Production Journel

Director (Patsy Jones)

As director, I took responsibility to ensure that all cast and group members were present at the arranged dates for filming. Two days before filming,(5th March) the female actor we had lined up could not make the dates arranged for filming. As a group we tried hard to find a replacement actor, we asked in the creative arts block at out college and even asked all the drama students. Unfortunately, at such short notice, we could not find an actor.

As an alternative, I volunteered to be the main actor In our production. Even though i have no acting experience and little confidence in front of the camera, we had no other alternative and already arranged filming dates and signed the location contract and release form.

We filmed out opening sequence on the 7th of March 2011. As director, I talked my other cast member through the storyline and script and made sure he knew exactly what to do. My responsibilities during filming were to work alongside the camera person to get the correct camera shots and angles. This proved quiet difficult as I also had to be part of the film but we worked around it. As director I also had the responsibility of calling cut and acting a few seconds before and after the shot to leave room for editing.

Camera Person (Catherine Seiersen)

Camera person was not my original role but due to the illness of the person who was allocated this role, I had to step in and take the responsibility. The first step I took was setting up the tripod so it was level with the first shot (car boot) and then placing the camera on the tripod, making sure it was level and centre, this was to make sure the camera was not on a slant.

Once the initial task was done, it was simply moving the tripod up and down to suit the shot. A few times I had to use the camera without the tripod as the camera angles/shots we wanted would not of been made possible with the tripod. This included the worms eye view shot of the antagonist and the OTS shot of the protagonist being tied up. During filming the director and I noticed that some of the earlier shots had our equipment bags in the background, so unfortunately we had to re-shoot the scenes. This did enable us to get it right first times as the other shots seemed like a rehearsal.

Editor (Patsy Jones)

Catherine was originally assigned to be the editor in out group, but due to the illness of a group member I had to take the role of the camera person. After the production was filmed, a 3rd group member who was not present for any filming, left the group for personal reasons. This left the editing position open.

We decided to split the role of the editor, but Catherine mainly working on the computer, as this was her original required role. I was present at all editing sessions, which included the audience research, preliminary task, opening sequence and an evaluation question. We worked together to decide which clips we did and did not need and in which was to place them together. Transitions and editing effects were also decided between the both of us. The music which was used in our production was a decision made by the both of us.

Editor (Catherine)

We started to edit our opening sequence on .This was my allocated role so no complication were made. The first hour we spent learning how to log and capture the film and placing it to become a stream on the sequence so we were able to see out sequences in an order.
The next step we took was to cut out all of the mistakes made and out them to the end of the stream in case they were needed later. After mistakes were taken out it was a case of placing the shots in order to get an idea of how the shots fit together and how long out opening sequence was.

We started to cut certain shots as they were long and took up time but needed to be allocated for other things. Once the shots were shortened we decided it was time to place transition effects and titled.

I started to place the title clips in between shots that we both agreed would be the best place to put them. I had to shorten the title clips as the standard time was 10 seconds and changed them to two seconds, this worked well to keep the time limit. We placed addative dissolve and a cross dissolve between two clips as we felt that it made a smoother transition between them. Another effect we used was to change the scale of one shot (the hand shot) so it started with it close up and then zoomed out to show the hand was in blood.

The film was done, so we finished it off by placing music from www.royaltyfreemusic.com when we found to sets of music which we linked the most. I placed the sounds within the scene and I had to duplicate both pieces and cut one piece as we had to place a certain point of the music in a part of the sequence further on. After listening to it a few times we decided the sound and the film times well together. Once it was all rendered we placed it on YouTube to place on our blog.

'A night to remember' opening sequence (draft)

Software Notes (Patsy Jones)

We have had to use and adapt to different software’s in order to complete our coursework.

This software is designed specifically for brainstorms and mind maps. In order to do out brainstorm we had to present it in the format required.

 

The main equipment needed to complete out production was a camera and a tripod. Through doing out preliminary task we acquired the knowledge of how to set up the tri pod and get it to the correct height and centered. We also learnt how to use the cameras correctly, how to set them up and view back out footage when necessary.

 

YouTube has been very useful to us, when we did not know how to use software’s or do certain things, we looked it up on here and found out. We had to use YouTube to upload our preliminary task and final production.

 

Scribd is software we used to present work in a technological format. We used scriptd for things like out script and props list.

 

Final Cut Pro is the main software that we used to edit work; we used this for our preliminary task, parts of our evaluation and final production. It was quiet complicated to get the hang of using it as first, but after researching how to do things on YouTube it became easier.