Prelim Task
I have uploaded all of my prelim work onto an "Emaze" presentation. This was the format we were told to produce our work in. This includes my film treatment, storyboard, production diary, risk assessment and our shot film "Surrender". It was a lot of fun making the short movie. I hope you enjoy.
Spectre
The new James Bond comes out on the 26th of October 2015. Below is 10 interesting facts about Bond films. Enjoy.
1. For Daniel Craig's time for playing Bond, Aston Martin have allowed him to take any Aston Martin from the factory once a year, free of charge.
2. Adam West, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds were all offered the role of James Bond, but they all declined because they believed that the role of James Bond should always be played by a British actor.
3.George Lazenby wasn't an actor. He bought himself a Rolex, a suit and had a haircut and met the producer and lied about what films he had been in and he was given the role of James Bond.
4. While under contract with James Bond, Peirce Brosnan was not allowed to wear a tuxedo in an non-Bond film.
5. James Bond has killed 352 people in 22 films. Pierce Brosnan was the deadliest. He killed 47 people in "Golden Eye".
6. Liam Neeson was offered the role of James Bond in "Golden Eye" (1995). But he denied it because he wasn't interested in starring in action movies.
7. The existence of MI6 (The agency James Bond works for) wasn't acknowledged by the British Government till 1994.
8. All the James Bonds in the past have been between the heights of "6ft 1- 6ft 2". Daniel Craig is the only one which doesn't meat the height. He stands at 5ft 10.
9. The Bond film "You Only Live Twice" was written by Roald Dahl.
10. In the new film "Spectre" £24 million was spent on blowing up Aston Martins alone. 7 Aston Martin DB10 sports cars were blown up during production.
Preliminary Task
For our Prelim task we have to make a 3 minute scene from a movie we have made up. We get to choose the genre though. This will motivate people more now that they have the choice of doing a movie about a subject/genre they like. My group consists of Melissa and Millie. They are both hard working girls, so they should be fun to work with. The genre we chose was thriller. We thought this would be the best genre for us because we had a lot of good ideas for a thriller. Our thriller is going to be about human trafficking. Human trafficking is the third largest criminal industry in the world. The films that we have taken inspiration from are "Taken" featuring Liam Neeson and "The Call" Featuring Halle Berry. These films have been very helpful because they have given us good ideas for camera angles and techniques. Also we have used some of the scene settings from the films. The reason we used these was because we think it will give some scenes a stereotypical look e.g. a dark gloomy room will inflict fear onto the audience. At the moment we are creating our storyboard, shooting schedule and risk assessment. Once this is done we can start filming. We should start filming on Wednesday the 14th of October. Personally I think we should have finished our storyboard and risk assessment quicker, because this would leave more time for editing. We have to have the task done by Friday the 16th of October. This could cause wok to be rushed and the end product to be not as good as expected.
Story Board
This is my Juno storyboard. We used this to shoot our Juno opening. The storyboard told us timings, camera angles and effects we had to use. This was very helpful for filming our opening.
My Logo
This is my movie industry logo. I made this logo on Adobe Premier because I find this is quite an easy programme to use. The reason I went for a cloud look is because most of the big name movie industry logos are related to the sky. So I thought to make mine look professional I would go for the same looking theme.
Dancing Animals
This was my second editing practice. In this edit I used a lot more visual effects because in music videos people use a lot of usual effects and chopping and changing of scenes. So unlike my James Bond I have include a lot more visual effects and I've chopped and changed videos around more.
The song that features in the edit is called "German Whip". The reason I went for this song is because when I was starting the edit I found the video of the animals driving in the cars first. The first thought that came into my mind was how funny would it be to put "German Whip" into the edit while they are driving their car. A "Whip" is a slang word for a car. So the idea first came from a funny idea. As I started to add videos I slowly started to realise that it looked like the animals were rapping. So I tried my hardest to get the intensity of the song to go with the animals actions.
Half way though the edit I also changed the music to "Watch me" by Silento. This was also for a laugh. I found some dancing animals on the internet that looked like were doing the dance to the song. So I put the dance and the song together and it seemed to work.
Doing this edit really helped me get to grip with transition, effects and effects settings. Before the edit I was a little scared to touch them because they were unknown territory. But now that I have played around with them, I understand them better. This really helped me with my "Juno" project because I had to insert video effects and transitions to make it seem like the original video.
