Evaluating the preliminary Task

What we were asked to do and how we prepared for it?

We were asked to create a short movie using the techniques that we talked about, such as the 180 degree rule,match on action shot and shot reverse shot. We prepared for this, planning where we would film, what the situation would be and what techniques we would use.

Filming...

• My role of the movie was a student asking another student if they had a hole puncher that I could borrow. With my entrance we used a match on action of me reaching for the handle, pushing it down and then going into the room.
• We used the match on action shot as we wanted to show the entrance of walking into the room itself so that the viewers could see where my character was going. We also used the shot reverse shot for the conversation me and Tom had. We used this as it was easier to see that me and Tom are having this confrontational conversation.
  
• The frames we used for pushing the handle down was a very close up. Then of me walking across the room was a long shot. Then for Tom sitting at the desk, we used a medium close up. Then when we were having our conversation we used medium close ups.
• We made sure that the positioning of the actors on the screen was not too close and but not too far away.

Editing...

• In Conclusion, I feel that the final result was a successful one as we managed to match the needs of what we planned to film. I also felt that our techniques we used worked well and that they were clear as to which technique was which.
• What our group could have done to improve the sequence was to make sure the camera wasn't too close to the match on action shot on the door handle as it was slightly unclear what had happened. I think that we could have also given it more time. The match on action was a bit too quick for the viewers to watch. I think that the shot reverse shot technique was good as it showed different levels of Tom sitting down and me standing up. However the dialogue could have been slightly more appropriate for the angles we were filming in.
• I think that, as a group, we worked very well together. I feel that we made joint decisions and came up with good ideas to help the continuity of the sequence.

I personally feel very confident using both the camera and Imovie. I feel the camera is easy to use as all you had to do was point and film, using the tripod or holding it hand held. Imovie was hard to use in the beginning but as the course went on, I started to become fluent and worked out how to import clips and to mix clips with editing effetc and transitions.

Evaluation of coursework movie: Part 5) Representing- Constructing 'the real'

I think our media product 'Sorrowful Footsteps' represents siblings and best friends or groups of friends that a very close. It displays after the title, a brother and sister walking and talking to each other and then hugging as they say goodbye and then head off in different directions. This shows that anytime could be the last time you say goodbye to them as anything could happen to them.

In our movie we represented a close pair of siblings walking together through a forest after not seeing each other for some time. We also represented a killer/psychopath on the loose in an isolated forest where it is easy to get lost. The ideas we wanted to show was the fear of being followed by someone unknown for some unknown reason. Or perhaps the fact that you don't know that you are being followed/watched but have a sense of something not right.

In our two minute opening we did not include text of people starring in the movie itself as we wanted the movie to start with a big an powerful opening. When there is a contrast of calmness brought back to the audience, then they are more interested in the text and who is involved in the movie.

The form of 'realism' that we have constructed was the fact that in real life there are real psychopaths who will kill no matter what the consequence. We wanted to show this in our media project because it keeps the audience terrified and makes them imagine what they would do if faced in the same situation. This helps the audience to get into the movie alot more as it puts their fear into the movie.

What role do the mise en scene, acting, dialogue, music and style of camera work play in the construction of verisimilitude?

• The mise en scene in our movie adds to the contstruction of verisimilitude (the 'macro' level of the textual world) as it is mostly realistic. The surroundings of the set were all natrual forest and this is what added to the realism.


• There was not very much acting done in this movie because we tried to make it as realistic as we could. The lack of acting helped the versimilitude as it could keep the audience involved and makes it seem like real life.


• There was also lack of dialogue meaning that it helped to add to the tension as you do not hear anyone's voice until the victim screams. This also plays in the construction of verisimilitude as it makes the realsim stronger for the audience as they want to be held in suspense


• The music in our movie made it very unrealistic as in real life you do not have tension music building up in realistic psychopath situations. So the verisimilitude was very un realistic as there is not music in real life.

