Flanna Lindsay Evaluation

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We as part of the blogging process and for research each researched, watched and reviewed thriller openings and films we tried to conform to the conventions of what we had seen, I think it challenges conventions of real media products because its filmed with young people and within the thriller genre there would generally be older people acting in it, the theme involved is supposed to be quite business-like with an mi5 feel to it, I think we tried to develop it by using a popular landmark(London eye) throughout it as lots of clips of roads, transport and landmarks are popular within action thrillers scenes we tried are hardest to incorporate establishing shots of the area(Waterloo) hence to show where it is set.

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I think it represents people that are high up in power and access confidential information are vulnerable because what they can access may be wanted by others for criminal reasons.

• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Universal may distribute our film because they distributed Bourne ultimatum and inside man, our short opening is like that as it involves technology and if developed would most likely be action involved chases and murders as I said before we liked the mi5 feel to it so if universal distribute films similar to ours such as those I think they would be an industry that would be interested if it was developed. I think the genre of our film is Spy Thriller.


• Who would be the audience for your media product?
I think the audience for this product may Range from a young age to an old age although I don’t think it would appeal as much to juveniles/teenagers or young children, there may possibly be more male fans as from research it shows the men generally more interested in action and conspiracy whereas women may side to comedies and romances or horror.

• How did you attract/address your audience?
As it was a London filmed project we would assume for an amateur company
that most people who would view it would live in or around London therefore we included a continuous theme of the London Eye with the titles and an actual part of the opening, I think this would attract our audience as they can relate to that landmark or that area it also adds an effect of “The Business Man” a 9-5 job working in the city of London which we are aiming that group to be our target audience.

• What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this
product? I have learnt how to confidently use final and sound track pro I have also learnt how to use and film with the HD-V cameras, as in previous experience I did not use those. I have never tried to make a soundtrack before and I happy to have learnt to use soundtrack pro well.

• Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? I think that putting into practice the 3 introductory rules: 180 Degrees rule, shot reverse shot and match on action proved hard at first as all have to do with continuity and remember what needs to be in this shot or that is difficult and whilst editing there were problems we encountered like matching this shot with other but from what we had learned in the preliminary task after rough edits and cutting clips we kept going over and over to try and make it as perfect as possible we dealt with sound problems (background noise for example wind etcc)

Awaiting to upload a video ....

My Evaluation - Joshua Pullar

End Of The Line from BDC on Vimeo.

Final cut Pro

Final cut pro is a fairly new programmed and has been developed very sophisticatedly and has reformed films directors and editors for big films previously used Avids Technology Media Composer. According to a 2007 SCRI study, Final cut is used by 49 percent of the us proffesional market whereas Avid is now 22 percent.

This has become from Final cut increasing its technology.

'Seven' Opening scenes

I watched the opening scenes for the film seven and and it was a typical fast moving piece of film for the opening scenes of the film it had the main colours of black,white and red included this to me conotated buisnessmen and proffessional witha twist some of the shota included are of books and people writing,film negatives being cutting its quite a gritty and twisted begging all the clips are fast moving anf the music used is sampled from a band called nine inch nails the song is called closer we were not allowed to sample music but the directors choice of music is interesting and changes tone throughout the story as the last song is by David Bowie another element i realised which is not in the opening credits of the film but is throughout the film it is constantly raining which shows us there is always an underlying sadness of fear of some sort. The opening scenes also reveal that it is a police film by showing a police badge very early on and we are givin clues throughout it. The is voted 8.6/10 according to IMDB figures and it classed a a crime mystery Thriller

Seven

Storyboard

Josh has posted our storyboard on the blogger we spent quite long on it because it was changed a few times as we discussed more realistic and enthralling thriller openings all our other ideas were less real and as we were introduced to thrillers more we realised that the ideas that we had didnt really show what was typical or accepted ad thriller openings.

Storyboard

Below are the storyboards for our opening. 

These do not include many of the loaction shots we took. It was in our plan to look for good location shots whilst we were there, we felt we would only know what we wanted when we saw it. It would also be hard as we didn't all know the area well enough to decide where we might get a nice shot.

