Preliminary Task

'Produce a short sequence which features a character entering a room, meeting another character, and exchanging words.'
Truffle Shuffle Productions
For our Preliminary task we have been asked to film a short sequence that involves a person walking through a corridor and then entering a room to establish a conversation between two people or more. By doing this we will create a range of technical camera shots and will have a better understanding of filming a media sequence, knowing how effective a camera angle will be and being able to use editing to make the media piece more effective. This has been a requirement by the examining board OCR to do this task. By making a preliminary video we will be more prepared for making a real opening sequence for our media work, our preliminary task must be no longer than two minutes. Our group members are myself Maddy Page, David Fear, Emilie Campbell and Dominic Bennett.

Planning: certain areas we need to look at when setting up
Location- where we will be filming to make it look more realistic.
Costumes-type of clothing that are required to make the clip more effective.
Topic and Genre- Horror, comedy, romance,tragedy etc
Lighting- how lights will make scenery look effective
Camera- camera angles and shots we will include

When planning we also need to include certain camera techniques to make our project look effective, for example the 180 Degree rule, keeping the camera on one side of viewing only,an imaginary line of vision must not be crossed when doing this. The rule is vital to stop confusion of viewers and keeping maintenance of the sense of the scene. An example of the '180 degree rule'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdyyuqmCW14

Another effective technical shot that needs to be included is the 'Shot Reverse Shot'.This technique is used to cut from one person to another without changing the scene. This gives it a more professional appearance. An example of a 'shot reverse shot'...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXqlg85-VY

Lastly a shot that is a requirement is the 'Match on Action' shot. A match on action shot is cutting in a middle of a scene and doing it in a different angle this makes the shot look more professional as it looks like there is more than one camera. an example of a 'Match on Action shot'....

Camera angles and movements

are important as well shots we will be using in our sequence, the types of shots we will be using are..

Mid shots- Mid shots show a character in detail but not as much as a close up shot, the shot shows enough for the audience to understand the whole subject.

Over the Shoulder shot- This is when the camera angle is placed over someones shoulder when a discussion is happening in a scene, the image normally shows the back of someone head and what they can see from there point of view.

Close up shot- A close up shot is used to show the detail of a person or an object. They are used regularly in sequences as well as long shots and mid shots.

Shot Reverse Shot- showing a shot of one person in a conversation then switching the camera angle to show the other person perspective. This is normally common when characters are facing each other.

Film Genres

We also had to think about what type of genre we were going to use for our preliminary task. The most popular genre categories in the film industry are Action, Comedy, Romance, Horror, Musical, Sci-Fi and children's animation.

Action-Action films have more physical action instead of dialogue, an action film will normally involve a hero and a villain. They usually target the male audience int rest over the female audience because of their limitless budget for explosions, destruction and extraordinary battle locations. Actor icons such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis are known for their roles as action hero's in their popular films e.g. The Terminator, Rambo and Die Hard.

Comedy- Comedy films emphasis humour in different ways, you can synchronize Comedy with any other genre and can be very adaptable and work really well. Comedy has developed over the last century many comedy films used be non speaking with physical humor, nowadays it is usually dialogue and physical humor. A favourite classic Comedy film of mine is 'Robin Hood Men In Tights'.

Romance- Romance films are known to attract the female audience as they tell a story of love and emotions. Most romance films will include drama,tragedy and life changing decisions of love and partnership. A favorite Romantic film of mine is 'Don Juan Demarco', it tells the story of a man who is wanting to commit suicide because he could not convince the woman he loved to love him.

Horror- horror films main focus of a story line is murder or killing, most horror films involve a killer/ villain set out for revenge. The main villain could be a monster or human with a mental or social problem. a lot of horror involves death and gore. An example of a horror film is 'Nightmare on Elm Street', although horror films were based around Gothic tales such as 'Frankenstein' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' but have developed over the past century.