• The style of the camera work made it realistic in the fact that it was sometimes a first person point of view as if it was the psychopath looking at the victim or/and her brother. However the unrealistic style of the camera work was the close up and longs shots of the victim before she is killed as we don't always know when it may be someone looking at her in a first person point of view. But all in all I think that the style of the camera work played well in the construction of verisimilitude.

Evaluation of coursework movie: Part 4) Making meaning

Our target audience would be young teens that like to let their mind play tricks on them. The psychological horror genre should relate to ages around 15-18. Most teenagers should like this sort of movie as a young mind will easily scare them as they are naive. I think we attracted our audience by bringing in the dead body straight away. I think this would have drawn the audience in quickly as they would get restless and would want to see something interesting happen quickly. 

With the audience in mind, I responded to the initial brief that nowadays most teenagers are into horror movies

 as they enjoy a good scare. I also thought that we would have to make the the movie originally different to regular horror movies nowadays but using the same sort of ideas as original psychological horror movies.

Our analysis and research into the type of film we selected helped alot. This was because we could see what people wanted out of the horror/psychological genre. The questionnaire especially helped our research as we could see what people personally prefe

rred out of the horror genre. This meant we could follow those guide lines of peoples preferen

ces and like/dislikes of the horror genre. The questionnaire also gave us a long range of ideas as people had put lots of different answers to each other giving a nice contrast to the creative process in pre-production. 

In filming and editing, we ensured that the meaning would be apparent to the audience as we used obvious signifiers, such as the dead body with blood running down her head, and titles in a blood red colour. this signified to the audience that it is going to be quite a bloody movie.

We had creative ideas that we made during planning, rehearsing, filming and edit

ing that were influenced by our sense of the audience and possible layers of interpretation. We had the idea of there being a fork in the path as when we were filming, we came across a fork in

the path in the forest. We decided to use this idea to show that on person is walking to safety and the other is going towards danger. We also had the idea while rehearsing to see who would go which way. We thought that using the left hand side (which can be implied as an unlucky direction to turn) would be the perfect way for the victim to walk, even if it was a subtle idea. It is up

 to the audience to decide if that could be part of the movie and also to see if they pick up on the idea that the unlucky character is turning left.

The audience responded positively when we trailed aspects of our film as they enjoyed the hints of subtle horror that a psychological genre should include.

There is a variety of possible interpretations of our opening sequence that will depend on the cultural situation of the viewer. The main interpretations would be about where/how/when and why the psychopath got around and started murdering people. This is because it is not explained in the two minute opening sequence. This easily draws in the audience as the would want to know everything about this killer and why he does what he does. Another interpretation could be about whether the victims brother will do anything to find this psychopath and bring him down or whether he is connected. Once again it draws the audience as they would want to know what the brother has got anything to do with the rest of the movie.

Evaluation of coursework movie: Part 3) Creative tools

I have personally learnt alot about technologies from the process of constructing this product. I learnt about the use of digital cameras, how they need to be on tripods to obtain a good steady shot. I also learnt about the use of panning to get an overall shot of your designated filming area. The main creative tool I learnt most about was the industry standard editing resource called 'ImovieHD' which was the main program we used to edit our clips together.

I learnt all about the optional transitions we could use to make the different clips mo

re fluent. The most useful transition we used was the 'wash in' and 'wash out' effect. This meant that the clips would wash in with a white fade and wash out with a white fade. When we used these, it shows a flashback of what happened before we see the dead body and how it happened.

In 'ImovieHD' we saw the different effects that we could use on the selected clips. The two effect that we used for our movie was the 'earthquake' effect and the 'sepia' effect. The earthquake effect was used as the point of view of looking onto the dead body itself. This effect gave it more of a personal feeling and made it the more eerie as you are not shown who is looking at the dead victim's body.

The Sepia effect made the flashback seem more realistic. This was because we 

didn't want to make the flashback look unoriginal in the same colour.  We wanted to make the flashback seem obvious that it really was a flashback. We also made the colour a bit darker than the original sepia colour.  

