Q5. How did you attract/ address your audience?

The first scene of our film involves the main character tied to a chair struggling in a dark room. This is intended to grab the viewer from the start leaving suspicion in their heads about what is happening in the film.
This is a conventional action thriller scene, we did not attempt to change the viewers preconceptions of an action thriller. To add this is also the only scene in our opening where any type of violence is shown when the villain punches our main character.

This scene shows our main character looking shifty and suspicious as he walks in to a room a long with this we have in the background a fast paced drum and base style soundtrack. This is aimed to begin setting the scene for the audience, the plan being that this small 2 minute introduction  allows the audience to settle in to their seats focusing on what is in front of them and forgetting about thoughts outside of the movie.

The scene with our main character opening a briefcase of money and then later goes on to throw the money up in to the air. This has to be one of our most interesting shots of our opening. What we hoped to do with this was to really open the audiences eyes making them think where did all of this money come from? Money is something that is often seen in action thriller films, however I believe that we adapted an iconic image of a hot shot character with bags of money due to the way we filmed him throwing money over his head. This made it very obvious to the          audience that our character was not used to handling large amounts of money!

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

When beginning Media this year I was introduced to many pieces of technology some of which I had never heard of, let alone had any knowledge of using. Although this was a daunting experience being expected to use all these programs with no prior knowledge, I decided to throw myself in to the deep end and start learning. I took advantage of our preliminary exercise attempting all roles from camera angles with the video camera to editing the piece on Imovie with the 'Mac'. I learnt many things from this and although the video camera was fairly easy to grasp my step change in learning came from the Macs. Throughout this movie making process I have learnt that apple macs  can work wonders and fulfil your every wish as long as you learn to treat it well and push the right buttons! After our preliminary task I began to feel more confident as although I was no editing genius, I felt I had sufficient knowledge to successfully make an opening for a movie.

Blogger is a key tool needed by every media student. Although I had never had a blog or ever used blogger before Media A level I felt that we got off to a good start from the beginning compared to other members of my class. I believe my ease of use came down to my perseverance in my first blog post as although I struggled I was eventually able to publish to my blog, where as other members gave up. This helped me as when it came to posting important information (such as these evaluation questions) I was able to do this with ease. I have thoroughly enjoyed using blogger and the many talents it has in producing appealing articles with fancy fonts and colourful backgrounds, It has made my media coursework a lot easier and considerably more presentable then if I was to have written it by hand. My blogging experience has been so successful I would even go as fart as to say I may even contemplate starting my own blog (after this ones finished of course!) It is very easy to see as you scroll through the articles I have posted over the last 4 months that my understanding of what should and shouldn't be in a blog has vastly improved. My articles are now much more appealing to read with the pictures and fonts I have used!

As with any work containing technology there were bound to be some trouble shooting issues, however I am proud to say we overcame every difficulty (even if it did take a few days). One trouble shooting problem we faced came about when we were stuck one weekend planning to film but with no camera. We had been used to filming with the school cameras and uploading to the Macs through fire wires, however due to a misunderstanding no one had taken the camera on the Friday afternoon. We were running short of time to finish our filming and because of this we were left with no choice but to use my own camera which although was a slightly newer model we had no fire wire for. Over the weekend I had managed to upload the footage to my pc through an sd card and transfer this to a memory stick. When we attempted to upload this on to Imovie we found that the footage was in the wrong file format.  We did not know what format this needed to be in or even how to change it. I took it upon myself to work this out as I knew how important this footage was. I spent the best part of 3 hours of my Monday evening 'googling' "how to's" in order to find the right format. Eventually I found out that the format we needed was 'quicktime-mov'. I then spent a few minutes looking on the Internet for a software to download which would convert these files. I used movavi video converter which easily transferred these files and placed it back on my memory stick to use on Tuesday. This gave me a chance to really put my trouble shooting abilities and perseverance to the test as I could have quite easily given up and spent time which we did not have to film the shots again. I also used technology which no one else in the class used when having to work with movavi video converter.


I have used other small amounts of technology through our group blog, through websites such as 'glogster' and 'teacher time line'. These were suggested by my teachers in order for me to use lots of different types of technology. I developed a strategy when approaching these new forms of technology where  instead of attempting my work straight away, I would spend my time reading instructions or tutorials to make sure I used the full capability of these technologies in order to produce the best work possible.

