Shooting

So, on Tuesday we went and shot all of our footage. We are now working on producing a rough cut for the end of this lesson. The shoot itself was quite successful. When we got to James's house we decided to shoot all of the outside shots as soon as possible in the hope it wouldn't get darker. Unfortunately it did get darker and we have now found that it is difficult to see what is going on in quite a few of the shots we have. We are experimenting with the Final Cit software to see if there is any way of making the characters visible. If we are unsuccessful in this we will have to find some time when we can go back and re-shoot.

Ali had an accident during the shoot whilst filming outside. We forgot to take into account how difficult it is to run along a garden path in the dark, whilst holding a camera. Ali was the unfortunate camera man who fell and cut his knee, luckily he was okay to carry on with the shoot. 

After we had finished shooting outside we moved inside. Here we encountered another small

 problem. Our shoes were covered in mud from shooting outside and as this wasn't a problem for Ryan and Ali as they were behind the camera it was a problem for James and Sam. We had to be careful not to shoot our feet because we would be robbing a house in our socks. We experimented with lots of different shot angles as we wanted to get as much footage as we can. We included a point of view shot from one of the protagonists. I held the camera up to my face for this and just repeated the scene the way we had done it before. We eventually got everything we needed and it was the end of the shoot.

Whilst I was writing this Ali has put the finishing touches on the rough cut and we have decided that we will most definitely need to go back and re-shoot some footage. This will probably be done at the weekend as Ryan and Myself both live in Bottisham, as does Sam, our other actor.

Title ideas

We began to think about names for our film. We thought about things to do with our film and thought we should base it around the word "Family" in some way as this is the basis of our film. Here is a list of ideas for names we have: 

• It Runs In The Family
• (The) Family Business
• Father & Sons
• The (Insert Surname) Family
• Brothers In Crime

The Shoot

Last night James, Ryan and Ali went to James's house to do a second shoot for the sequence. This shoot went a lot better than the first one and we managed to get everything we needed. We did have some worries about shooting in the dark but we have found that we can edit this on the Final Cut software so there isn't really a problem. We did all the outside shots first, which made our shoes muddy so we had to be careful not to film feet when we were inside as we weren't wearing any shoes. We would like to thank James's parents for letting us shoot and would like to apologise for making them eat dinner on their bed. We have uploaded the footage to the computer and have began the editing process.

This is our test footage which we filmed in the DT block. It gives a basic representation of what one of our scenes will look like and different camera shots and angles which we will use. The story is not an accurate respresentation of what it would be, it is just test footage.

Half Term

We had planned to film over half term but unfortunately the opportunity for filming never came up. There was never a time where we could have people filming and also the actors for the sequence. We will now be filming everything on Tuesday 24th at James's house. This is the only time we can get actors for the sequence and enough members of our group for the filming. Unfortunately Michael will not be able to make it to the filming but James, Ryan and Ali will be filming.

We have a consent form from Sam who is in our sequence:

filming

We went filming at James house yesterday to film our footage, from doing this we found that the area when wanted to film in was quite small and difficult to film in so we might use that as test footage of the type of location we want to film in and go to another location. Also we forgot to pick up our storyboard so we couldn't remember all the shot types that we wanted to do.

Animatic

This is our final animatic it is going to be similar to our final title sequence as the scenes will be approximately this long and the music will be similar to this. However the shots maybe different because once we do our test footage we may decide to change it a bit more.

response to feedback

We are overall very pleased with the feedback we received about our blog. The positive feedback we received said that our blog was good, in depth and gave a good idea of where we were headed. Negative feedback was also constructive, we were told to go back and look at the micro-elements of the opening sequences we analyzed.

In responce to our feedback, we are going to keep up the work on our blog, but will go back to look at the micro-elements of our title sequences.

It is essential to receive feedback because it lets us now how we are doing. We may think that we have a very good blog, but it could be that we don't have all the things we need on there. It may also be that we understand what is going on in the blog but it may not be clear to someone else looking at it, from not in the group.

Ryan and James: Our thriller blog was quite good. Ram did quite a lot of work on our blog when we did our thriller project. I would say that our blog for this project is slightly better because we have a clearer view as to what we are supposed to put on there.

Michael and Ali: Our blog was lacking blog entries, which meant that if someone looked at it they wouldn't be able to see all our ideas. Also we didn't upload many videos and pictures up so this meant the blog didn't look as good.

Class feedback on blog

Positive

• In depth - constantly updated
• Mood board detailed + informative
• Good analysis
• Stuff
• Frequently updated, with some good info.
• Good research
• Lots of pictures
• Good animatic and logo
• In depth
• We're very proud of you :)

Negative:

• Narrow down film genre examples
• Die Hard is not related to Juno in anyway (but that was our homework)
• Confusing
• Animatic too long (supposed to interpret actual length of shots etc)
• Whilst analysing narrow down inspiration to micro elements
• Relate analysis to genres