Final Task Feedback

YouTube

The comments we received from YouTube were praising but once again we got some good constructive criticism from a viewers perspective. The comments in blue are good and the ones in red are constructive criticism.

Class Screening and Feedback

(Best to view in window not full screen)

Theatrical Poster

Purpose

The purpose of this poster is to market and advertise our film, this poster could be placed online, in magazines, on television and other forms of media to raise awareness of our film to therefore attract a wider and larger audience to watch our film.

Detail

The street sign was created in Adobe Photoshop, we had to get the font Univers from an external source seeing as it is not easily accesible and is not integrated into any software packages outside of the media industry. It was then placed onto a white background in photoshop and saved as a photoshop layer so it could then be transferred to another document and all aspects of the poster could be compiled in on document. The 'LAND Productions', 'Edward Stephens' and 'Katrina Hughes' text was also created in Photoshop.

Improvements

If we had more time then we would have liked to have taken the background into photoshop to edit the white brick (mortar) lines behind the text so that the text would read better out of the background but unfortunately as we had been focused on completing our evaluation and final task we did not have the time to do this.

Location Shots

Evaluation

To create this video of the evaluation I used a powerpoint then exported the slides as .jpg files. After doing this I imported those slides into Photo Story 3, which is a free downloadable piece of software, this then allowed me to create timings for each slide, add transitions and a voiceover.

I used the first two options but chose not to use a voiceover as I felt my powerpoint was fairly self explanatory therefore it wouldn't add much to the content of my evaluation.

Final Task

Brief

We were asked to make an opening to a thriller film (approx. 3 minutes). We were expected to use camera angles/shots/techniques and any other knowledge of film making that we had acquired from the AS Media Studies course and our own knowledge as well to make the best film possible.

Construction
After sorting out our filming location and the other aspects such as who would be starring in our film we set to work on our final task. Our filming wasn't as fluent as our preliminary task due to the fact we filmed it over a couple of days at two different locations and we had to work round the arrangements of our actor and actress. This meant that the ease of editing our preliminary was decreased, therefore we had to spend more time on the post production. 

Our main problem was the scene on the rooftop garden, now obviously we can't control the weather and when the wind decides to pick up, so when we were filming it was hard to tell whether or not the wind was going to ruin the audio. To try and avoid this we also filmed an alternative inside scene with Katrina committing suicide so we wouldn't have to go back if the audio was poor outside. It all went well until we had to shoot the scene of Katrina on the floor in blood, we weren't able to film this due to the fact that we were filming inside the Blue Fin Building. This was because we couldn't clean up the fake blood sufficiently the scene therefore this meant we couldn't use the alternative scene and had to use the outside scene.

In our final task you hear the wind at one point quite loud, it was worse than this but with a bit of fiddling with the sound levels we managed to make it less of a problem. The only positive of this is the fact it shows how windy it is and that the weather is not particularly good which fits with our pathetic fallacy (Emily is unhappy = bad weather).

The other thing we found was that our shots were all very still and there wasn't much movement of the camera, we realised this about halfway through production, after filming the second half of the scene up in London so tried on our second day of filming to incorporate some shots with a moving/non-tripod based camera. A prime example of this is the point of view shot where Ed walks into the living room to find Emily has gone.

Film Title

With some thought and brainstorming of titles, we came up with lots of one word ideas such as 'Pursuit' and 'Chase' but none of them felt quite right, so we thought literal. What happens in our film? Where's our film set? This lead us to 'Suicide on Southwark Street' which also gave us alliteration to emphasises the title.

We created a title on Photoshop which we could use for any film related products such as a DVD cover or theatrical poster. The main problem with creating this sign was that Univers which is the main font used on street signs is very hard to get hold of so we had to find a similar font to it for our film title which was Univers. Unfortunately it's not able to be transferred into LiveType or iMovie so we couldn't use it in our final task.

Green Screen

We intended on having a cut scene whereby you saw Emily (Katrina) in front of sped up traffic for dramatic effect. To do this we needed to shoot at a green screen with Emily (Katrina) then film traffic for more time than we needed so we could speed it up. At the Blue Fin building we used a green screen but were left to our own devices without supervision to shoot at it. The end product after superimposing Emily (Katrina) onto the traffic and speeding it up looked good, the only problem with it was that we hadn't used bright enough lights in the studio therefore Emily (Katrina) body was almost strobing and sometimes the green screen bled through.

To solve this we tried to take the image of Katrina into Final Cut Express and clean it up with a chroma keyer then loop one frame continuously through the clip and add a video effect, this worked but didn't look very realistic and we decided it wasn't up to the standard of the rest of our work so did not include it in our final task.

Here's the final product: