Planning is a very important part in the film industry. Creating a storyboard allowed our group to really visualise each individual shot in order to understand what the camera will see and construct a further visual representation of the mies-en-scene. We have created a story board to help give a representation of what we want to achieve in terms of the out come. Of course this is a rough draft and won't have anywhere near as much detail as the final outcome. An advantage of creating a storyboard is that it includes being able to adapt on your shots to make them better as if makes it more clear to the individual what components of the shot may need to be improved or changed (this may include the camera being higher up, the character having a different prop or in a different position). I believe designing a story board is a good thing to do before shooting a trailer or a sequence in general because it gives us a rough interpretation of what we intent the outcome to come out like.
We have created a 'Captive' cover poster in order to help promote our film opening. Posters are a very effective and traditional marketing tool which helps you build and attract an audience. We did some research into cover posters, we have taken ideas and inspiration from three different film posters to use in our poster. We have made the photo very dark, displaying a single character tied to a chair with a logo containing a white background to make it stand out and contrast the main image.
James Bond Spectre is the latest edition of the James Bond series. It was released in October 2015. It was one of the largest anticipated moves for the last few years. In this cover James is accompanied by his partner in crime. It is clear that James Bond is the main character in this movie because he is in three quoters of the background of the cover with his face in a blue / grey colour. The woman beside him must have a big part to play in the movie. The title is centred at the top of the cover, the font is a silver colour and it has a reflective side to it. The colours are different in the background of James's face as compared to the smaller full body image of him in the cover. I think the blue colour of James represents the past. In the top left of the corner there is a figure with a skull mask on. I think that this figure is a representation of the villain in the movie or has something to do with the plot in a pretty big way otherwise it wouldn't make it on the cover.
In Olympus has fallen the cover supports and shows three characters, we are able to assume that the character in the middle is the main protagonist. The main character I believe is the centralised character because that is normally how designers create movie posters. The two men beside him will have key roles win the film, we don't know what the specifically are but its safe to assume that they will have a big role in the film. On the left hand side of the cover there is the United States flag which is on fire, I believe this represents how the United States has fallen to the hands of the enemy in the film. The title itself tells us that Olympus has fallen. Olympus is a codename for the president and the Whitehouse. So by saying olympus has fallen it means that the Whitehouse has been taken hostage by someone. With the flag and the white house on fire in the cover this shows how the Unites States has fallen to the enemy. A big emphasis is used on Olympus in the title, it shows a great importance in this movie.
Star wars the force Awakens was a very widely anticipated movie prior to its release, this theatre cover gives off a lot of information to the film that enthusiasts have picked at and tried to find every bit of information towards the film and the plot as possible. The artists of this cover will want to be able to show off big points in the film and show of the characters, the point of this is to draw people in so they can analyse and make their own assumptions on the film. We can see that on the right side there is the blue side which is of the Jedi. The Jedi is the good side in the star wars universe. There is a female character who is in the centre of the cover, I think it is safe to assume she will be the lead in the film.
In order to work as a team, we needed communicate quickly and efficiently. f
Four of us decided to create a WhatsApp group chat. We chose WhatsApp as it was the most heavily used instant messaging service within our group.
Organisation is a vital part of video production, however people are often busy so we can't talk in person, so WhatsApp allows us to message on the go whilst planning events without the need to be in the same location.
As well as communicating within our group, we have used Facebook's instant messaging service in order to make plans with one of the people that is doing the Russian voice overs for our opening scene. He is our friend called Philip Ilinitch and his primary language is Russian. However, he is able to speak english in a strong Russian accent which is exactly what he needed.
One of the characters in our opening credits movie is meant to be Russian. However, in reality he is English. Therefore, we needed someone who is able to speak English in a Russian accent to be the voice of the character.
Overall, the dialogue which Philip sent us was very clear and sounded realistic. The reason it worked so well is because the shots of the character speaking didn't really show his mouth. As a result, the dialogue didn't have to perfectly match the speed of the characters mouth.
