew. They also indicate what narrative is being used as an opening eg. the opening of 'Brick' sets out an enigma code as it opens with a mystery leaving the audience to wonder what has happened to these characters, the same in 'London to Brighton' as the audience are left to question what the plot is and why the characters are disrupted. 

Another technique that is used in openings of films is to introduce the characters. Different films introduce characters in particular ways eg in 'Trainspotting' the characters are introduced at the beginning of the film individually in a freeze frame, which tells the audience what the character is like, such as Renton - he is introduced as daring and a rule breaker.

Main Task

The main task is to create a opening to a film lasting a maximum of 2 minutes.

The deadlines are :
Research deadline - 01/12/10
Photo-storyboard deadline-3/12/10
Filming deadline-07/01/11
Production deadline-28/01/11
Evaluation deadline-11/02/11

Targets

1) Take more care when filming
2) Make sure I save my edits in the right drive to avoid loss
3) Understand how to avoid jump cuts

Preliminary Task: Evaluation

When doing the preliminary filming task I learnt about continuity editing -what it is and why it is used. It is a process of editing to make the edits as invisible as possible. Also when filming we had to consider the key rules of continuity editing-180 degree rule is when each character must stay on one part of the screen and must never appear in the same frame, match-on-action is two pieces of footage of the same event are filmed together in different ways to make them seem continuous, 30 degree rule is used to avoid jump cuts and the eye-line match is when footage is matched to the characters eye line.  

When creating the story board to illustrate the sequence of the film with different shots being used, I used a digital SLR camera to take photo's of the shots that I will be using. Using this camera was easy as I set it on 'portrait mode' to capture the main aspect of the image- the character. I learnt when using the digital SLR camera that I was fairly confident with using this technology as I have used it before and the functions I used for this task I had also used before


After using the digital SLR I could now create the story board using 'Adobe Photo Shop CS5'. I print screened the photos onto the program and added text to demonstrate what the shots were and what we were doing. After doing the story board we could start filming-I used a digital video camera. When using this digital video camera I found that I didn't really know how to use it at first, but once I got the hang of it after a few shots it was fairly easy to work. The functions we used on this camera were zoom and rewind.

I thought that when we filming we were fairly organised as we managed to get the filming process and beginning of the editing process in one lesson. Although I think we could of been a little bit more organised as we missed a few continuity editing shots as in one scene we accidently produced a jump cut - which we had to redo along with the match-on-action shot.

After finishing the filming process we uploaded the footage from the video camera using a 'firewire'. The firewire imports the footage from the camera onto the computer in a programme called 'Adobe On Location CS5' which we then record which clips we needed for our sequence. After we used the programme 'Adobe Premiere Pro' which allowed me to edit clips easily. I found this programme to be quite confusing when I first did it, but after a few attempts from having to import the same clips again due to the computer wiping them I had got used to all the tools and techniques. The tools we used were 'razor' which erased part of a clip more easily, we also 'unlinked' clips so the sound wasn't running through that clip or to import a different sound from a different clip eg talking. The difficulties with this programme and 'On Location' were we kept losing our saved video clips to import to 'Adobe Premiere pro' as we saved them in the wrong drive ( G drive) which kept wiping our saved clips so we had to keep importing the video clips onto the computer and save it to the D drive.
We each imported our video onto our own blogs using 'Youtube'. We did this by creating a Youtube account and uploaded our video onto there- which wasn't a problem. To get the video onto our blog all we had to do was copy and paste the Youtube URL onto our post and it uploaded. Using Blogger made it more easier to set out my work neatly and helped me organise it better. Overall I found this Preliminary Task quite frustrating at points when we lost our clips but I did enjoy the filming and editing part once I got used to it.

Post-Production

The editing process went well at the beginning, although we noticed when editing that we had a jump cut and also needed to zoom into the match-on-action shot - so we will need to include that to our original film when we have re done those 2 clips. We also had to re do our editing because the software we used didn't save it properly. But overall the editing was found to be relatively easy once we got the hang of it.

Production

The filming process went well, we managed to film and start the editing within one lesson. Although we had re-do a few takes due to people walking past the camera. Overall, we managed to finish filming but we also have a few jump cuts that we will need to do again and add into the original film.

Pre-Production Task

Before we started filming we had to create a story board showing what our film involved and the different shots we will be using. We also had to do a risk assessment to assess the possible hazards of where we will be filming, this was to assure everything was safe. Also had to scout locations and ask permission to use the locations for our mini film.

Continuity Editing

Continuity editing is a style of film editing. The goal of this editing technique is to make the editing as invisible as possible.It is used to make the viewers get carried away within the story and to make them forget they are watching a film, tv etc. The main elements of continuity editing is '180 degree rule' - 2 characters facing each other, they must never appear on the same half of the screen otherwise the continuity of the scene will be broken. The next technique is 'match on action' cut - two pieces of footage filmed in different ways but edited together to seem continuous. Another rule is the '30 degree rule'- changing the angle of the camera to avoid a jump cut. 'Eyeline match' is another editing technique - footage is matched to each eye lines of the characters. The last element of editing is 'establishing a scene' which demonstrates an audiences understanding of a scene.

Preliminary Task - Video Production

This exercise involves filming and editing a character crossing a room, opening a door and also sitting down opposite another character which they exchange a few lines of dialogue to. The Preliminary Task demonstrates match on action, shot reverse shot and also the 180 degree rule.

Welcome :)

Hey! Welcome to my AS Media Blog, I will be using this blog to provide updates for my practical work throughout the year :)