With reference to the question, you can see from above that I have learnt a lot about new technologies. However if there is one important rule I have taken from constructing this product, it is that it is sometimes better to take a step back from what you are doing and to make sure you fully understand it, whether it be a new technology for editing your movie or making the most of the presentation features on blogger. This is a lesson that can be applied to all aspects of life and not just new technologies.  It is not always optimal to rush into things! This is a lesson I will keep with and apply throughout my life.

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

2 months ago I produced my preliminary task which I am proud to say was the first film I had ever created. If im being honest it was a very daunting experience but knowing that this was the practice for what would be my real As level film coursework made me realise the importance of going through the process mithogically and taking detailed notes of anything that went wrong or that I would like to change when doing it again for the real thing. I feel the biggest diference between the way we set out to produce our preliminary compared to our opening sequence was the confidence that we showed and brought to filming and editing. 2 out of 3 of my group had never made a film before, it can be quite scary at first to be given a camera and expected to just get on with it. However as the process developed we realised that with media and filming there is no one right answer and infact the more creative you can be with your scene selection and your shot types the better your film can be. By the time we started our opening movie sequence ideas flew on to our paper during planning as we had these amazing thoughts. I would say the first thing we learnt is that there is no one way of doing things in media and that having the confidence to try something new and be creative  eg; using strange camera angles can add to the effect to your film.

We were given very little time to plan, film and edit our preliminary task, however we made the most of what was given to us. Planning our preliminary was an important lesson in film making as none of us had ever drawn a story board or properly planned a film. Although we spent time planning our preliminary and drawing our storyboards, we found they still led to some confusion when we were filming the scenes. Although we knew what we needed to film we found that we had not included enough detail leaving us having to put the pieces together off the top of our heads whilst filming, this did lead to a few continuity errors as not everything had been planned. However because of this when it came to planning for our opening film sequence we ensured all was done efficiently from research to developments of ideas to story boarding even including the dialouge we would use in the film. The extra time spent on research and planning paid off when it came to filming and we had a perfect plan of everything we wanted to film, what angle we were going to film from and what dialouge was going to be exchanged.

When I look back at what was expected of us from the preliminary task and all of the basic shot types that needed to be in our film. It was important for us that we learnt to film these shots effectively as when it later came on to our opening film sequence it was vital that we used these film shots in order to make the film more aesthetically pleasing as well as receiving marks for good use of varied shot types. Film shots such as the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/ reverse shot aloowed us to add variance to our opening sequence. Another vital lesson I had learnt in our preliminary task was to ensure scenes were filmed repeatedly at different angles. When creating our preliminary some scenes were filmed once at one angle, when this was later used in editing we were given very little creative freedom to adapt the film. Again this lesson was noted and when it came to producing our film opening we made the effort to redo scenes 3 or 4 times despite this being quite tedious and boring!

When it came to editing our preliminary piece no major mistakes were made and so it is dificuilt to say any lessons were made. However editing the preliminary gave us a foundation of imovie allowing us to understand the very basics of the software, which could later be developed on when fancy titles and effects were needed for our opening sequence. My knowledge of Imovie has progressed emensely over the past couple of months especially in the last couple of weeks where i have been relied upon to use it more and more. I went from being a novice to someone who could quite confidently edit another movie, if given the chance.

Ultimately, I now look back at the preliminary task and compare the diferences (the planning and filming as well as the end product) to our opening film sequence. There are vast amounts of changes I was not even aware of, most of which I have detailed above. The preliminary task taught our group to learn from our mistakes, working out how to do things better as well as teaching us a valuable lesson in the importance of continuity. As a group we realised how important continuity was to a film when we were shown scenes with and without proper contnuity, the diferences were astonishing. I think the preliminary task was worth the time and the effort solely because of the key skills and understanding we learnt from our first movie making process.     

Glogster

http://jmurray11.edu.glogster.com/

Evaluation Of My Preliminary Task

For our preliminary task we were asked to shoot a short 30 second sequence involving two characters exchanging dialogue across the table. Along with this we were asked to show the character entering and exiting the room as well as using a variety of shot types, such as shot-reverse-shot, match on action, and the 180 degrees rule. As with any film we were expected to edit the piece to the best of our ability whilst adding opening and closing titles.

