Preliminary Work

Lesson 1, Preliminary Work 1

Today was our first lesson on the preliminary work so myself, Samantha Bevan and Samantha Priestman discussed ideas of the genre and ideas for the storyboard we are going to be making. Our chosen genre is Sci-Fi as we all agreed that Science Fiction was a very good way to show our creativity and it also has a wide range of options to explore when considering this genre. We began by sharing ideas and writing them down on a separate piece of paper and then transferred these ideas onto the first storyboard slides. Our initial ideas consisted of a potion being handed to a character and then the character dying as she had taken the potion. My group and I also discovered a new term called the 180 degree rule. The 180 degree rule is the idea of two characters and that they should always have the same left and right relationship towards each other. If the 180 degree rule is broken, it will make the film look unprofessional as it will look like the characters are talking to each other but are sat in exactly the same place as each other. The lesson shortly came to an end, and my group and I decided that next lesson we are going to be adding more detail about identifying which sounds are diagetic and non-diegetic to the storyboard. 

Lesson 2, Preliminary Task 1

In this second lesson, my group and I continued planning our story board. We have a new group member called Mary Hainsby and she started to input some of her ideas into the planning of our story board.

Mary suggested to add and remove certain aspects that we had already discussed and we made the changes which made our storyboard look better and more effective.

This lesson we also started adding more detail to our storyboard by adding which sounds are diagetic and non diagetic.

Next lesson we are going to add even more detail to our storyboard and start to write up our storyboard in neat.

Lesson 3, Preliminary Task 1

Today my group and I completed the storyboard by drawing the illustrations and writing the camera angles and different effects onto a new clean storyboard.

Next we started filming our Preliminary Task with the help from Katie Lawson and Sam Constance. My group and I decided we did not want to do the acting as we wanted to focus on getting the camera angles and making sure the current actors where playing the roles correctly. As we ran over time, next lesson we will be watching the footage back to see what improvemenets we need to make and to see if we actually got all of the camera angles correct.

Story Boards

Lesson 4, Preliminary Task 1

During this lesson, my group and I had finally completed our video and started to edit it. We used the iMacs to edit our video in which we all worked together to find the correct clips that we needed for the final video. We managed to complete almost all of the editing as we worked quickly to ensure that we would finish in time.
The things that went well this lesson are that we all pulled together as a team to make sure the editing looked very good and fluent for people to enjoy.
Next lesson we will be finishing and finalizing the video so that we can upload it to Youtube.

Lesson 5, Preliminary Task 1

During this lesson, my group and I finally completed our preliminary task. Here is the final result.

Preliminary Task, Report

Our main idea for our preliminary task was to base our idea on the genre Sci-Fi as we felt that we wanted to task a risk and try something new. We felt that this would be a very challenging and different from what our real opening of the film is going to be.We based our preliminary task on the idea of a mad scientist trying out a new potion and the new potion did not go as planned. This scene was added for a dramatic effect as the audience will not know what happens to the actors on the screen.

My group and I was very pleased about how the overall process of the creation of the preliminary task went. The first thing that we thought went very well was the creating of the storyboard and how well we followed each scene of the storyboard. Creating the storyboard was a very good idea as it helped us organize what we where going to film and at what times. From this my group and I learnt that we should plan every single camera movement and angle to help us create the beginning of the film that we are planning to make.

Using the cameras was one of the trickiest parts of the entire creation of the preliminary task. The cameras are very small and are unable to record a large amount of space which was the hardest part. In our task we had to use the 180 degree rule which was very hard to do when using the camera on the tripod as we had to keep moving it about quite a lot. We stabled the cameras on a tripod so that the recording would be very still and stable for people to watch. We used shots such as Over the Shoulder to portray the relationships the characters had towards each other and emotion of the characters. From this I learnt that my group and I should find different ways to try filming so that we can have a more varied range of camera angles and movements.

Editing was one of the most vital parts that was needed in our preliminary task. We had to use the Mac computers to edit our video. This was  a very challenging part of the entire process as using the editing software on the Mac's was new and different to what my group and I had ever worked with before. Each member of the group had a go at editing the video as we all wanted to.  We learnt about the different ways we could edit the clips such as fading in and fading out of certain clips. From this we learnt that we do not want as many transitions as it takes the realism away from the video.

In editing we added diagetic and non diagetic sounds to put onto our video. The diagetic sound was the sound of the female character walking across the outside space with the sound of heels going across the floor. The non diagetic sound was the sound of the heart beat of the male character. Both sounds built up suspense and made the audience want to watch more of the video. From this we learnt that we could use more sounds like these as they are downloaded onto the editing software. When creating the opening to our film we have decided that we need to make sure the sounds are in time with the characters to make the video look and sound more realistic.

In uploading the video we discovered some errors that made us have a delay of around 10 minutes. We exported the video onto the Mac but we realized that we could not upload it to YouTube as it was the incorrect form. We managed to export the video again but it took us an extra 10 minutes and then we had to upload it to YouTube, we also needed to change the quality when uploading it to YouTube to the highest quality as possible. From this we learnt that we should export the video into the correct format to save time when trying to complete the final stages of the process.

We also managed to record all of the needed clips in two recordings. We thought this would be an issue as the characters did not have much costume to work with and if we had to continue the filming over two days, the characters would of had different outfits on. We recorded all of the first part with 2 actors and then the second part was with 2 completely different actors as we changed scene. From this we have learnt that our actors must have set costumes so if that we had to record over a few days the actor would be in the same outfit so that the video would look professional and realistic compared to different outfit changes that do not flow with the idea of the video.

To conclude with, during this preliminary task my group and I have learnt how to make our actual task be better as we will change the ways we did certain things to improve our quality of our task.