Evaluation: Question 1

Conventions of film openings

This is the order of titles from teen film 'The roommate'. 

The order of titles for our teen film is similar.

Idents... 

 Distribution company

Production company 

 Distribution company

Production company 

Cast

Title

The order of titles can vary a little for example if you have a big name actor or actors in your film then their names would go earlier on in the title sequence. Where the title of the film goes can also vary, otherwise everything else stays the same, for example the director is always the last title and company idents first.

Evaluation: Question 2

REPRESENTATION

We have chosen to represent the characters in our film like a clique. This is conveyed in our film because the characters are always seen together or responding in the same way, showing that they are following each other; a common representation of teens.We conveyed that there is a leader of the group as she is always in between the two characters and represented as the strongest character. As the characters are black or have different ethnicities to a white person this means they fit into a stereotype of being up to no good, this was illustrated through a series of high angle shots showing they had less power during the interrogation scene. They have been represented negatively, which is how they would be represented in real media.

Evaluation: Question 3

The gifs from the presentation...

Evaluation: Question 4

TARGET AUDIENCE

The wider audience for teen films are teenagers (13-19 year olds) so we had to bare this in mind when creating our teen film. Teen films are made for teenagers, so they have to relate or be relevant to a teenagers life/lifestyle. Our film is a psychological thriller therefore are target audience is for girls aged 16 who like thrills and are mischievous. The person below is someone that would be part of our target audience because of her age (16) and her interests shown in her bio.

What makes our film unique is that it is thrilling and mysterious. This is what will attract our target audience because teenagers are looking for fun and excitement.

Evaluation question 5

Throughout the project of Can you keep a secret we tried to continuously relate  to our target audience. We did research before we started making our film opening to make sure we attracted our target audience.

Research

We advertised our film in a variety of formats to try and appeal to  numerous amount of people

Feedback

The feedback from our rough cut helped us to decide what needed to be improved in order to make sure that we did attract our target audience. We were required to make our titles more interesting to keep our audience interested as these will be the first thing they see which makes them crucial to the success of our film. We also needed to switch some clips around as some supported others better, for example our opening clip was originally quite shaky so by switching that around with another clip it made our film seem more solid.

Originally second clip but was a lot stronger then the one below so switched to be the opening clip.

 originally first clip but was shaky so switched to second.

Poster

We created a poster as it's a informative visual format to present our work.

Social Media

Twitter was our form of social media, we decided to create a twitter page as it's one of the worlds most popular social media sites, a lot of films also promote themselves on twitter.

Private screening for target audience!

We rented out a cinema, filled it with college students and showed them our film opening.

 Here is a Short clip of what happened and the audiences views. 

Here is the Actual Film opening 

As our blog has regular readers I decided to create a survey and poll which  asks our audience questions about what appealed to them in our film.

Can you relate to the characters in can you keep a secret?

Yes

No

To some extent

View results

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Yes0%

No0%

To some extent0%

Other: (Please specify)0%

Create a poll like this

Evaluation: Question 6

Evaluation Question 7

I have improved on the use of sound as in the prelim there was no sound used apart from the sound already in the video i.e. no non diagetic sound. On the other hand in my final film, all types of sounds have been used and the effect it has on the opening is great. The use of diagetic and non diagetic sound has enhanced the quality of our film and created an atmosphere.

Editing and finalising our film opening!

This is my last vlog for the blog (hey that rhymes!) Here is us in the final stages of editing, enjoy.

-Lauren

Deadline!

In a few hours it will be the deadline for our planning and research blog! So i thought i would bring my posts to a close with one last post going into detail about the final edit.

We commenced editing on tuesday in the morning during our media lesson. The lesson is three hours and little did we know that we would be there for much longer then that. We watched our film and then decided on little things that we thought we could add or change to improve it. The first thing we did was add music as we knew this was something that was left to do. We added intense music to the beginning of our opening to set the scene. We already had the sound of birds in the background, which played during the titles and established the scene of the forest but we knew there was still something more to be added. Maya and Esther searched for tracks while i carried on editing clips to make sure all the cuts were clean and precise. When editing we had several mishaps when clips would go missing in the timeline out of the blue. LUCKILY we noticed this and were able to find out which clips had disappeared by looking at the other saved versions of the project. Yep we saved the project with a whole different bunch of file names on to our video drive for the exact reason that incase something happened to one of the projects we had so many others saved (clever right?). 

When watching our filming opening for a second time the first thing i noticed was that we needed to fix the sound on sound clips as it there were either sounds missing or it was not loud enough. So going through each clip we had to make sure the sound was ok and that the newly added intense sound didn't overpower the dialogue (It did at first but we fixed it!). After this we thought we had finished little did we know that our titles were still out of order and we could add even more sound to build the atmosphere and add suspense. By this time it was about 2pm which was shocking since we had been working on the project since 9am, but once we got this done I can say that the film did look a whole lot better. This is when we got our opening checked and were able to happy dance with the knowledge that WE HAD FINISHED OUR FILM OPENING. From this point it was straight to the big list of groups who had complete there openings and we were able to sign off our group (HURRAHHH).

A Review

It has been a very long process to get to the point where we can say we have a finished film opening but i have learnt so much in the process. 

Here are a few things i have learnt.

How to properly frame subjects when filming to come out with the best possible quality film at the end.To ALWAYS check if the film is in focus (had enough disasters with this).To film longer then is needed so the clips will be easier to cut in editing. Always check the weather before filming and make sure we will have sufficient lighting.Watch clips back after filming...chances are that there's something that should be filmed again. Give more time then is needed for filming because timing was something that we really struggled with. 

Final editing.

We finished editing on tuesday this week and it was a struggle and an extremely long process of refining refining refining, but it was ALL worth it to get the outcome of a film that is quality and something that we were all happy with. 

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S OVER!

I am super proud of myself and my group able to work together to produce something we all equally contributed to and that we are happy with. It has been a whirlwind of an experience and i think we each have progressed with our editing and filming skills. The final edit for our film opening required us to all work together to make it the best it can be and i can honestly say i think it is! In the pictures shown in this post you can see we are smiling and it's because we are genuinely happy with the outcome. HURRAY.

It took us hours and hours a lot of stress and a whole load of doubt but we got there in the end! We made it out alive! ... Okay maybe i wouldn't go that far but you know what i mean. After endless rearrangement of titles, all the time we have put in to finding the perfect sound tracks and diagetic and non diagetic sound, the countless times we have had to edit, replace, re-film and change clips because there was always SOMETHING WRONG, we have now finished our opening and that feels EXTREMELY good to say!

Day 3: The End of Editing!

HOW WE EACH CONTRIBUTED IN LAST HOURS OF EDITING: 
I can't believe I get to report this but... WE FINISHED and we were able to finish a day before our deadline (because we're bosses like that). Never have I seen us to be so determined to finish a task on time but we knew it would be best to get over and done with as soon as possible then get caught up with individuals trying to squeeze their last bits of editing.

But today WAS NOT easy. As we entered the editing room in the beginning of the day we thought that we got everything covered. By, we were wrong. Our main issue that left our piece to be incomplete was both titles and sound. As we had a three hour lesson, we thought that this would be completed in a short period of time.... Lets just say we were wrong about a lot of things today. As my other teammates had lessons to return to after our media one, I volunteered to stay behind. If I didn't then I know for a fact that those mistakes will still be in our opening scene. Ended up staying in that media room from 9:00am to 4:30 pm.... Didn't even consider to eat lunch because I wanted this thing to be PERFECT! And I wasn't going to risk anything.
So the problems that I found were:

• The Title order and removing tiles that weren't supposed to be there
• Finding some more sounds to give our opening that eerie feeling we wanted in our film. 
• Another problem was that sometimes our clip went out of sync (several times Lauren and I had mini heart attacks xP) 

We did manage to get there in the end though, (with the support of both Marissa AND Mary) the feeling was pretty empowering I must say. 


In addition, we also added some extra things to make our film to be a little more out there. One of them being the awesome use of split screen (of our lips.. Oh gosh =\). It did take us some time to master as we've never done it before and faced a few issues (e.g. some pieces of the clips were starting at different times, the clip was out of sync etc) but we go there in the end (we always do!).

And of course the rest of the editing process, included getting all the right clips in order, making our opening scene look pretty decent and so on. I guess you could say we used this time to polish things off and add a few more finishing touches. 

Recording the voice over

Throughout the process of can you keep a secret , there was the huge debate on voice over or no voice over.  Originally we decided there was going to be a voice over which would be the main sound and focus of our film opening , but as the production progressed we became unsure on the idea of us having a voice over. With all the sudden changes I thought it was best to keep our options open so I decided to go and record it anyway. 

Here we our filming the voiceover. 

Day 2: Spending Hours and Hours on EDITING and DESIGNING!

So last week we stayed behind to do as much editing as we can. We spent about 3 whole hours after college helping eachother in the editing process on Final Cut Pro and creating the title of our movie in Motion.

It was a very long process getting out of our way to edit a short clip, but it was definitely worth it. We managed to get a lot done! Finding the perfect transition effect on the Title took time because I (Maya) wanted the design to be a simple font and make it fade in and out with different transitions.

Editing on Final Cut Pro also took some time as some of the clips were quite dark, so using the filter to get the brightness just right was a little tricky.

CYKAS: FINALISING THE ROUGH CUT

The start of editing

Today we started filming , me and Lauren worked on the film opening whilst maya and Esther created our company indent.

Here are a few screen grabs showing you where we are at so far.

The rough cut of Can You Keep A Secret & Feedback

The feedback on our film opening was that it was very good but to improve we need to work on the order of our titles and how we want them to be presented so that they are interesting. We also need to switch around the opening clip to something more steady and strong.We were said to have used cross cutting well as our teacher was able to understand our use of flashbacks in the opening as we thought we would have to use a filter. It was also said that some of our footage was a bit too dark.

CYKAS: FILMING DAY 2

Day 1: We FINALLY Began Filming!

Disaster strikes again.

Filming day 2!

I know what your thinking! I'm thinking the same thing too! Lemme start from the beginning though. Esther and Maya arrived at location later again due to travel which meant we started filming late. When we got to location it looked perfect though. It was just beginning to get dark. We entered the forest only to realise that it had not dried from the rain the previous night! AHH. With myself in front, i was required to lead them to where we were shooting, while also dodging the mud so as not to get my costume dirty. The path was a complete NO GO so this meant we were required to walk on the grassy patches. Finally we got to the set of our location and hey guess what? IT STARTED RAINING! yep. That happened, and not only that but during all of this it had gotten to dark to film. On the camera the screen looked pitch black. After everything all we managed to get was a creepy shot of the sky and the tree's on camera. 10 seconds worth of footage! :( We are going to consult as a group and then decide when we are going to try filming again. Probably some time next week after college. I'll keep you updated. 

-Lauren

Our filming disappointment

So we were supposed to film today but disaster struck! Maya and Esther had trouble travelling to our filming location so we ended up getting no filming done today! This sets us back MAJORLY because we were hoping to get the majority of our filming done today. Therefore this means we are required to get ALL our filming done tomorrow! So cross your fingers for us! It also got really dark at around 5-5.30pm today meaning that it was just too dark to film. All we can do now is make sure nothing goes wrong tomorrow!