To prepare for this task we designed a story board. I was given the role to draw the story board although both Fergal and Jack contributed with ideas on the setting and the plot. As we did this we decided on where our task would be shot, we decided to shoot on the sixth form balcony as we felt it tied in with the plot and we could guarantee that it would be free to use when filming commenced.

When filming comenced we assigned eachother various roles in the production. As we needed two people acting in our sequence Fergal and myself volunteered to do this, whilst Jack took on the role of filming. We all contributed to the directing of the piece however Jack was able to see what looked good through the camera and so we listened to many of his sugestions. I believe this was a good choice as when it eventually came to editing we had a vast amount of good shots to play around with. Although we had not planned when to use our different shot types on our story board ( something I would probably do, if we were asked to do this task again) we ensured all were used and added to effectiveness of our piece. Our match on action was especially effective due to the fact we were working with a glass door which allowed you to view the person entering the balcony (Fergal) from both perspectives. Whilst Jack was on the camera he ensured our piece followed the 180 degree rule although was still able to film at various angles and positions within the 180 degrees to give our sequence a slight edge. When it came to the conversation between Fergal and myself Jack used over the shoulder shots in acordance to the 180 degree rule, this also gave him the oportunity to place shot reverse shot to our growing list of shots used. A variety of close ups were used throughouth the piece specifically focussing on Fergals hand when opening the door and of my mouth when conversation was initiated. The positioning of the 2 characters was central when focussing on the speech apart from when over the shoulder angles were used. Something we did effectively is that when filming not all locations were imediately available. Instead of waiting a long period to film in the right order we filmed difeerent scenes depending on what was available and by using a paper clacker board to help when edditing. One problem we had when doing this is that on one of the takes of Fergal opening the door their was a foot on the other side, however in the next take it has disapeared. We were not happy with putting this mistake in our piece and so made the decision to film this particular scene again.

Once filming was done we then moved on to editing our piece on Imovie. Jack has extensive knowledge of Imovie and film editing due to previous experience outside of the media class. It is because of this that we decided to put Jack in charge of the computer when editing, but this by no means Fergal and myself left him to do it. Together we gave numerous contributions and suggestions for improvements. Edditing was a quick process as when a suggestion was made Jack was able to implement this imediately, where as if Fergal or myself were in charge this may have taken a fair bit longer. I found editing was when we worked best as a group as we were all able to contribute ideas to the piece and all ideas were listened to and discussed. I am very excited to be working in this group and look forward to starting our next filming task. It has been a great learning experience and has prepared me for future pieces we will perform together.

Comparisons on opening sequences between 28 Days Later and American Werewolf

28 Days Later
The opening sequence of 28 days later is fast and action packed. The opening sequence involves animal activists breaking in to a monkey testing centre. This invokes fear and violence to the audience from the very beggining, common signifiers in a horror film. The lighting of the scene is dark and gloomy and the music is loud and fast paced. This allows the audience to experience the horror element of the film from the very beggining of the film. The scene of the opening sequence is what would come expected from a Horror Film with an empty dark laboratory with rabid monkeys.

American Werewolf
In comparrison to the film 28 days later, American Werewolf involves a very different and unorthodox opening for a Horror film. The opening scene involves a farm cart driving along vast amounts of green hills and dales with an upbeat love song as diagetic sound. In the opening you are introduced to the two main characters who are hikers from america who have hitch hiked in this cart to get to this vast amount of mountains. Although this does not follow the usual conventions of a horror film, there are signifiers such as isolation, empty space, foggyness and howling wind.

The intentions of Christopher Nolan in the making of Insomnia and Momento.

The film 'Momento' began production in the year 2000 under the control of director Christopher Nolan. Momento was Nolan's first full production movie, after the previous success of 'following' in 1998 New Market films optioned for Nolans next proposed film 'Momento'. The movie is based on the short story Memento Mori, written by Christopher's brother, Jonathan Nolan. It follows widower Leonard Shelby (played by Guy Pearce) who suffers a head injury and is unable to form new memories. In keeping with this inability to know what has just happened before, the film's narrative structure runs in reverse (with an interlude between each pair of major "flashback" sequences).