Film Diary

Film diary

Editing lesson 28 of November.

This lesson we were given the task of trying to decide the name of our film company and designing our logo and making them into final designs. Our design was a teacup logo because it represents Britishness and so is conventional with gritty realism. First of all I drew out a basic teacup shape and then we spent some time deciding where we wanted to put the writing "cup of tea productions". After moving it about a bit i drew it up in neat and scanned it up onto the computer.

The first filming session- Monday the 30th of November.

This filming session I could not personally attend but both Lucy and Beth headed into Sidmouth to begin taking the introductory shots of the opening sequence. We wanted these shots to introduce the setting and to show the area of which Chris (our protagonist ) lived. Lucy and Beth took pan shots from the top of peek hill looking down onto Sidmouth to show the setting. These shots were taken at around 5 o'clock or so and so it was dark and the lights lit up the town from the top of the hill. These shots worked out okay but as it was dark a lot of the lights from the town and from passing cars were blurry or wobbly and some of the shots we couldn't use. Beth and Lucy then took some shots along the seafront and promenade as we were filming on there the following night and we wanted a few more introductory shots apart from the ones on the hill. These shots all worked out well apart from still due to a lack of light and using school cameras a few of the clips were blurry and the lights would not come into focus.

Second filming session- Tuesday the 1st of December.

This filming session I could attend and we met as quarter to five on the promenade. For this filming session we needed our actors and so both Chris and pascal met us there. Filming went well that evening although we had he same issues in that the camera was blurry and the street lights were distorted. The clips we took were shots of Chris looking out to see and feeling as though he is being watched. We tried our best to make it eerie and to make him seem alone but many people were walking along the promenade and so had to keep stopping to let people come by.

Editing lesson 11th of December.

Previously when editing the logo on the computers and trying to put it onto the opening sequence, enlarging it and moving it made it pix-elated and it looks very unprofessional so we put used adobe illustrator. This meant we could get the logo was neater and could be enlarged and edited better as well as having much neater lines to make it look a lot less home made. Once we had the logo perfect we put it onto a word doc and emailed it to other members of the group.

The week before xmas holidays.

filming has proved to be a struggle during this week as our actor Chris has been having some personal issues and so hasn't been able to film with us and editing what we already have has been completed and we have all the clips we can have. As we are behind we have been given the Christmas period to get all of the raw footage we will need so we can edit in school and get it prepared as much as possible.

Xmas holidays filming on Saturday the 2nd and Sunday 3rd of January.

Saturday evening- Before filming that evening we had to make a few changes to who was acting in the clip as our previous actor (Pascal) could not film with us so we had to find someone else. We contacted a friend of the group and asked him if he could act instead. With our new actor we met again on the seafront a re-filmed the sections we had done previously and the rest of the shots we need in town. The audio turned out very well considering how windy it was, but we did have to have the cameras practically in our actors faces in order to be able to hear them over the sound of the sea.
Also because it was a Saturday night in the holidays many people were interrupting us filming as we were on the seafront, the same with when we were filming in town as we were by the bars and restaurants people would be walking in and out of view.

Soundtrack workshop

We first started making the music for the opening sequence in a workshop we had with Mr Hickman (our music teacher) before Christmas. We used this time to write a few lyrics and we had help from sir. He played the guitar and helped us decide on some chords for the song and then we recorded what we had done. During that session we wrote some lyrics to go with the song and experimented with ways we wanted it to sound. Mr Hickman then kindly sung it for us and we recorded it on Lucy's phone and then she emailed it to us.

Final term

In the last term before the deadline we spent our lessons working on the logos and changing things around to make the opening sequence more conventional. We re-filmed our title sequences and made new graphics for the title, after receiving constructive criticisms from our most recent group crit's. We also spent time moving around shots and experimenting with text colours in order to make our opening sequence look more put together.