My friend performed at an event "Smile carnival",
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Monday, March 20, 2017
EVALUATION Q4 - USE OF TECHNOLOGY
How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?
Here is a list of the technologies used for producing our film opening:
HARDWARE:
Here is a list of the technologies used for producing our film opening:
HARDWARE:
- Camera (DSLR) + Lens - Nikon D610 / 50mm f/1.4, 18-35mm (vlog)
- Microphone (RODE)
- Drone Phantom 4 - bird's eye view shot
- Laptop (Macbook Pro) - edit
- Phone - communication
SOFTWARE:
- Adobe premiere pro cc
- Aftereffects
ONLINE:
- Blogger
- Youtube - tutorials
- Youtube-mp3.com
- Dafont.com - download fonts
- Snapchat/line
- Google slides/docs/drive
Since my camera (Nikon D610) only allows 60fps at a quality of 720p, and 25fps at 1080p, I decided to set it as 60fps at 720p because this would give a smoother slow-motion footage which in my opinion is one of the main features in films. I learnt that lower frame rate would lead to laggy slow- motion.
As you can see, the highest quality for our film opening that was uploaded onto youtube is 720p.
The reason I set the camera to an f-stop of 1.4 as you can see on the screenshot above, that the focal point is focused on the toy. That is the effect of an f-stop of 1.4, to allow the light to come in in addition to having a accurate focal point. The 1.4 f-stop plays with dimension, and as we focus the camera within the video, it is as if we are allowing the audience to interact with the boy as if playing a hide and seek game when the boy is not recalling the presence of the audience at all, which similarly linking to that he is concentrating on playing with his "ghost" friend and avoiding reality.
To adjust the f-stop manually, I set my camera to A mode, this allows me to film in the lowest f-stop which is f/1.4 for my lens. Lower f-stop means that the output footage will create a blurry background as shown in the image above. This gives a more cinematic look to the footage and therefore will look more professional.
Apart from playing around with he f-stop, I also adjusted the ISO and the exposure setting on my camera according to the setting, this then allows the lighting in the camera to adapt with the setting. The exposure was set to a lower range in most of footages. This created a dark effect, as if the footage was already colour graded. This setting was useful because we did not need to add extra colours or filters to the film.
We used a friend's RODE microphone to record diegetic sounds such as the close up scene of the boy writing on the concrete floor with a brick. I adjusted the amount of sound captured to a lower range in order to capture only the sound of the brick and cancel out most of the background sound. We then added this sound to our sequence to give a more realistic feel to the film.
The Phantom 4 drone was used to shoot a bird's eye view shot to show the audience how small the boy's world is compared to the real world. The phantom 4 is capable of recording in 4K, however i decided to choose a quality of 720p because this would match with the quality of the camera footage. Furthermore, shooting in 720p would take less time to render once put into an editing software. Before flying the drone, we made sure that there were no obstacles in the way.
Other technologies used during this project are laptops for editing the film and general process of the project. Phones were used for communication throughout the project.
SOFTWARE
Softwares used for producing our film opening were Adobe Premiere pro cc and Adobe Aftereffects cc. Premiere pro was used for editing the general sequence of the film including the glitch effect as well. The glitch effect was achieved by using keyframes and moving the position of the frame on every 2 or more frames. By smoothening the glitch, I used the Gaussian blur which can be found in the effects panel in premiere. Aftereffects was used for masking the text to create a cool effect for the credits where the character in the film walks through the text while blocking the text, as if the credit text is a part of the setting.
ONLINE
For the research part of this coursework, I used Blogger.com to record my process throughout the project. As mentioned earlier, I also used youtube to watch tutorials on editing videos, colour grading, and effects. Youtube is a big part of this project as I have found so many interesting ideas from youtube channels which has been an inspiration for my film opening. To download music from youtube, we used sites such as youtube-mp3.org, and http://convert2mp3.net/en/. These sites were very useful and convenient due to the fast speed of conversion.
To download the font for our film opening, we used http://www.dafont.com.
Social media was also a huge part of this project. LINE was used in order to communicate with our partner and also share ideas. We also used Snapchat to send short preview videos of what we have done so far, which we were then able to give feedbacks to each other's work while at home.
Apart from this, Google was probably the most important source to this project. We started off brainstorming our ideas using google drive/docs, this allowed both of us to access the same folder and make changes at the same time from different locations.
Here is a screenshot of our folder with ideas from the start of this project.
The reason I set the camera to an f-stop of 1.4 as you can see on the screenshot above, that the focal point is focused on the toy. That is the effect of an f-stop of 1.4, to allow the light to come in in addition to having a accurate focal point. The 1.4 f-stop plays with dimension, and as we focus the camera within the video, it is as if we are allowing the audience to interact with the boy as if playing a hide and seek game when the boy is not recalling the presence of the audience at all, which similarly linking to that he is concentrating on playing with his "ghost" friend and avoiding reality.
To adjust the f-stop manually, I set my camera to A mode, this allows me to film in the lowest f-stop which is f/1.4 for my lens. Lower f-stop means that the output footage will create a blurry background as shown in the image above. This gives a more cinematic look to the footage and therefore will look more professional.
Apart from playing around with he f-stop, I also adjusted the ISO and the exposure setting on my camera according to the setting, this then allows the lighting in the camera to adapt with the setting. The exposure was set to a lower range in most of footages. This created a dark effect, as if the footage was already colour graded. This setting was useful because we did not need to add extra colours or filters to the film.
We used a friend's RODE microphone to record diegetic sounds such as the close up scene of the boy writing on the concrete floor with a brick. I adjusted the amount of sound captured to a lower range in order to capture only the sound of the brick and cancel out most of the background sound. We then added this sound to our sequence to give a more realistic feel to the film.
The Phantom 4 drone was used to shoot a bird's eye view shot to show the audience how small the boy's world is compared to the real world. The phantom 4 is capable of recording in 4K, however i decided to choose a quality of 720p because this would match with the quality of the camera footage. Furthermore, shooting in 720p would take less time to render once put into an editing software. Before flying the drone, we made sure that there were no obstacles in the way.
Other technologies used during this project are laptops for editing the film and general process of the project. Phones were used for communication throughout the project.
SOFTWARE
Softwares used for producing our film opening were Adobe Premiere pro cc and Adobe Aftereffects cc. Premiere pro was used for editing the general sequence of the film including the glitch effect as well. The glitch effect was achieved by using keyframes and moving the position of the frame on every 2 or more frames. By smoothening the glitch, I used the Gaussian blur which can be found in the effects panel in premiere. Aftereffects was used for masking the text to create a cool effect for the credits where the character in the film walks through the text while blocking the text, as if the credit text is a part of the setting.
ONLINE
For the research part of this coursework, I used Blogger.com to record my process throughout the project. As mentioned earlier, I also used youtube to watch tutorials on editing videos, colour grading, and effects. Youtube is a big part of this project as I have found so many interesting ideas from youtube channels which has been an inspiration for my film opening. To download music from youtube, we used sites such as youtube-mp3.org, and http://convert2mp3.net/en/. These sites were very useful and convenient due to the fast speed of conversion.
To download the font for our film opening, we used http://www.dafont.com.
Social media was also a huge part of this project. LINE was used in order to communicate with our partner and also share ideas. We also used Snapchat to send short preview videos of what we have done so far, which we were then able to give feedbacks to each other's work while at home.
Apart from this, Google was probably the most important source to this project. We started off brainstorming our ideas using google drive/docs, this allowed both of us to access the same folder and make changes at the same time from different locations.
Here is a screenshot of our folder with ideas from the start of this project.
EVALUATION Q3 - SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
CODES & CONVENTIONS
At the beginning of this course, I had little knowledge in terms of media vocabularies including "codes" and "conventions", I did not know the meanings of these words nor how to use them. But as we got along with the course, I started to understand the concept and the meanings of these specific words. This then allowed me to become more confident in using them. Furthermore I did not know categories such as "sub-genres" existed since I saw thriller as being the same as horror.