Overall I think our Juno opening scene went alright. The one thing we could of worked on was our story board. We diffident realise how important the story board was to the project and we did it too quickly. When we came to filming our footage we didn't have any timings on our storyboard so we had to guess the duration of each shot. This became a problem when I started editing because the clips that my group had filmed were not the length of the official Juno ones. This meant that my clips didn't match the officially "Juno" opening scene. Because of this I had to play around with the speed of the clips. So the clips in my project are now the same speed as the officially opening but some of the clips are sped up or slowed down. This makes my opening look quite inconsistent.
We also didn't put enough detail on our storyboard about the camera angles and movement. We quickly realised when filming that this was a problem, so I had to search the movie opening on my phone and we had to replicate it from watching it. This made the task a lot more time consuming.
My group was good at finding good locations to film at though. We managed to make the places used as much like "Juno" as possible. This made up a little for the speeding up and slowing down of clips. My group also used props well. We managed to keep the milk bottle in the right hand through at the whole project, we managed to get the leafs in for the foot scene and the wooden fence near the end of the scene. This gave my project a more professional look.
Editing "Juno" was actually quite fun. We had to find a visual effect that made the footage seem like a cartoon, so I used "Sharpen". Sharpening makes objects POP. Sharpening makes edges appear more defined by darkening the darker pixels. This creates a crisp edge between light and dark portions of a image, this gives it more contrast. I made the videos so sharpened that it gave it a cartoony effect.
I also added the officially "Juno" opening in the bottom right of my presentation, so people can compare my work to the original.
Luckily my group got all the footage we needed except for one little bit. In the opening scene we forgot about the tree "Juno" is meant to run past. This is quite crucial because when she goes pass the tree it simulates the start of cartoon graphics. Because this was quite an important that we needed I had to edit in a tree. This doesn't look too great and makes my work look quite unprofessional. But I will remember for next time to make sure we have all the small things because that's what makes a good film.
While editing "Juno" I found a way to speed up and slow down footage. This was really helpful because I could make timings perfect. I also learnt how to revise transition swipes and zooms. This becomes really helpful when you are trying to replicate footage.
In my next production I will defiantly make a better story board because story boards have turned out to be very important when creating a film/footage. I have also learned not to leave out the small things because getting the small thing right can make a huge difference to the film. In the next films I will also over shoot because I had to slow down some footage because there wasn't enough of it.
In class we were given genres and a target audience and we had to make up a story for a movie around what we were given. You then had to explain your storyline, Characters, target audience and film industries used in a PowerPoint. My group included Megan Thomas, Maisie Smith and Tez Everard. Our genre was Science-Fiction. Our target audience is Middle aged women.
Feedback for "Darkness Within" Positive Feedback
People said they liked our logo for "TMTM" and that it suited our movie industry theme. "TMTM"'s them is Mystery/Horror. Our logo represents this perfectly because you have the gloomy grey background which looks like its out of a horror film and a dark hooded figure in the middle of the picture with his back turned. This also shows mystery because you start asking questions to yourself like........ Why is he standing in the middle of no where?.......... Why is he hooded? Is he trying to hide his identity?..............Why has he got his back turned? People also liked that we based the characters around the same age of the target audience. This can help the audience relate with the characters. Our title may not be original, but our storyline defiantly is. No other movie has had a house randomly teleport to out of space. This is also a way of showing that the characters are imprisoned within the house. People think San Francisco was the perfecting setting for the house because it is a family friendly area and the perfect place to bring up a child. They think that the setting is realistic.
Negative Feedback
Some people said that we needed to change the title because it was generic and not original. We decided to keep the title though because as a group we liked our title and we thought it suited the film. Some people found our budget unrealistic, which is fair enough because it was a little. But our movie is meant to be a top budget blockbuster. This means our budget can be unrealistic. Also people think we would never get all the actors and actresses into the film because they would all want to play main parts and in our movie there is only two main parts. People think there would be friction between the actors and actresses. People thought that the films message isn't original and that it will be like every other film. This means that this film may not stand out from other films, but we needed it to because it is a big budget blockbuster and we need to make as much money back as possible.
Media Talk
Today we had a talk done by Pete Fraser from BFI. Pete's talk was really helpful because it has made me more aware of what to do and what not to do when I come to filming my movie opening. He also showed us what we have to do to succeed. Below is the PowerPoint that Pete used for the talk. The PowerPoint will definitely become helpful later on when I start filming.
