Here is my infographic presenting data about the distribution of a major Hollywood film, from a big studio in comparison to A Field In England and another film of my choice.
Month: April 2014
Evaluation- Question 7
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
We have improved hugely since the preliminary exercise where we did the video for reservoir dogs. Firstly we were simply more organised than before, we planned our characters outfit in advance, meaning we could dress our actor beforehand to see if it looked right for the film.
We took photographs and did practice tears and sweat on our actor, this gave us a head start as we would know what worked and how to make it look real. I have also learned how to work quickly and effectively to produce a good outcome, our Reservoir Dogs video felt so rushed as we spent a lesson filming, and another couple of lessons editing then it had to be finished, with this film opening project Rosy and I managed our time well, making sure we were including as much detail of our plans and what we had done to prepare as possible.
Our editing skill have grown a lot, with the preliminary task there was not that much on the editing style just the basic cutting away of mistakes we had made while recording, where as during the main task the editing was one of the most important things, added effects and cutting away things that didn’t sound as we wished. we also spent along time actually fitting all the part together like the outdoor scenes, and match on action clips filmed.
I feel we were a good team and I feel proud of our media creation.
We have progressed in terms of organisation skills and using Motion and Final Cut Pro. This has made Rosy and I very confident when using it and we know what we need to click to achieve our desired outcome.
I feel we have learned good time management skills as we set the days for each obstacle, we set a date for filming and a date for doing all our preparation by.
When we first began our film opening project it was quite hard imagining the final product and what our film was going to look like, there was so much pressure and the deadline was fairly far away. However I believe we have made excellent progression from the preliminary exercise to the actual final product. We have shown good time management skills by handing in our finished film by the deadline, also filming on the designated days and editing during lessons and our free time.
We have also learned alot about film making in general, you must be organised and know exactly what you want to achieve with your film. You must have actors that are chosen exactly to fit the part! You must also choose your genre and have a good action plan to make the film s excellent as you had imagined.
Another thing we have learned about making a film opening is that it is all about team work, you must work with your partner and keep organised and both have the same goal, for us, this was very good, we worked excellently as a team and are both proud of our film opening. We have also learned each of our strengths, Rosy has excellent camera angle skills that look very artistic and professional, she also edits very well to achieve a stylish outcome. I feel that my strength is helping and supporting Rosy, and also, both of us, together, thinking of what we should do to get to our next milestone.
At the beginning of this project we had only used Final Cut once or twice, we had also only filmed with the cameras twice and to be honest we were still a bit unsure of how everything worked on Final Cut, the buttons on the camera, the zooming etc. After completing this AS Media project I can safely say that both of us are confident on Final Cut, Vimeo, Motion, using a good quality camera, using a microphone, editing shots, matching sound to video clips and working together. This project has taught us that as long as you have good ideas and determination, then you are able to reach your goal, no matter how stressful it is. It has definitely taught me that you can learn alot just from simply watching other films, taking inspiration from brilliant famous directors is an excellent tip, looking at some of the most famous and greatest films ever made. You can learn so much from the successful films.
Overall I think we have had a successful outcome, produced an interesting and artistic final product, shown our talent and eye for artistic shots, and worked brilliantly as a team. We both understand each other and both wanted to produce a final piece to be proud of.
Evaluation- Question 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
The Technologies We used:
The camera: We used a proper expensive professional camera to film the shots for our film opening. After using it for a couple of hours you get used to it and using the buttons and learning what each one does. We had originally used the same type of camera for our preliminary exercise so we mostly knew how to use it. For some of our shots we used placed the camera on the ground to film as it created a nicer looking shot where the character ran into the shot and you could see her feet only.
Tripod: The tripod was an important piece of kit as it was responsible for making our shots clean and not shaky. We used the tripod with the camera when doing shots of our character walking across the shot or doing close ups. Using the tripod meant that our shots didn’t shake and the were still.
Final Cut Pro: I had only used Final cut about two times before we did this film opening project, the first time was for our preliminary exercise and also for reservoir dogs. As you use it more you become more confident on it, learning which buttons do what and how to edit your shots together in the best way possible. You learn there’s more to editing than putting the shots together in a nice way, you have to consider sound, effects and lighting, motion from one shot to the next, text and how to display it without it looking cheap or not very professional, adding the ident etc. We managed to do some good editing and take some good shots which looked excellent when edited into the film. Final Cut made it easy to cut up shots and put them together in the way we wanted, it is also easy to understand and you learn fairly quickly what all the buttons do and how to make your film look exactly how you want.
Motion: We used Motion to make our film ident which we attempted first but it didn’t fit the genre of our film so we re made it and it was much better and flowed with our film because it has an element of sadness about it so the ident. Our first film ident was too jolly to fit our film, we had used sound on it which we were advised to take away because it was not like a proper famous film ident.
Vimeo: We used Vimeo to upload our videos so that we could embed them in certain blog posts. It took quite a while to upload the video from the computer onto the site but that was because of slow internet connection from home.
Prezi: I used Prezi when doing a blog post which was not in an essay style. It is a different way of presenting information which looks quite good as there is an endless amount of templates to use. I like using Prezi because it gives variety to my blog as it means its not just a series of essays and pictures.
Microphone: We used a microphone to record the sound in our film, however we didn’t actually need it in the end as we ended up not using speech and just using the power of body language and music to represent what the character was feeling. This made it easier for us when editing because there was no sound to match or speech to add on. We still used it but didn’t know we weren’t going to need it as we only decided when we were finally editing the clips together.
Jessica Morris's AS Blog 