The two photos above show a small part of the conversations that have taken place in order to arrange. I believe working as a group to complete this trailer has been vital, the social media chats we have been using have been so helpful because they have allowed us to be able to contact one another even when we are not even physically present. Its been so much easier having been able to contact each other and organise dates and times for when we can do our shoots, its definitely been beneficial in our organisation of the project. A conclusion as to why I believe group communication is vital is that it is so important for us as a team to be able to easily contact one another. Its good because we don't need to all be in the same place physically instead we can arrange and organise our shoots and the dates for the shoots. Having the group chats has been very important and has been vital to our team work and the overall outcome of the trailer itself.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
This is our preliminary task, in this we had to follow the guidelines and we had to create a simple short video just to show that we understand the task that was given. It required us to edit a continuity task which then involved a person/character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character in which the person will exchange phrases of dialogue. This task will demonstrated match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule. It is simple but it covers the requirements. We my group and I look back at our preliminary task we feel that as a group we have all learnt alot and developed our skills and positively improved as a group. It is has definitely helped us when it came to creating our main trailer 'Captive'. We believe ever since the preliminary tutorial our camera work has been much more efficient and effective as we can now use the manual settings to much greater effect and this actually makes our footage much better as we can control what the outcome will be more like as to compared what it would be like if we were to use the auto mode like we would've done if we hadn't learnt a great deal from our practices. The manual mode allowed for much more control over the shutter speed, aperture and ISO (camera sensitivity) which then made it easier to get a more cinematic look on our film. As a result of this, you can see that compared to our preliminary task there was our main trailer and the trailer showed how much our camera work and abilities had improved, we used a larger variety of shots and angles and also the quality of the footage was much better. I have picked out a you tube video below that describes how colour correction works and how to use it effectively.
180 Degree rule One of the main camera techniques we improved and worked on was the use of the 180 degree rule. Before any of our work I didn't have a great understanding of what this meant, but we were able to build a better understanding of it as the course progressed. In our preliminary task we actually didn't use this rule as we lacked the knowledge of how to use this rule, we didn't know where to apply it and how to use it. We then researched into it to improve our understanding of it to see how to achieve the 180 degree rule and this research actually made our final film opening a lot less confusing and time consuming. I believe the use of the 180 degree rule made our film more professional as it has followed the guidelines of a real media production.
Screen shots from Preliminary Task
The two screen shots above were taken from our preliminary task. The 1st shot is a close up of my face and the depth of field on the camera focused in on me meaning that the other person was more blurred out, this means that the camera was focusing on me. As you can see the 180 degree rule is broken in this because it is a POV in screen shot two and in screen shot one it is a close up, this has broken the 180 degree rule and it makes it confusing for the viewers to understand whats happening.
The planning of our preliminary task was confusing and hectic because as a group we didn't really know what to do and we didn't know who to create what we had been used to do so we simply brainstormed a few ideas and came to a conclusion and we created 'LONLEY'. Our outcome was pretty bland a lacked a variety of detail and it missed out the '180 degree rule' for example. We instantly improved on this as it came to the pre production of Captive and the production of Captive, as a group we worked solidly together and we got things done effectively and efficiently. To communicate as a group we used whats app instant messenger and we created a group chat were we would construct a few ideas and then organise the dates and times for the shoots. This was very helpful and it definitely made the process much easier. We worked collaboratively in order to create a storyboard that would help us when it came to shooting the scenes. This helped us give a pre visualisation of our shots and change anything or correct anything in advance, instead of wasting our time when filming. This is something which we struggled with in the preliminary task. We had no storyboard and that definitely effected our outcome and the efficiency of our shoot.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process pf constructing this product?