PLANNING & ORGANISATION
I feel that I am a relatively organised person in general; this can be supported by the fact that I often try my best to finish my work before due dates. This part of the project was hugely impacted by the filming days. This is because we had to communicate through social media about the date, time and location of the filming day. This required lots of planning beforehand, and organisation due to the large amount of equipment needed.
CAMERA WORK
I personally think that I am fairly experienced with cameras as I own a DSLR therefore I often go out to take photos/ videos to edit short films during my free time. This habit has allowed me to expand my knowledge on how cameras in general functions, adding on to this, I also enjoy experimenting different settings on my camera to see each end product; I find it very interesting. Other than that, I usually watch youtube tutorials on camera settings to develop my skills further. After studying this course, I learnt a lot about different camera shots and angles and how they are able to convey different messages to the audience. What i found fascinating was the vast amount of camera shots that are used in films to portray different meanings. From this I am also able to understand how each shot in blockbuster films are used to tell the story.
VISUAL FX
Visual effects was not as necessary for our film opening as we were going for a more natural/environmental look. Before this course, I never tried using Aftereffects due to its complicated system. The first ever time that I tried using it was when I attempted to make the production title "LIGHT PRODUCTIONS" (this can be found in the previous blog post) for our film opening. This was when I started to become familiar with some settings on the software. Watching tutorials on youtube has really helped me with this struggle.
EDITING
I believe that I am quite familiar with editing as I have been editing travel videos ever since I became interested in videography. Since then, I started using iMovie on the iPad to edit short videos, then after I got a Macbook air, I started to play around with the expanded iMovie setting on the mac. Just before I started this course, I downloaded Adobe softwares onto my laptop including video editing softwares like Premiere pro cc, Aftereffects, and DaVinci Resolve. I found out that Premiere pro was easier to use than Aftereffects, so I decided to play around with the settings on there as well as watching tutorials to help me with the understanding of keyframes and the basics. This course has pushed me into experimenting and learning more about the softwares which helped to develop my editing skills in general.
Apart from softwares, I also learnt about different theories and meanings conveyed by how the films are edited. For instance cuts between each scenes can have difference meanings. I tried to apply these theories in the rough cut for our film and was fairly successful.
CREATIVE CONFIDENCE
After I heard about the theme "thriller" being our coursework, I was quite unsatisfied due to the fact that the genre "thriller" doesn't seem to get me off the chair. However after learning about the theories of thriller and their sub-genres, my mind started to overflow with ideas from different directions of thriller. Another factor which may have helped with with creative side is the fact that I took Art for igcses.
CODES & CONVENTIONS
At the beginning of this course, I had little knowledge in terms of media vocabularies including "codes" and "conventions", I did not know the meanings of these words nor how to use them. But as we got along with the course, I started to understand the concept and the meanings of these specific words. This then allowed me to become more confident in using them. Furthermore I did not know categories such as "sub-genres" existed since I saw thriller as being the same as horror.
PLANNING & ORGANISATION
I feel that I am a relatively organised person in general; this can be supported by the fact that I often try my best to finish my work before due dates. This part of the project was hugely impacted by the filming days. This is because we had to communicate through social media about the date, time and location of the filming day. This required lots of planning beforehand, and organisation due to the large amount of equipment needed.
CAMERA WORK
I personally think that I am fairly experienced with cameras as I own a DSLR therefore I often go out to take photos/ videos to edit short films during my free time. This habit has allowed me to expand my knowledge on how cameras in general functions, adding on to this, I also enjoy experimenting different settings on my camera to see each end product; I find it very interesting. Other than that, I usually watch youtube tutorials on camera settings to develop my skills further. After studying this course, I learnt a lot about different camera shots and angles and how they are able to convey different messages to the audience. What i found fascinating was the vast amount of camera shots that are used in films to portray different meanings. From this I am also able to understand how each shot in blockbuster films are used to tell the story.