Musical- a Musical normally tells the story of a film in the form of a song, they develop the characters through the song. Musicals can have dancing as well as singing and are used frequently instead of characters speaking. The story line of a musical can be anything as long as the music relates to the story. An example of a musical is 'Sweeney Todd The demon Barber Of Fleet Street'. The genre of the film Horror/Musical and most of its dialogue is in musical form.

Sci- Fi- Science fiction genre base their films on extra terrestrial, space, time travelling, robots and space crafts. They are usually based in the future or in space and the normal storyline is the discovery of extraordinary, war between different races or the earth being threatened by an alien race. Most Sci-films are big budgets because of their graphics, costumes and props have to look very authentic. A good example of a Science fiction film is Avatar, The film cost millions to make because of its realistic graphic and 3D effects the film has been nominated for many awards because of its story and graphic works.

Shooting script:

Location

Since our sequence is about David finding out he has an illness and has not long left to live it was obvious we needed a location that was a look alike to a hospital. We needed locations that were identical to certain areas in a hospital for example a waiting room and a GP's office, we found ceratin areas in our school Arthur Mellows Village College that looked like a waiting room so we were able to adapt a hall way into a hospital waiting room. For the GP's office we used one of our schools meeting rooms we had to ask the one of the recepionists to book the room for a lesson so we could film a scene, we also had to change room furniture around so we made the meeting room look like a large office.

Props/ cosutmes

Our Sequence did not require many props or costumes, we simply made sure that david and dominic were wearing the same clothes as they were in the scene otherwise it would not look very authentic. The only type of props we needed were table and chairs and since we were filming in our school we had plenty of tables and chairs to use and we were in no fear in having a shortage.

Character representation
Our film genre is a tragedy, whcih means  our characters/ actors will need to show sad emotion towards their role in the preliminary task. We made sure David was full aware of his role by telling informing him on the plot of the story as well as the script

Storyboard
Our film shows David being told he has a medical problem by his GP (Dominic), we have planned the story out by making a storyboard, that way we will know the story plot and the camera shots we need. In the sequence we have David waiting in a waiting room, David walking through a door and David and Dominic Sitting in a room. When planning we decided to make a draft storyboard just so we had an idea of how to film our sequence

Filming diary
While we were filming our preliminary task we decided to change some of the shots we used in a different order and we also included new shots to make the scene look more effective. We added a shot of David's feet to show his eager emotions.

All of us had a chance to use the camera so we could get used to it and understand the different techniques of the camera the only person who didn't use the camera was David because he was the main person in the opening sequence. Although Dominic was in the sequence he was also able to use the camera because he was only in a short piece of the sequence.

We filmed our preliminary task in a numerous amounts of day it took us a while to film because of the location ideas, we found other areas were more suitable for a waiting room and other areas looked better for the GP's room. Since we filmed on different day we had to make sure David was wearing the same clothes so it made the sequence more realistic and authentic. In total we worked out that the filming if done in a day would of taken two lesson to do but since of delays it was filmed in over the course of a week.




Evaluation
Overall I am pleased with how well our preliminary task turned out, The editing really improved the standard of the clip as well as our range of shots and angles. The overlap of  clips improved our orginal ideas and made the sequence look more professional, the idea of using black and white colouring instead of original colouring gave our sequence more emotion and a deeper depth to it. The close ups and over the shoulder shots allow the audience to feel in tune with the characters emotion which is exactly what we wanted to share.  I was pleased to work in a relaible group because we were able to discuss and listen to each others ideas and our sequence was a success because we were able to work together as a group.  A weakness of the sequence was the authenticity, we did not make Dominic look very authentic as a GP as he did not wear a suit  but we are hoping no one will notice.

Our Opening Sequence

'Truffle Shuffle Productions'

For Our Opening sequence our group has been discussing ideas for what to do when it comes to our opening sequence. when deciding we were a bit clueless on ideas, we knew many people were doing thrillers, scary and crime opening sequences and we did not want to follow the trend of everyone else. We wanted to do something different from every other group that not many people had thought of, when thinking of ideas we thought of Comedy, urban type, fantasy, children's and animation opening sequences. we wrote down our ideas so we could choose the best one out of all of them. Eventually we came up with an idea...

Our Idea we really liked was to do a fantasy opening sequence about toys coming to life while a person leaves the room, we wanted the toys to move around a bedroom while the person is unaware of what is happening in the bedroom, our idea has a great deal of resemblance to the pixar animated film 'Toy Story' because we liked the story idea to it and thought it was very creative however we have made an alternative way of making the opening sequence. when we decided we liked this idea we decided to do our planning early so we had it all sorted and wasn't confused during the process of filming. In concept of making the toys move we decided to use stop motion effect to make the toys look realistic, we could not use animation because we do not have the budget for it and would be more time consuming.

We based our story and genre idea on 'Toy Story'. A good example of a children's stop motion film is 'Wallace and Gromit' which is animated but is made out of plasticine

What we need to consider:
.Location
.Props
.Lighting
.Sounds
.Filming times

Location

We decided to use Davids house as our Location set because his house was the accessible out of all the group the house was also suitable for filming and his room had enough space for the toys to do there movement. whenever we need to do filming we will have to go to Davids house which is located in Eye Village.

Plan of action/ Storyboard

We made a plan of action and a storyboard so we knew what we were doing and how we were going to film the sequence.

This was our opening sequence ideas, we had other ideas but choose the fantasy idea because we liked it the best.

Basically our storyboard shows a boy (David) waking up leaving his house and then our stop motion sequence begins toys come out of a cupboard and start moving around there are also clips of the toys moving around cameo appearances of the credits making the sequence look more like an opening sequence, by the end of the sequence the boy realizes he has forgotten something and goes back into his room to discover the toys are moving.

The genre of the opening sequence is children's fantasy, we could not find many opening sequences that related to this topic as we are using stop motion, but we managed to find videos on youtube that were very effective and used the stop motion effect. I particularly liked this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoOhZN_PR8
This is an amateur video of stop motion that I found on youtube i liked this because it includes real life objects instead of animation use and works really well.

Costumes - clothing and costumes does not seem to matter in the opening sequence much we just need to make sure when filming David will be in the same clothes as we planned otherwise it will not look very authentic.
David just needs to wear his night wear and his casual day clothes as they play role in the sequence.


Lighting- The lighting in our sequence is very important because we must make sure it look likes morning in our sequence as it involves David getting out of bed in the morning

The weather is also important especially for lighting we need to make sure the weather is suitable so it doesn't make the day look to dark.

Props- As our sequence is about toys, we are going to need toys that have some robotic movement to them for example, plaster-toys, race cars, wind up toys, movable Teddy's and any other toys that would look good in the sequence. Any other props we made need is paper for our credits will be on them to make the sequence look different. For Camera Props we used the Tripod so the camera was able to catch balanced shots of a scene.

Sound-(Non digetic & digetic), since we cannot make the toys speak we decided most of our sound will come from non digetic music. Our toys will be moving and dancing around which means they will have to have music to move around to, we have not decided what type of music we will use yet but have ideas on what music we will use. We particularly liked the Song 'Kids' by the band MGMT, we like this song because it relates to the theme of children's toys. Because we have not decided what music we are using yet I have researched into different types of music, I particularly liked the Owl City's song 'Technicolour Phase' which relates to our idea of fantasy, The single can be found on the soundtrack to Alice In Wonderland. I also liked the song 'Skeleton Boy' by the band Friendly Fires.

We decided to final song should be the Reeling  by the band Passion pit.

Risk Assesment
We filled in a risk assement, so that we were aware of safety hazards and so

Characters: David Fear is our main character for our opening sequence,

Filming Times- There are many disadvantages to our filming times, since our group members live in different areas of Peterborough it is hard for us to meet up and do our filming because none of our group members can drive, we have to take the bus to Davids house after school which only gives us a short amount of time to film. We cannot film on weekends because David works at the weekend and we require Davids house to film our sequence. We therefor decided we need more time to film our opening sequence, we hope to ask our Media teacher, Mr Zaidi so he can give us an extension so we have more time to film.

