Just so you know, to tell which one of us did what, Tom's posts are marked with the label 'Tom', and Dale's posts are marked with the label 'Dale'. When there are both labels, it's because we both worked on the content of that post. The vast majority of the coursework was a joint effort between us both, especially with the evaluation. We hope the improvements we've made from prelim to coursework is obvious, because we think we did a pretty darn good job!
Friday 6 May 2011
Friday 8 April 2011
Evaluation Activity 7 - 'What We've Learnt' - Final
In the preliminary task, we used (I think) iMovie in order to clip together the video that we had recorded, and we learnt little to nothing about the process other than keeping the shots continuous (i.e. specific frames leading to specific frames). However, in the film opening we learnt how to use a far superior program (Adobe After Effects CS4), in our opinion, that we found had several effects that could be applied to the videos that benefited in the end, helped along no doubt by having a friendly interface to go along with it.
The continuity of shots was also something we were introduced to in the preliminary task, but expanded on when it came to shooting the film opening. There were a heavy amount of continuity errors in the original that we didn’t really contemplate until we were editing it, such as the changing of Dale’s costume between shots due to filming on different days – a problem we learnt to avoid by planning out the different aspects of the filming, including costume, set and lighting (which included the time of day, due to the use of windows).
In order to increase the efficiency of shooting, rather than spending as much time on it as we did the preliminary task (which took at least three days for the shooting of around 30 seconds worth of filming – ridiculous!), we planned out each of the individual shots with a top-down diagram of the room we were shooting in and drew out where the camera would be shooting from and where – when it came to shooting the opening, it only took a couple of days to shoot the vast majority of it, as we were able to refer to the diagrams when needed. This shows that throughout the filming, we learnt to plan out things in order to maximise the efficiency of the filming process, which left us more time for the editing process and increased the final quality of the opening.
In the preliminary task, we also learn about match on action, the 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot, with the latter of which not being used in the film opening due to it’s content not requiring it – however, the 180 degree rule was used throughout, as the camera angles generally keep shooting the back or the left of the room. It was, however, broken at a couple of points – for example, when shooting from the perspective of the man in the chair, or when the camera is positioned outside of the room, both times breaking the rule in order to clearly show a different perspective being used, as well as further the relation of the audience to the killer (taking his perspective from inside the room to outside of it). Match on action was also used for this final section, as well as the actual murder of the guy in the chair.
Evaluation Activity 6 - 'What Did We Learn' - Final
The camera we used for the filming of the opening was one we had just purchased, and throughout the process we learnt to work with it confidently, and by the end were fairly well acquainted with the vast majority of it’s features, as well as considering it’s “auto-focus” when doing shots – the opening pan, for example, had certain angles being unable to be used, because the sky would become blurred and instead the trees would come into focus, despite them not being the main point of focus for the shot we had planned, so we chose a higher angle and a different location to shoot from to avoid that from happening.
We also used Adobe After Effects CS4 when putting together the clips and adding certain effect to them, which we were also unacquainted with using when we started but by the end were confident with using – we learnt how certain effects can be used and when they’d be appropriate, such as the lens blur on several of the shots (like the one of the knives, glass of water and pills), and how to put clips together. The render quality of the final video was considered as well, and the need to test a few different settings to get the best quality-to-size ratio made us come up with the idea of simply rendering out each of the individual shots into different files and then putting the clips together in one final video and rendering that instead – this decreased the time to render at the end of the project, as instead of having to calculate different effects it was simply rendering clips together, which allowed us to find an appropriate quality with a small enough size that was able to be played back properly (without the jittering).
We also used WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe, a video conversion program (and DVD burner) that allowed us to convert the .MTS videos recorded with my camera to .AVI files with fairly little quality lost in the process of doing so – this was something we had to do, due to several problems with rendering using .MTS files in After Effects. After using several programs that just didn’t work quite as well, this program was found to be the best out of all of them, and was also used in order to burn the DVD at the end of the project – other programs made for the task just didn’t do it right, resulting in the loss of several non-rewritable disks (we hate Nero). We learnt that in the future, WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe is the program we should use for conversion jobs and DVD burning – we’ll be buying it at some point soon (or at least Dale will).
We also learnt that DVD+R disks are the best to be used when handing in the final project – we went through DVD-R, DVD+RW, and DVD-RW disks before finally using a DVD+R disk, as all of them had problems when burning the opening to a disk, such as the image becoming distorted and the sound being delayed by a few seconds (which wouldn’t matter all to much if the gunshot hadn’t been placed so specifically).