VISUAL FX
Visual effects was not as necessary for our film opening as we were going for a more natural/environmental look. Before this course, I never tried using Aftereffects due to its complicated system. The first ever time that I tried using it was when I attempted to make the production title "LIGHT PRODUCTIONS" (this can be found in the previous blog post) for our film opening. This was when I started to become familiar with some settings on the software. Watching tutorials on youtube has really helped me with this struggle.
EDITING
I believe that I am quite familiar with editing as I have been editing travel videos ever since I became interested in videography. Since then, I started using iMovie on the iPad to edit short videos, then after I got a Macbook air, I started to play around with the expanded iMovie setting on the mac. Just before I started this course, I downloaded Adobe softwares onto my laptop including video editing softwares like Premiere pro cc, Aftereffects, and DaVinci Resolve. I found out that Premiere pro was easier to use than Aftereffects, so I decided to play around with the settings on there as well as watching tutorials to help me with the understanding of keyframes and the basics. This course has pushed me into experimenting and learning more about the softwares which helped to develop my editing skills in general.
Apart from softwares, I also learnt about different theories and meanings conveyed by how the films are edited. For instance cuts between each scenes can have difference meanings. I tried to apply these theories in the rough cut for our film and was fairly successful.
CREATIVE CONFIDENCE
After I heard about the theme "thriller" being our coursework, I was quite unsatisfied due to the fact that the genre "thriller" doesn't seem to get me off the chair. However after learning about the theories of thriller and their sub-genres, my mind started to overflow with ideas from different directions of thriller. Another factor which may have helped with with creative side is the fact that I took Art for igcses.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
EVALUATION Q2 - TARGET AUDIENCE
How does your product engage with audiences?.....
I researched about audiences who are interested in films that has a similar concept as our opening.
*Please turn on annotations to see analysis*
I researched about audiences who are interested in films that has a similar concept as our opening.
----> Children targeted
by the protagonist.
These are the results of the type audiences who are interested in films that are similar to mine. (Source from YouGov profile)
INSIDIOUS
THE BOY
As you can see these are mostly women aged between 18 to roughly 40/50. This may be due to their strong emotions for children as most of their desires are to have kids. Apart from that, most of their favourite movies are not blockbuster movies, in fact, many of them are not known by many. This may imply that the sense of isolation from society interests them.
PLEASE READ ANNOTATIONS ON THE YOUTUBE EMBED FOR OTHER WAYS OUR OPENING ENGAGES WITH THE AUDIENCE
.... How would it be distributed as a real media text?
Personally I think that our film is quite typical as the protagonist whom is targeted by the antagonist is a young child. It is a mixture of indie-art movies with a hint of hollywood. It follows the same concept as most thriller films since we followed the main conventions of a thriller film. However our plot may be slightly different to other general thriller films which means that our film might have a niche audience. An example of a particular group of audience which our film can possibly attract may include people who fears isolation or dislikes the thought of being alone. This applies to the theory of how people are often attracted to films that consists of their fears. Apart from that, younger children/ teenagers might be interested in our film as some might be able to relate to this issue during some point of their lives.
In my opinion, our film might not be suitable for being released in cinemas due to the fact that it is not quite mainstream, therefore it will face difficulties in competing with other blockbuster films with mass target audiences. This will mean that our film will be distributed to a smaller amount of people, in order to solve this problem, we can let Netflix do the job for us. By uploading our film into Netflix, it will be distributed worldwide which our film might eventually become more well known. Another advantage of this is that our film will reach our target audiences more easily since Netflix has a system which separates different genre of films into different sections and allow their users to pick their desired genres. Furthermore, Netflix is an online movie streaming program therefore this means that their users do not have to leave their homes and travel all the way to the cinema, instead they are able to watch movies at home on their laptops/PC etc.
In order to distribute our film further, we can submit our film into different film festivals from all over the world. This might give our film a chance to win at least a few awards and may end up being recognised more by many. Film companies such as Focus Features might be able to help us distribute our film as they have launched Focus World in 2011. Focus world is a label focusing on the video on demand market. This can be another source of distribution for our film.
If our film was to be released, a suitable release date would be on a Thursday as it follows the trend of blockbuster movies and movies that are released in the cinema. Moreover, for the movie opening, our aim is to target audience in the mainstream area in addition with those who are critiques for indie award winning films.