Editing

Today we did some editing to our Opening sequence, we used Sony Vegas Movie Maker to edit or video because it is very professional and provides all the accessories for editing film. We spent many hours editing our opening sequence because our sequence was stop motion we found it very difficult and time consuming to put all the clips together in order to make it look more professional. We managed to finish our editing at the end of the day but felt we still needed more time to make it look better and we needed more shots of other things and less of others. when editing we noticed our opening sequence did not look much like an opening sequence it was very blunt from what we imagined and did not work very well. Mr Zaidi our media teacher explained to us how we could make it better by changing  the storyline as well as some of the clips because it did not look very productive. Our group members Dominic and David had to go away and film our new idea that they had thought of.

This was our original plan for our story however during the editing process we had to change the story because it lacked the effect of an opening sequence that were required. Our Story idea had new scenes and also new shots.

we needed changes to all the media ideas we had thought of, for example location : because we changed the story idea we had to use different locations, our new location spots was around Eye Village and Park as well as Davids house.

Characters- we included Dominc as a new character in the opening sequence because of the new story where david speaks to dominc about his childhood.
Once we had finished our extended filming we had to come back to the editing process, 

Evaluation

1) How does your media product use develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?
It is vital that a media product includes an opening sequence so that the audience is able to understand the genre,setting, character representation, narrative, camera angles and movements  and story-line.  for example our main character was David which we included in our opening sequences so the audience knew who to focus on in the sequence and we  we also had to let the audience know the genre of the opening sequence by including a vital prop which was the toys hopefully the audience understood that our opening sequence was a children's fantasy film. It was also important that the setting was accurate we decided to use a child's bedroom as the usual place you find toys is in a child's bedroom. We also had to include the lighting
We wanted our film to relate to the Disney pixar film 'Toy Story' so we had to use a method of making the toys move professionally,we used the stop motion effect as it was effective and was the only resource we could use because we could not afford animation and graphics. It was also important we knew all about camera angles and how effective they are to make a scene look professional, fortunately we did research about camera movement and angles before we shot our product so we understood how effective we could make our product and more professional.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Since our  target audience group was a family group it was important we included suitable character representation and narrative for our social group. We decided to use two characters from our media group which was Dominic Bennet and David Fear we choose them because they were the people we had in mind and they were very comfortable to play the role although our opening sequence is a children genre our main characters were teenagers, we weren't particularly aiming this opening sequence on male audience it was because they volunteered and it worked well. We did not have to include many people in our sequence because of the large amount of props we used e.g the toys they were the main role in the opening sequence. We discussed as a group that our opening sequence should be certified as an U or PG because the sequence does not include no violence, strong language or areas of sexual nature.

3) What kind of media institution would distribute your product and why?

Film 4 are known for distributing low budget british films and have won many rewards and reviews from finding talented media products from unexpected candidates. Our product did not compare to the hollywood industry of filming because they are known for their big budget projects and gross revenue, this meant we had less advantages of filming and expanding our project because of our low budget. However Film 4 have shown  how much better they can be by distributing films such as Shallow Grave and Slum dog Millionaire, Shallow Grave is a low budget product but I find a very good quality of a film. Slum dog Millionaire was directed by the well known British Director Danny Boyle who has directed many british low budget  films that have been distributed on Film 4, the film won 8 awards and is one of the best films of the decade. Films like slum dog millionaire give small media products like ours hope toward how successful our product can become because of the institution of film 4.

4) Who would be the audience of your media product?
We decided our genre was Fantasy/children film so instantly we knew it was going to be a Family suitable fim, this meant it was suitable for all ages children to adults. Since we decided it was a family film we knew it shouldn't include any violence, strong language or scenes of sexual nature and of course we didn't need to because it did not relate to our story line. Ours was very different from other media products in our media class because many choose to do a thriller we thought it would be a good idea to try do something different and unique to attract a different type of audience. If our film was to be distributed it would have to go through the classification of the BBFC (British Board Of Film Classification) where the product will be classified to a particular audience, as before we feel our product should be either classified as U or PG because it show no offensive signs.

