Opening Scene Final

Preliminary task: Finished film

Animatics

After we Storyboarding for our film opening, George created the animatics which allowed us to note how long we want each shot to last and therefore get the most truthful representation of the structure of our film .

Question 7

With our preliminary task offering a kind of introduction to the equipment and process you must go through to create a product I feel that i've been able to extend my knowledge gained from this first instance to improve and refine to a certain extent some of the key filmmaking skills.

Planning and research


Although i've never been short of new ideas in the past, with my knowledge of the media greatly improving over the last year, i've been able to link these new ideas to examples of similar work with more ease and my ability to acknowledge and identify influences of our own work or films within a specific genre have been enhanced.


Filming


Having used a wide variety of different shots during our continuity task I felt that the possibilities of how you can shoot a scene were opened up to me. During the storyboarding for our film opening I found that I had gained more of a filmmakers eye and was able to think in terms of the overall sequence of scene, shot by shot rather than focus on coming up with spectacular, one off shots. This doesn't mean any creativity was out the window, as I often wanted to push us as a group into being quite ambitious in our shot choices. (My idea for a tilt tracking shot moving from low down behind the computer in my bedroom for the bedroom scene proved very challenging to get a smooth take without any wobble. Consequently the shot wasn't used in the final edit). What I found myself pushing to achieve most was efficiency in the execution of a shoot. One of the main problems I’ve faced throughout the year whether with the preliminary exercise or the film opening is the difficulty of having to come back to a location having shot half the footage needed and then add onto this while trying to keep the continuity. This is near impossible if the gap between filming sessions is left too long. Other than time restraints I now feel comfortable using any school camera equipment on a basic level. The next step is to develop my operational skills of a variety of film production hardware so that I’m able to personalize and gain more control over the look of footage captured. Such as we've done with the Panasonic in learning how to effectively use manual focus.


Editing
Editing was the skill I was least sure about after our preliminary exercise because i had not done as much of the post production editing as I’d have liked to. However after doing a large amount of editing for our film opening I’m much more comfortable with the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro and although I’m clueless still to some of its advanced facilities, I'd now be able to take production footage and create a finished media product that was edited sufficiently and with some detailed work within the edit.
Going into the future I hope to further develop any filmmaking skills mentioned and to keep learning from my mistakes. Also, as our film opening showed, to continue to exploit new technologies within our media products.

Question 7

Evaluation question 6

Voice Over

For the recording of our voice over we employed the help of principal music student Ed Watson as we knew that sound can be a tricky thing to get right and a bad recording could easily lower the quality of our product and make it look amateurish. A high quality condenser microphone was used to avoid background sound being picked up and using a device called an Emu my speech directly onto a computer through the music editing software Cubase. He then added a small amount of reverb and ran it through a virtual compressor with smoothed out my voice and background sounds by reducing the transmission bandwidth of the audio, removing the higher and lower frequencies. It is this kind of affects that along with plush, insulated studio gives radio presenters such as Terry Wogan such silky toned voices.

Evaluation question 4