Digital technology enabled us to develop creatively as we could make it original to how we wanted to make the movie. The different effects and transitions also added to the mood and atmosphere. e.g. Having a black fade out could mean that something bad has happened to someone and is creating an unhappy atmosphere. However there was one technological problem that prevented our creative flow. This was the audio coming from the camera. We had the problem of wanting to put music over one of our clips whilst the characters in the clip were talking. What the problem was, was that the audio from the camera gave off a mildly loud buzz which, when mixed with the music, made it sound quite un- professional. What we had to do to solve this problem was turn down the audio on the selected clip and also turn down the music audio as well so that the dialogue in the clip could be heard.

Evaluation of Coursework movie: part 2) Proffesional practise

The kind of media institution that might distribute our movie would be a video store. One that stores lots of different kinds of horror movies as there may be a gory horror, or a physical or psychological horror. Hopefully our movie would fit into one of these catergories and for any teenagers wanting a scare.

We managed our group dynamcis, equpiment and resources, interim deadlines and the necessarily collaboarative nature of film-making. We made sure of movie was filmed early so that we could get editing as soon as possible. We all had different ideas about what type of movie we wanted to film and in the end decided that we would have better ideas creating a horror movie. We wanted to make our film making look proffesional aswell. So we used a few different angles to give it contrast.

We manged actors, locations and props rather easily. There were only three actors which included Tom, Anika and I. We were thinking of using other people for violent images at one point, But we thought that this would destroy the whole psychological point of view of the film as there is no iscolation or suspension if you see other people. The use of three people makes the movie the more scary. Locations were talked about for a while and we thought that using a forest would be suitable as it fulfilled the options on the questionnaire and it also created lots of ideas for us to play with. We decided that we would use a forest in West Byfleete as it had lots of open and closed spaces. It also matched the needs that we wanted a horror movie to create.

The costumes we used were very simple as we used modern clothes, Apart from the Psychopath who wore just black and the mask. One problem that we faced was the fact that we did filming two times, so we had to wear the same clothes as we did last time or it destroyed the continuity. We actually decided that we weren't going to use many props apart from a phone and a stick. This was because we wanted to use the particular strategy of not not using too many props. We thought that this would be a creative decision as we didn't want to make the movie to complicated for the audience.

The storyboard and creating a shooting script worked in our practise. This was because it helped us to organise our filming and we would know what and how to film our different clips. It also helped our continuity of our clips as nothing was out of our order. However we did create decisions to depart from the original plan. This was because we would have new ideas while filming the actual move itself as we were in the forest. So we kept on developing the ideas into clips.

Time management was very important in our movie as we had to decide when and when everybody was free to start filming and editing. Once we had finished planning we started filming a few days afterwards and once we had finished our first part we uploaded that straight onto the computer and started editing the 'dead body' scene. We then planned when we would film again and we finished off the filming the next time we went to West Byfleete and started editing the rest of our movie. I think that our time management worked very well as we were organised and strated filming and editing as soon as we could. We edited every Media lesson after our first shoot in the forest. We also used a few lunchtimes to do some finishing touches to it.

Evaluation of Coursework movie: Reworking the familiar, part 1b) Looking back at preliminary task what has progressed from it to the full project?

At a Macro 'Symbolic' level, our fiction film reflected the conventions of a pyschological horror. We wanted to portray the sense of what your mind replaces of what you see and hear with their own personal thoughts. The way we wanted to portay this was having the psychopath watching and following the victim from far away, but not too far so you can't see their body. Having a mask in our movie really added to the pschological point of the genre. This is because not seeing the face of a psychopath keeps the audience on the edge of their seat as there is an unknown identity. The fact that it was obviously a home made mask made the more scarier as it was very rough and had a bloody hand print on it. The music also added to the tension as it was a build up on the strings so it drawed the audience in as they wanted to know where the music was taking them.


Our film did fulfil the contractual nature of the film genre as it did feel very psychologically scary. This was because it matched the expectations of a typical horror genre. However we did slightly subvert waver along the lines of a possible thriller. this was because we had the dead body at the beginning, which could have resorted to a optional murder mystery/thriller where the brother of the dead victim goes out to find the psychopath who killed his sister.