5) How did you attract or address your target audience?
Since we produced an opening it was important that we made the sequence interesting so the audience did not understand the concept of our product and give it a bad review. When we finished our first lot of editing we asked people to watch it and give us a review we also got our media teacher, Mr Zaidi to review it for us as well, many told us they liked how different it was but were a bit unsure of the story line from this we knew we had to change the story line and we also had to add more parts to it. From this we managed to film new clips which included new shots and new locations, this way we understood which parts needed to be improved so we were able to make the story line less confusing and be able to attract our target audience.



6) What have you learnt about technologies  from the process of constructing this product?
Before we ever filmed and planned our opening sequence we researched into film opening sequences that carried a lot of suspense and mystery so we were able to understand what opening sequences should contain and how they are structured. we looked at opening sequences such as Dirty Harry, The Usual Suspects and Seven, we looked at how effective camera angles were to a scene as well as camera movements  and the authenticity of the scene. This helped us understand what was essential to make an opening sequence look appealing and attractive it also gave us some experience to what we needed.


Through the process of recording our preliminary task and opening sequence I have learnt a lot about the different technologies of our product although I have had experience with a camera before I did not know about all the different processes of filming and editing for example, I did not know how to zoom with a camera or adjust its setting but since I am more comfortable with a camera then I was before. When filming our opening sequence we used a Panasonic SDR S26 camera that over time I felt very comfortable with and helped our opening sequence look effective. When we were filming our preliminary task we used a different camera that gave it a different effect this helped me realize that different cameras have different effects and don't all work in the same way.

When constructing our opening sequence I learnt all about the process of editing, we used Sony Vegas movie maker which helped us put clips together and use special effects to make the opening sequence look more professional it took our group a long amount of time before we were comfortable with the process we had to play around with the movie maker so we could understand how it worked.

Other technologies we used were face book and youtube to get feedback from an audience, if we didn't use this we wouldn't be able to know what to improve to our product as well as making it better than our preliminary task.
7)Looking back on your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt from the progression to it from your main task?

From development of the preliminary task to the opening sequence I feel like I have learnt a lot about Cameras, Authenticity and Editing. After the Preliminary task we knew that we had to so something better and different to what we had before to show that we had learnt a lot from the experience, because of the different idea we had from our media class we learnt all about stop motion effect and how time consuming it was.
Since we were limited on the amount of shots we had to include as well as time I felt we could experiment more with the main task and learn different techniques with the camera and editing. From the main task story line we were able to get different camera angles such as better panning shots and wider shots we were also able to add different effects when editing as well which gave us a better understanding of movie making.

From the preliminary task I also feel we have improved on our media standards I think we were very creative towards our main task although it did not turn out the way we wanted I'm glad we tried something different from everyone else, I also feel more comfortable as a media student and hope in my next project I shall be more advanced and experienced to make a better product in the future.

Opening Sequences

For producing our opening sequence effectively, our media class has researched and evaluated different opening sequences from different films such as 'Dirty Harry', 'The Usual Suspects' and 'Seven'. We have learnt that for an opening sequence to be successful it needs to have a range of shots and needs to look authentic for audience to be interested until the end of the media sequence. Dirty Harry was very effective as an opening sequence because it provided suspense and mystery into the plot which attracted me personally as a viewer.
Since the task includes a conversation between two people, a main importance is the topic of the conversation. It is important we include an interesting conversation at the beginning of are opening sequence so the audience can understand and are willing to watch the rest of a film and know how the story unfolds. For example 'The Usual Suspects' opening sequence includes a conversation between a victim and a murderer, the conversation they share creates confusion to why the murderer kills the victim which attracts audience to the rest of the film.