Saturday, 20 August 2016

Personal target setting for A level

I was very pleased as well as proud of our completed opening last year for our proposed horror movie 'RoByN', especially despite the multiple boundaries and barriers we came across when filming. I felt that we adapted ourselves as well as our surroundings to a professional environment where we considered all the technical elements when filming and with our filming and continuing deep study of media and its technicalities managed to obtain an A grade at AS level which i was hugely proud of. 

The preliminary task was of huge benefit to us because it taught us about some of the key continuity editing aspects which were prevalent in our film, Especially teaching us how to create clean match on action shots which were vital with our interaction between just two characters in our movie openings. Relating to not only camera work, but also editing and mise en scene our knowledge, skills and technique improved hugely in the process of preliminary task to the real movie opening, and we feel we also independently worked well to complete a secondary prelimary task with panoramas and draft shots of our location because this helped us to solidify our knowledge on certain camera techniques. Because of only having two characters in our movie, shot reverse shot was extremely important to show their interaction and relationship to each other however a possible target for us next year would be to use this technique more frequently especially when we have a limited film cast because it is effective at bringing relation, intensity and depth to the scene. Relating to this, we also could have ensured we focused more on the final cut of the opening scene and who was purposefully given the prevalence of the final shot. A shot reverse shot of the young girl swiftly followed by the males reaction would have been effective and next year with our studies we could focus on this technique more.

Despite considerate planning of times and locations for our movie opening, we feel another target for next year would be to be more prepared to film when we can rely on the weather when it is exactly how we want it- in our case foggy and dry; not wet and rainy which posed a barrier for our cameras and for our actor Robyn who had to lay down on the wet floor. next year, if we plan ahead more, we could use the weather (and ideas of pathetic fallacy involving the weather) in our movie to make it more intense, supported by the weather, and it would show more control as producers and directors of a movie. If weather continually proves to be a barrier when filming we could even make attempts of creating our own more appropriate atmospheres for locations when filming for example using dry ice to create DIY fog and mist, or using our own artificial lighting to add saturation, temperature, contrast, shadow and light to environments. prior to our AS projects we began to research how we could have improved how the weather and atmosphere was portrayed in our movie by using dry ice techniques or editing after filming on our adobe software. (tutorials shown in the two videos below). 
 
A major barrier was the sound, which is a part of mis-en-scene. This was important as the quality on the camera wasn't the best due to alot of background noises (such as rain) which made it sound fuzzy. Next year we will ensure that the conditions we film in are appropriate and allow us to create a successful film. Also, we will ensure that we are using the correct piece of technology which is suitable for filming to a high quality. As a result of the bad quality, we had to delete all of the diegetic sound and then add more sound effects whilst trying to make it seem natural at specific points (for example the car door and the foot steps). Potentially, this will not be the case next year and we will be able to keep all of the ambient, diegetic sound making it seem more natural whilst adding the odd sound effect, such as a thud, conforming to the horror genre conventions. We also didn't really incorporate original renditions or recordings of sound In our movie which made our movie less independent and professional because we could have created a home foley studio to create sound effects and used a local/known band or orchestra for the soundtrack, next year this would defiantly be a target for us so that we get the exact sound we want not just make do with edited internet versions.

Lastly, the final target would be filming things more than once. This was an issue as some of the most significant points in the film had minor errors however there were a few which we only filmed once meaning we had to work with it and make changes on the software which may not have looked or planned out as expected. Next year, we will ensure that we have filmed each clip multiple times in order to have the best quality film with no errors. however, we did learn from our errors as many film conglomerates and distributers do too as in our free time we researched 'textbook movie mistakes' to ensure next year we don't make any silly mistakes in our filming for example having a camera seen in a mirror, having someones feet seen, or having an actor look directly at the camera which all collectively ruin the magical feel a movie is meant to exert.






No comments:

Post a Comment