There were not really any elements of deliberate parody or pastiche in our movie. this was because we wanted to be original with our movie and we thought we would make it more scary if there wasn't any type of pastiche in it.


There were definate hints in our movie that hinted to another film. The film we wanted to base our own movie around was the film 'The Strangers'. this was because it met all the needs of a pschological horror genre that we also wanted to use. For example The mask we used was inspired by the main mask used in 'The Strangers' as it

was a home made mask that was obviously quite crudely made, with stitches and paint. The one used the film was a lot more neat and tidy compared to ours as we made our mask dirty and had a bloody hand print on the right eye.

Another part that we may have hinted to the film 'The Strangers' was the part where the Victim answers her phone and is standing there saying: "Hello!?... Hello!?...Hello!?" The masked Psychopath steps out from behind a tree and stands there watching her. In 'the Strangers' when the woman is standing in her kitchen when the man in the mask steps out from behind the corner from the dark. we thought that using this effect would work perfectly to fit into our genre.







































The kind of audience that we are tying to pleasure with our movie are mostly horror loving fanatics that love films to be full of suspense. This would mainly include teenagers and young adults that are up for a fright. I am confident that 'Sorrowful Footsteps' delivered its promise for this age range as we followed the results of the questionnaire. The questionnaire was given to a group of 16-17 year olds. This should make it accurate for teenagers to enjoy watching this movie.

Evaluation of Coursework Movie: Reworking the familiar, Part 1a) how does my media project develop or challenge forms and conventions of real products

At a 'micro', technical level, I observed the conventions of continuity, the language and the grammer of the edit well.

We made sure the Continuity of our movie was the way we edited our clips together. We wanted to make sure that are clips would smoothly go into the next. We sometimes blended two clips into one to make it look like there were two camera angles shooting the characters.

The Language of our film was all about the editing of our movie. We used a few editing effects in our movie. In the beginning we used no effects whilst panning across the forest but as it panned onto the dead body, we used a slight eathquake effect to give it more of a personal feeling about looking upon a dead body. When there was a flashback to the events before we gave a different colour effect to the clips making it darker and made it more of a personal flashback and the darkness created more of an atmosphere. We also decided that we didn't want to use too many effects in our movie as we wanted to make it feel more realistic to the audience.

The Grammer of our film was about the transitions from clip to clip. We used quite a few transitions in our movie and they were very important for our outline of our movie itself. In the beggining of the movie we used a lot of cross fades and dissolves into the next clips of the panning camera across the forest. Then we used a fade going into the first picture of the dead body's eye. We then used no transitions as we had lots of pictures building up so it gave it a fast tempo of the dead body and it gave a brillaint effect. We used a wash out into a white background with our title "Sorrowfull Footsteps" and then used a wash in to our first 'Flashback' clip of the two charcters walking through the forest before the victim is killed. We then used no transitions until the end where the psycho comes out from behind the tree. when He is just about to kill the victim, the psycho lifts his weapon to kill the victim and there is a a very sudden blackness but the heartbeat sound effect carries on.

We made alot of mistakes in our movie, such as not having very good continuity of our clips, Not making much sense out of the editing and having charcters in different positions as the last clip. We also made the mistake of splitting the clip too much and losing the part that we need. We realised that once we had done our filming, we wouldn't have enough time to do anymore, so if we filmed anything with mistakes in it, then we would have to edit it thoroughly.

However, I think we improved quite alot from the preliminary task as we realised what mistakes we had made in it, such as keeping the same positions of characters from one clip to the other. Another mistake we wanted to be careful of was, if the character was holding an object in their hand in the first clip and in the next clip, they are holding it in the other hand or not holding it at all then it looks very amateur and doesn't make sense to the audience.

Analysis of Horror genre and 'The Strangers'

'The Strangers' is a psychological, dramatic horror/thriller. Directed and produced by Bryan Bertino. It is about a young couple in an iscolated vacation home who are slowly terrorized by three pyscopaths. There is a definate psychological presence in this film as it is all about hearing creepy sounds, seeing people from far away, and the use of masks. Ther use of masks is an important role in this movie as you never see the psycopaths faces once, even when they take off their masks. The idea of this movie was the thought of iscolation and terror, being trapped in a house with three maniacs who want to kill you. The use of suspense is used perfectly even as there is no music (apart from the use of a jammed record player). Having no music to the movie also means that it feels more realistic to the audience therefore they can relate to the movie. This movie keeps everybody stuck to their seats for the whole movie as the tension builds through out the movie.

• This is a review from 'Maitland McDonagh' who works a reviewer for the 'TV guide'...
  

"First-time director Bryan Bertino's no-frills thriller is a throwback to the 1970s' heyday of nasty, relentless movies in which ordinary, unsuspecting folks are trapped and terrorized by remorseless sociopaths, right down to the solemn assurance that it's based on a true story. There's nothing more to it than meets the eye, but Bertino understands the mechanics of suspense and knows how to use them.

In the movie that we are filming ourselves, We have based a lot of our ideas on the movie 'The strangers'. This is because we are filming a psychological horror. It helps to have lots of different influences for our movie.

The Horror genre is a very interesting concept to deal with as you can have so many different ideas for a horror movie. Over the years the horror genre has developed from a normal psycho who kills a few people like the film 'Pyscho'. Now it has developed to psychological horros such as 'The strangers' or developing on a psychopath killer like the film 'saw'. The horror genre is now a very popular genre in cinemas. This is because they can be mixed with other type of genres, such as thrillers and comedy. Using the horror genre for our Coursework film was a very good choice, as we were able to say what type of horror movie we would do (Pyschological). We were also able to think about horror without boundries.

Cheers. x

Insomnia and Memento

• In one of our lessons, we watched the opening of two films, Insomnia and Memento.

The opening title credits of 'Insomnia' was a basic opening as it was a a blurred vision slowly focusing into white as the title of "Insomnia" fade in and then fades out. The white background then faded into a very interesting view of an extreme close up on fabric fibres as blood seeps into them, giving it a dark red and damp colour to it. There are lots of different clips of this blood seeping into the fabric fibres. The music contained strings crescendo as a feel of suspense and tension grips the audience. The fibres then fade into another piece fabric, but a white sleeve with blood on it. The camera zooms out to see a man trying to wipe the blood off his sleeve. Once again there is another fade, but this time into a plane flying over the icy mountains of Alaska.

The opening title credits of 'Momento' The background is black while the credits slowly come into focus. Then the title "Memento" slowly fades in blue. we then see someone's hand holding a polaroid picture. But this picture has already been processed. the camera moves back as we see a man holding this picture. Ths man starts to shak the photo and as he does, it seems to get weaker. there is a hint of a tatoo on the man's hand which obviously means somehing will be related to that during the movie. The picture on the camera slowly gets weaker and weaker unitl thee is nothing left on the picture frame. He then puts the picture into the camera. As this happens we can see that everything is actually happening backwards. We see blood on the wall running backwards, the shell of the bullet come off the floor, glasses coming off the floor and onto the shot man's face, the man with his photo having the gun go back into his hand. We hear this as the sound flows backwards and then a shout as victim is about to be shot.

I personally prefered the 'Memento' opening more than the 'Insomnia' opening as I feel that the use of reverse was used very well and was very different. The blood seeping into the fabric fibres was a good effect but I feel that it went on for too long. I loved the idea of a ploaroid picture going from stronger to weaker as i feel it could be a metaphorical meaning for the rest of the movie. Cheers. x

Warner Bros

Five Facts on warner Bros:

1. The historic studio was built over 110 acres of farmland in Califonia.



2. Old time movies such as "Little Caesar" and "The Public Enemy" were made in the manydifferent studios. The Studios theselves were and are so big that they can design scenes from an Amazonian jungle to a LA ghetto.



3. By the late 1930's, nine new sound stages were used, which are now used today. These sound stages were used for voiceovers, sound effects and theme tunes such as the classic Looney Tunes theme. Voiceovers included charcters such as bugs bunny, silvester and tweety, Daffy duck etc. Actors like Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Bob McKimson, did the voiceovers for these cartoon charcters.