Hardware
As our Camera we used a Canon 700D with a standard lens and a 300-700 sigma lens. This camera recorded everything we did when it came down to the visual footage, it did the job really well. We used a road video mic attachment to be able to achieve better audio quality rather than use the on camera mic which doesn't do the best of jobs at picking up high quality audio. In black park it was an open and exposed environment so we needed to use a dead cat to be able to prevent the wind from effecting our audio quality. Henry brought the dead cat along and we needed it vitally. The point of the rode video mic was that it was aimed towards the direction that we filmed in and it picked up a much more intense and high quality audio in that direction, it only picks up audio in that direction so the background noise was pretty non existent. To record audio when it came to smaller and distinctive things such as footsteps or the voice of someone speaking, for example when Ollie (male being kidnapped) spoke towards the end of the trailer that we recorded by Kieran who used the apple ear pods, this was because they had a mic on them and they picked up the audio really well because it was so simple minimal. This image here is an example of what our camera set up looked like. We used other equipment such as tripods for still shot stabilisation, this was important because not every shot was moving, some were fixed and we needed the trip pod for this. We used a glide cam which was extremely important because it stabilises the footage, for example when the camera is moving and shaking the footage will be stable because the glide cam auto stabilises everything. The lighting we used was a soft box this was used to easily correct the colour in the frame and made the colour better too. 3 lenses were used, we used a 80-55 mil lens this was a great lens because it gave us a fairly good range of aperture. Then the second lens we used was in black park and it was a zoom lens, this was obviously used for its zoom capability but it had a good depth of field, this was used alot on the shoot in black park. The third lens was a 50mil lens, this was used to shoot the dark shots in black park for the kidnapping scene. Websites We used a website called free sounds, this was really needed at times because it allowed us to download for free small sounds such as the sound of a drill or water drops anything in that variety was gained off of free sounds. This site was great because when we attempted to collect these sounds for ourselves we found it really hard to pick them up in good quality as to compared to free sounds it was so simple because all we did was search the sound we needed then downloaded it. Although some sounds were recorded in black park with the rode video mic, we recorded mostly the ambient sounds with this mic. Our main source of research was from youtube videos, we used other channels to create a broader understanding of the task in hand and we used youtube to learn more about certain angles and ways to improve our camera skills. We used box office mojo helped us when it came to what certificate (rating) we wanted to create this film for, we chose 12A because stats show that 12A films are the most successful because it opens the variety of the audience to everybody in the public. IMDb was also used to create further research for things like DVD cover research and in terms of who watches the movies and each specific age group or class of people. We used obviously blogger as our main website to create the entire blog, we also used Prezi which is a website used to create slideshows. Also we used google docs just to create a few drafts and brainstorm ideas between the group. The video below shows how to compensate exposure on the camera settings, I put this video in because in black park the lighting massively varied and we had to change the exposure of the lens to be able to make sure the shot wasn't too dark or too light. We liked to keep the aperture on the camera reasonably low because this made the depth of field better and we personally felt that it gave the shots a much more cinematic effect. The settings on the camera massively depended on the day because obviously we cant control the weather so we had to do the best as we could and we had to compensate at times.
The main reason why we shot behind the scenes footage is because it is good to be able to have so we can refer to it and see what we did well and see what we could've improved on when it comes the time to create a new trailer we might possibly do in the future.
We chose very specific locations for the shoot, this is because they are of a good environment in which we could shoot the scenes well, the locations we used are well regarded and have been used many times before for big companies who produce box office movies such as James bond and star wars.
The ways we attracted an audience were by to use certain locations that are used by film productions that are larger then most and have a great fan base, so when they watch one of the films they often know where it is filmed e.g. James Bond is filmed at Pinewood Studios. So black park is the woodlands that is seen in our video footage this is because we were looking to achieve a rustic look for the scenery and woodlands was good for this effect.
The second way in which we wanted to attracted/address our audience was through the use of parallel editing which creates a sense of tension in the scene, in a shoot you can have mediocre shots but with the power of editing you can create something much more. The quick cuts between the two different locations meant that the audience never knew what to expect and are therefore this makes them much more engaged in whats happening. When the quick cut is occurring something else could be happening in the other scene such as the agent is doing something, the Russian kidnappers could be doing something else. This is good because the audience doesn't know whats going on. We could have chosen to create a film opening by using a of montage editing to represent different perspectives, although it wouldn't have had much of an impact in terms of helping the quick change of locations in real time.
Our front cover can go two ways it can either go well because the people would pick it up and think it looks good or they ignore it and there will always be some that ignore it, this is because some people just don't pay a bit interest in posters/pamphlets, but we hope to have made it stand out with the black and white photo and shows a man tied up and this would get people thinking is he going to get free or will he die, which will make the audience attracted to it and therefore make our audience wider.
These are all the different ways that we attracted and addressed the audience. The way it addressed the audience was because as soon as they see London and woods they can instantly tell by associating it with other films what this films is going to be about just from the scenery.