Some shots are in the wrong order because we decided in post production to change something so it looked better.

Music and Soundtrack Pro.

before we started working on sountrack i showed the rest of the group a track i had already made. i wanted to use this on our thriller. at first it sounded all right except for the samples that i had used - it sounded more like a music video that a thriller. but with a few changes, making it fit with the video, it would sound alright. in the end however, the group decided to create our own soundtrack.

i am familier to sequencing software, but i have never used soundtrack pro before. but i soon got used to it at it had elements of garage band and logic in it. because i am a music student, and have had experience with music software, i naturally took the lead in creating our music.

we decided to make our music more minimal, and not have too much going on. by using simple drum beats and

*will complete later*

Editing

My view on the editing of our thriller - Jesse

i enjoyed editing our thriller. we had good footage, and the filming went smoothly. we all, as a group worked well together. 

the idea of having a fast paced intro worked well and built the tension as it should have done. 

the location in the tunnel also worked well. the graffiti painters and the echo's in the tunnel really set an eerie scene. 

in the edit, we managed to flip back and forth from handheld shots to tripod shots which showed that we are capable of using both techniques. and again, when we cut shots at a fast pace, flipping between the two techniques, it looked more professional and well made. 

when we were filming i shot lots of 'cut-away' shots of the area we were in, setting the scene around our location. in the tunnel, i got lots of handheld footage of people painting graffiti and hanging around. i also shot lots of our location, like the southbank, thames, parliment and other shots to set the scene in our thriller. this allowed us to have a lot more choice when it came to choosing shots to cut to. also, by having these shots, it makes the film look more professional as we could use random shots to set the scene to join our important shots together.
i had an idea to create a short 20-30 sec 'montage' scene before josh walked into the tunnel. but in the end, we did not have time.  

Final Day

On our final day of  editing our lesson was canceled although we were allowed to come in and work because our soundtrack wasn't completed we all attended to finish it, it was quite a tricky task and we are at the moment having problems using the crossfade after transfering the soundtrack to final cut pro but i think now are soundtrack has really come together. 

Sountrack Pro

We started to formulate a soundtrack although Jesse had produced a non edited soundtrack whichb me and josh thought was really good but because we wanted to have silence incorporated and different sound effects we needed to redo it on one lesson when we were introduced to soundtrack pro but jesse was absent me and josh fiddled around and realised it was quite an easy program to use we agreed that we should all make a soundtrack together the following lesson on soundtrack pro, this wasnt as good an idea as expected as Jesse had been using another program we had to start from scratch and we discovered the sounds on soundtrack pro were more common than expected but we have progressed and are almost halfway through the soundtrack i think this was at first a good idea because we can make the track while watchin the video and incorporate crossfades and silence effectively we arent finished but im confident that we together can we can complete the soundtrack in the allocated time.

Editing Process

I have found the editing process very interesting and i think i have developed my skills and i also think that i am confident with using soundtrack and final cut pro throughout the process of editing i have reminded my self of match on action,continuancy and shot reverse shot.The three rules in which we were taught about for the prelim i think the most difficult of the three for me would be continguancy because if for example in our office scene a certain object on the desk was absent because we filmed on 2 occasions then we would have to work around that although overall i think our piece is definatly quite a high standard and we all have taken these rules and others into consideration while editing.

Edit Diary - Day 5 & 6

For these two lessons we spent all of the time working on our soundtrack. The progress we made was finding all the loops and tracks we wanted to use. 

We found problems when we tried to fade out a track. We were not able to find a solution for it in these lessons.  

I hope to have finished the soundtrack by next lesson.

Soundtrack Pro

On thursday we had an introduction to Soundtrack Pro. As you can probably tell, it is for composing our soundtracks on. Flanna and I played around with it in the lesson and have a basic idea. Jesse said he would compose something because he is a pianist and is competent in music composing programs.
We then have a choice between two soundtracks and if one falls through we will have a plan B. In the coming week it should be finished and our whole project might be completed.