4. In 1956, the 'Studio jungle set' was constructed for the movie "Santiago". It was created to simulate wooded areas. The lagoon that was made for the jungle set held 250, 000 gallons of water.



5. In the 1990's, Warner bros became one of the most successful televiosn porduction companies of all time. New television programmes were created such as, "Friends" "ER" and "the Drew Carey show".

• Two other companies are owned by Warner Bros, These are:

- Castle Rock Entertainment, Inc.

and...

- StarParks S.A.

Warner Bros is a subsidiary of Time Warner -

4 facts:

1. Number of employees- Total Worldwide: Approximately 38,000 as of March 2009.




2. Stock Ticker information- The common stockof Time Warner is traded on the new york stock exchange under the symbol TWX.




3. So far, Time Warner have won 23 awards and honours over the last 2-3 years.




4. Time Warner are related to other companies but do not own them:

Cheers. x

My shocking group! (In a good way)

Hi there, and welcome back to my blog with dr. veira.
This post here is to give you fabulous readers an insight to my truly b... e... a... utiful group and what we will be doing with our media coursework.Here we go, (and brace yourself):

First of all we have the fabulosis German exchange student Anika Franko.... (I can't say her surname) She is Directing, filming and editing this movie. She's rather clever!

Then there is Thomas Derek Bates, who, to be honest, really doesn't work hard enough in life, but who can blame him!? Tom is taking part in this movie as he is one of the characters in it, he is also, directing and editing.

Then there is me, Nick Veira. I am also taking part in the movie and editing.

A few lessons ago, we were talking about what sort of genre our film coursework should be. We had some minor disagreements and tantrums were thrown (Tom) but in the end we decided we would either do a thriller or a horror genre. We talked about it in more detail and looked at some examples fom the previous year and relaised that horror would be best to create, as there were many ideas that could be thrown into the stirring pot.

Hopefully it should be a success, who knows.

Thanks for reading and I hope you are well.

Also, A name has been created out of our "stirring pot". We have decided to call it....... "SORROWFUL FOOTSTEPS"


Nick, Cheeerss! x

Psycho

One lesson that we did was 'Semiotics'. This lesson was the study of signs and symbols. In order to analyse a film we needed to study literal and potential meanings. We had two options:  

• Signifier- Denotation- literal. e.g. red rose, flower itself is the signifier.
• Signified- Connotations- Potential. e.g. red rose signifies love, sorrow, passion, labour party, England rugby team etc.

 In this course we looked at the 1960 horror film 'psycho' directed by Alfred Hitchcock. We watched the scene where a lady is packing her bag to flee somewhere. She keeps on looking at a big wad of money on her bed during the whole scene. this wad of money is the signifier and it signifies that she has stolen the money or it is not hers etc.

The most famous part of 'Psycho' is in the picture displayed above. The same lady is taking a shower and then a killer comes up behind her and lifts a knife to stab her. The knife is the signifier and it signifies death and violence. it shows that this lady will be killed.

The Dark Knight

I am looking at the three main stages that a film goes through. These are:

• Production,




• Distribution,




• Exhibition

http://www.warnerbros.com/?page=movies&pid=f-ce83422e/THE%20DARK%20KNIGHT#/page=movies&pid=f-ce83422e/THE_DARK_KNIGHT&asset=064159/The_Dark_Knight_-_Original_Theatrical_Trailer&type=video/

This is the home page of 'The dark knight'. It contains much information on the movie and it would be very helpful for people looking for this information.

Once you open up the page itself, There are two different trailers; Blu-ray advert and the original theatre trailer. These both have most of the same shots as the other but the original theatre trailer is much longer than the blu-ray trailer.

There is a synopsis at the bottom of the trailer giving a long paragraph but short description about the actual movie itself. It also has a link to the cast, and special downloads that are avaliable.

Why make this blog?

The reason i have created this blog is to display my results of my as level media studies work. This is my first blog so don't be taking the mick now. cheers!