Evaluation Activity 4 - 'Goths, Goths Everywhere' - Final
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| Age 16+, fan of macabre stuff, clearly doesn't give a crap about the way he looks (iron man esque piercings) |
The kind of teen that would come to see our film would most likely be of the goth variety – you know the kind, the ones that love dark clothing, love anything with a macabre twist and are quick to jump on the newest gore fest out there. However, we’re not really aiming towards the worse end of this stereotype (kids who love to kill things, like emos but more external), but the kind who are open to liking things based on their own opinion, not just because no one else likes them.
Silly hipsters!
So yeah, really we’re just aiming towards those who are open to different kinds of films – ones that deviate from genres enough to consider them a different breed, rather than people who like films with explosions and stereotypical storylines. It’s hard to try and generalize the target audience for our film, and for that reason I don’t think it would do too well commercially – it’s sort of the in between of “unique” and “stereotypical”, the kind that doesn’t really attract people too well.
We tried though. God knows, we tried.
Evaluation Activity 3 - 'Media Institutions' - Final
We didn't have time to record, so we decided to post the script instead
What does a production company do?
A production company essentially creates the film, or has a certain group of people within it that do so. They also generally are either independent or mainstream, each one different mainly in budget and dependence for successful films, with mainstream production companies being more unwilling to diverge from proven formulas and independent production companies being the opposite. They also may be known for specific genre films (or being multi-genre), such as Lionsgate Entertainment who, despite being mainstream, have been known to fund independent films, and are both distributors and producers in their own right. They’re fairly similar to ours, in that they’ve produced a couple of the films that helped inspire our own film opening – Saw and American Psycho.
The idea of a distributor and who that might be and why.
A distributor, something we missed out from our film opening, is essentially the company behind releasing the film, whether it be in cinema or on DVD. For example, Motion Pictures distributes films on DVD in the UK usually, with them being behind the UK distribution of The King’s Speech more recently, and are known for funding and distributing independent titles also – they distributed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Let The Right One In, two fairly popular independent films.
Where the money might have come from for a film such as yours.
Funding for independent titles is usually done via private investors or several companies, or even the UK Film Council. Other production or distribution companies may also provide funding if they like the film themselves – for example, Motion Pictures provided funding for The King’s Speech, which turned out to be a pretty good call on their part.
Why the various people are named in the titles – which jobs appear, what order, why.
The credits we included in the film were the directors, editors, writers and main actors, of which we probably could have left out the editors – we used these due to them being the main things that the audience will see throughout the video, and probably the ones that they would like to know. For example, the directors have designed the things they’re seeing, the writers have written everything they hear and the actors are the ones who they’ll be following the story of throughout the film. We say that the editors could probably be left out, as really people just don’t get interested in who they are unless it’s some pretty darn nifty editing, like making a film feel like a completely different genre simply through editing tricks (Hot Fuzz comes to mind).
Evaluation Activity 2 - 'Fancy Suit Man' - Final
As mentioned before, one of the main inspirations for the film opening we’ve made is American Psycho, both in terms of the character doing the killing and the method by which they do it. The character of Patrick Bateman and the character of the killer in our opening both represent the upper-middle class of society – the kind shown to the public mainly via businessmen and politicians. The kind of suit-wearing, shallow and selfish person that is more concerned about the state of the floor than the life of the victim.
One of the main themes that American Psycho portrayed was the importance given to outward appearance by people, often not reflecting their true nature – Patrick Bateman was forced to vent his anger and frustration at the littlest things through killing many, many people (whether it was real or not is beyond the point).
Though the opening does have a somewhat different feel to it than the death scene involving Paul Allen in American Psycho, there are several similarities between the two that were intended to link the characters together:
· The room is filled with very clean colours – white being the dominant one
· The central point of the room is generally considered to be the chair the victim is in
· The victim’s chair is surrounded by newspaper
· The victims wear fairly similar clothing, as do the killers
· The table is covered in a white cloth
· The windows have blinds on them (though ours are light coloured to match the room)
· The killer takes pills from next to a glass of water
· There is music overlaying the murder, and it’s being played from a stereo system of some sort
· You don’t see the dead body – just the blood on the newspaper surrounding it
Evaluation Activity 1 - '9 Frame Wonder' - Final
Title Font and Style
Conventionally, the font and style of the title is meant to reflect the tone of the film itself (e.g. in Dawn of the Dead, it uses a bold, red font for the title that appropriately sets the tone for the graphic nature of the film itself). In order to go along with this, we chose to have fairly fancy font that is the main focus of the shot (being on a blank background and centred), which links to the character and his need to keep up a positive outward appearance (as noted in evaluation activity 2), being a person who cares more about their appearance than what they actually do. This is also reflected in the music overlaying the opening too, which all represent the tone of the film accurately, as normal film openings do.
