Filming - second attempt.

Today we've filmed all of our footage again at Alexandra's house and this time we are much more positive about the footage. As this was our second attempt we were able to learn from previous mistakes and were able to make sure things such as continuity, was correct in each shot. We also were able to learn on the technical side of things how to use the equipment more efficiently so things such as the wonky camera angel were resolved using a different tri-pod and learning how to make sure it was at equal footing so the shot wasn't wonky.


After spending almost seven to eight hours filming this time I believe that we have taken much more care and consideration over what we were doing and hopefully it will mean that the outcome will be of much better quality than before. We have however come into an issue with the Mac we have taken out from the school in order to edit as we thought that to have a better quality of film we would use Alexandra's camera instead of the schools as this is exactly what another group have done with the same camera and we have seen how much the quality of their final footage improved. The problem however is that the Mac won't allow us to import the footage into quick time so that we are able to use it on premier pro and edit. This is due to the file format which on Alexandra's camera is AVI but for the mac we need MOV. Alexandra has emailed the teacher in hope that we are able to get a reply and hopefully we will be able to sort it out and edit before we get back to school otherwise this sets us back even further and will mean the amount we work will have to be double as we are wasting a lot of editing time during the week.

Re-shoot

Me and Alexandra sat down in order to look at the footage in order to see what needed to stay and what needed to go from the footage we had taken, this was mainly because Alexandra had previously looked at the footage on her own and was not completely happy. When we sat down and watched it I agreed with Alexandra that there was much that could be changed in order to produce a better quality of work. We realised that several things were wrong with the shots such as the movement of hands and feet which didn't match in each shot and therefore looked strange when laid out next to each other but also we realised that the shots were wonky and there was no way to change that other than to re-shoot. We have therefore decided that we are going to re-shoot all of the footage again on the 18th of February and hopefully by taking a mac home over half term will be able to get at least a good half if not all of the editing done over the week.

Filming - first attempt.

Filming for the first time was much harder than both Alexandra and I anticipated. First of all we had issues with where about in the room we wanted to shoot and this took us along time to figure out as we had to base it all around lights so that even if it got dark outside the lighting would stay the same in the footage in order to maintain a good quality. Secondly the setting up of the props took a lot longer than we thought as well as we assumed it would be easy to just put the props in place however we found that we didn't always agree with the positioning but also that when it came to filming certain things didn't look right and therefore we would have to change things around. The filming itself seems good so far on the camera but we have yet to put it onto a mac in order to see it laid out together. If we do have to film again then I believe that this first attempt has been positive as it will allow us to have more of an idea about what exactly we want from each shot as this time we were very unsure in places and had to take several shots from different angels rather than having one solid idea and this cost us a lot of time.

Planning - Animatic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4CyzPlnAHQ&feature=player_embedded


Our anaimatic was made in order for us to be able to see what our final opening would look like whilst in sequence rather than just looking at the pictures on the page. I don't believe that our animatic gave us a great in site into our final project as the pictures didn't move as we want them to, however, it did allow us to see how areas of the footage may not work and how perhaps certain things will need to be changed during our filming.

Planning - Costumes

I have been trying to find information on different costumes for us to use in our opening however I found it very difficult to find different information about costumes without a story line.
We now know what we are doing and so now we have an idea for our costumes.


The male - Killer - The mise-en-scene of our two minute opening requires our characters to dress as if they're attending a wedding and therefore we have to dress the male character in a smart black and white suit in order to fit the wedding theme.


The female - Girls - We decided that we are going to shoot the girl in separate parts like the leg, arm and head. Because of this we only need to find a ring, vial and a shoe which will fit in with the idea of a wedding.


We hope that the items of clothing we have picked will match the mise-en-scene and therefore depict a wedding. Through research I discovered that there is not one specific style of outfits which is usually seen in a thriller but that isn't the outfits usually depict the story line and the roles the characters are meant to be playing within it. Therefore I believe that the costumes chosen will work well for our opening.

Planning - Our idea change.

After discussing with our teacher what we are planning on doing as our plot for our opening we discovered how it can be seen as very cliché and whilst we want to keep up the thriller conventions as well as the horror conventions throughout our opening we decided that we wanted to do this in a way which is less cliché as there has already been things like this which have been done. 


Our new idea is still going to be a young girl however we have now decided to go along with the idea of a wedding day. We are yet to complete the story board and understand fully what it is we wish to do exactly however so far we know that we are going to have the young girl dead and in different parts with her body kept in different places around the house. We decided that we are also going to keep the main character a male, we decided that we would stick with the usual idea of a male killer and a young girl, this has been done many times before however we decided that if we are wanting to do something which is less cliché we still have to keep up out conventions of a thriller in different aspects and I believe it is probably expected from the audience for the male to be killer as this is what they are use to seeing. 


We understand that it may be hard to shows only parts of the body around different areas of the house but this is something which we are going to tackle when it comes to shooting and we will start deciding how to hide different body parts whilst we create our story board for our new idea.

Planning - Our tasks:

Each member of our group has had tasks designated for them so that we each have an equal amount to do and we can each focus on something and this way our tasks will all get done sooner.


I am doing the story board for our group and that will be put up soon so that we can see how our opening will flow that will be done by the 10th of decemeber we have decided.


I believe that I will finish before then but once we have done that and are happy with the story board we are going to start with the animatic so that we can actually watch our opening; the good thing about the animatic is it will give us a good oppotunity to decide if anything needs changing within our story board as we will be able to watch how it goes.


I have also got the role of costumes and so I have to choose what to dress the characters in, I am finding this a challenge as we have yet to fully decide on how the male and female characters are going to be presented but I will dress them accordingly making sure they fit with the image we are trying to portay of the characters.