PLEASE READ ANNOTATIONS ON THE YOUTUBE EMBED FOR OTHER WAYS OUR OPENING ENGAGES WITH THE AUDIENCE
.... How would it be distributed as a real media text?
Personally I think that our film is quite typical as the protagonist whom is targeted by the antagonist is a young child. It is a mixture of indie-art movies with a hint of hollywood. It follows the same concept as most thriller films since we followed the main conventions of a thriller film. However our plot may be slightly different to other general thriller films which means that our film might have a niche audience. An example of a particular group of audience which our film can possibly attract may include people who fears isolation or dislikes the thought of being alone. This applies to the theory of how people are often attracted to films that consists of their fears. Apart from that, younger children/ teenagers might be interested in our film as some might be able to relate to this issue during some point of their lives.
In my opinion, our film might not be suitable for being released in cinemas due to the fact that it is not quite mainstream, therefore it will face difficulties in competing with other blockbuster films with mass target audiences. This will mean that our film will be distributed to a smaller amount of people, in order to solve this problem, we can let Netflix do the job for us. By uploading our film into Netflix, it will be distributed worldwide which our film might eventually become more well known. Another advantage of this is that our film will reach our target audiences more easily since Netflix has a system which separates different genre of films into different sections and allow their users to pick their desired genres. Furthermore, Netflix is an online movie streaming program therefore this means that their users do not have to leave their homes and travel all the way to the cinema, instead they are able to watch movies at home on their laptops/PC etc.
In order to distribute our film further, we can submit our film into different film festivals from all over the world. This might give our film a chance to win at least a few awards and may end up being recognised more by many. Film companies such as Focus Features might be able to help us distribute our film as they have launched Focus World in 2011. Focus world is a label focusing on the video on demand market. This can be another source of distribution for our film.
If our film was to be released, a suitable release date would be on a Thursday as it follows the trend of blockbuster movies and movies that are released in the cinema. Moreover, for the movie opening, our aim is to target audience in the mainstream area in addition with those who are critiques for indie award winning films.
Thursday, March 9, 2017
EVALUATION Q1 - CONVENTIONS & REPRESENTATION
How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
This shot where nearly half of the screen is blocked by the walls on both sides is commonly seen in typical psychological thriller films. This shot suggests the isolation of the boy which can be symbolised by the fact that he is trapped within the walls. Another convention is to represent someone who is not present within the camera to follow the conventions of the protagonist being a victim to the mind games of the antagonist. Moreover the idea of not seeing the "ghost" creates enigma to the viewers in questioning that if he exists or not or is it all in his head.
Our film opening consists of a boy who is abandoned by both parents and friends due to his mental disorder. In the social world, there are similar issues for instance, orphans, children who does not socialise allowing them to have no friends, or even kids who live in their own "imaginary" world and builds a barrier between the real world. We converged this idea of a lonely boy who created his own friend in his mind. From this shot, we can analyse that the two walls on both sides represents the barrier that is set by the boy in between the two worlds; being his own imaginary world and the real world. Adding on to this, the boy lies inside the two walls, this suggests that he is not intending to cross the "barrier" into the real world.
Many psychological thriller films usually position the youth as the protagonist being the victim of the antagonist. In other words, the antagonist often targets the child in the film as they are seen to be an easy target to manipulate (e.g. Slender man, Lights out, The boy). As researched previously in the blog, the reason for this is that children are more open minded therefore this allows them to be able to see more than normal adults do. This convention of psychological thriller films is clearly shown in our film opening as we chose to work with a young boy (Enid's brother) who is experiencing abnormal visions of his imaginary friend.
These close up shots of different chalk strokes in our opening follows the the conventions of thriller films. A reference for this is the film opening for "The Black Swan".
By showing close up shots increases the level of suspense within the film as well as for the audience due to the restricted scenes that are available for them to see; they cannot see the big picture. This also creates an idea of mystery which can be linked to the idea of imaginary friends.
Friday, March 3, 2017
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