Setting / Location
Normally, a film opening sets the location up via a long shot, often sweeping, however the long shot that we use for ours isn’t used to set up the location, but rather the atmosphere. The actual location of the opening is stereotypical of horror films, and takes direct inspiration from the “kill scenes” of both Dexter and American Psycho, and (if the film were to be fully made at some point) would have the audience know what was going to happen the moment they saw the room again, helping to advance the feeling of anticipation in them, something that is conventional of the horror movies of old, but is something lost nowadays in preference of jump scares – this is helped along by the repeated shot of the empty room, in which the basic elements of the room are all shown (chair, white surroundings, and newspaper covered floor) and are kept on screen for a few seconds to sink it into the memory of the audience for the rest of the film, or at least as long as they need to remember it.
Costumes and Props
Costumes, traditionally, represent the basic ‘need-to-know’ qualities of a character, and are meant to be there so that it’s easy to understand what role those characters take within the scene. Film openings often don’t have characters being shown, but when they do it’s easy to understand who exactly they are in that scene – with horrors, this is often whether they are the victim or the killer. From the moment you’re introduced to the man in the white shirt, you witness him being dragged across the floor and see blood down his shirt, as well as bruises on his face, and it’s obvious that he’s the victim, whereas the (dashingly handsome) man in the suit is much more refined in his appearance, and it’s clear that he has the control in the scene.
Props, again, are traditionally meant to give some immediate sense of fear or anticipation to the audience on seeing them – knives are the quick, go-to weapons of choice for killers stereotypically, so we decided to use them within the scene in order to link them to the killer and make it clear what he’s going to be doing with them. After thinking it over, removing the pizza cutter was probably a good choice in the long run.
Setting Up The Story
More often than not, film openings don’t really set up much story, but rather give brief overviews of them, or reflect some of the more basic elements of it. For example, in Dawn of the Dead, the opening shows a viral outbreak that the government can’t control and then shows some of the “infected”, which gets the general gist of what happens in the background of the film, but doesn’t point out that the film is mainly based around the survival of a group of people within a mall, nor the ultimate goal of escaping from the mainland via boat. Overall, our film opening conforms to that kind of set up, with the use of a murderer doing his thing and whatnot whilst not revealing much about the killer himself or his motivation, but does hint at some sort of health issue, mental or physical, with the shot of the pills.
Portraying The Genre
Film openings often portray the genre note for note to the audience, with horror films basically always having some sort of grim or graphic opening sequence. In The Reeds, they have a man being hunted by an unknown attacker, and in the opening for Dawn of the Dead they have a fairly pessimistic government official and a graphic few clips of the infected. We decided to challenge this and focus more on the portrayal of the character of the killer rather than the genre, which may have been a bad choice in the long run but felt right at the time, such as the various shots of his interaction with the man in the chair whilst not really showing much of the character visually – the genre itself really only shows through in the action of the sequence, such as the murder itself and the transport of the body, though the room being used is a traditional, easily recognizable “death” scene type of room that reflects the genre as well.
Character Introductions
With film openings, the protagonist often isn’t introduced, at least not in horror films. In Dawn of the Dead, there is no mention or portrayal of any of the characters, and in The Reeds they show the antagonists – in fact, both of these openings show the antagonists instead. Technically, we’ve kept to this convention with the introduction of the killer, but the opening was designed around introducing him not only as the ‘bad guy’, but also as the main character of the film. The victim within the scene however was something that deviated a lot from traditional openings – characters that aren’t repeated just don’t get given too much screen time, or at least no shots of the face, simply because they don’t want the audience to linger on characters that don’t matter on a personal level, and in this case I think we did rather badly.
Special Effects
With horror films, special effects are mainly used for graphic content – what the audience have come to see it for, essentially – and in our film opening we’ve tried to keep to that as well via the use of blood and an eyeball, which we’ve detailed the creation of in separate posts.
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