Tuesday 23 March 2010

Evaluation Questions

The following questions must be answered in your evaluation PowerPoint:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?


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

7. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full produc

Monday 22 March 2010

Evaluations photo's



This is a collection of photographs, mostly from the filming night, that show you a lot of what we were seeing from behind the camera:

Screen-shots from final project:









Mise-en-Scene for Army Gear:



Screen-shots from our editing stage:

Title cut straight from video:







Final title(Plagued):

Screen-shots from video editing:



More titles:
Our predicted age certificate:


Written By:
George Marino,
Sassie Risino

Wednesday 17 March 2010

T2-59 THRILLER - FINAL

T2-59 THRILLER - FINAL from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Problems With Video

There were quite a few problems that we encountered during the editing stage.;
Firstly we did things separately, we had created the three main files (the Logo video, the production video and the soundtrack) all in different formats.
We thought it would be simple enough just to open them all on final cut and then synch them together because we were happy with all three but after taking a lot of our time syncing the gunshot sounds into the video (Which we did in Garageband), with the music underneath and video on top, We exported the finished product from Garageband to a .mov file, then imported that into final cut. But when we watched the video we found that the sound had been distorted and shortened and thus made completely unusable.
After spending hours trying to fix this by ourselves (this took two full lessons). We sought expert help (We got our teacher and the technician to take a look), it was suggested that a couple of things could be done for example: cutting up the sound and shifting it to the correct positions on the video or starting again. Not content with the latter option we shifted the sound and saved. But when we checked the video in quicktime the sound was still distorted and out of place again.
in our despair we asked our teacher (Steve) if there was any other option. Steve (ever willing to help) then told us that he could put the videos together without entering final cut, thus not distorting sound. He did that and now we have a finished video ready to be uploaded to Vimeo.

Written By:
George Marino,
Edited, Corrected and Rewritten by:
Henry Jones

Monday 15 March 2010

editing techniques

Text options.

when putting the text in i realised the normal fade in and out was quite boring to look at and dosent add suspence towards the film, so having discussed with the group and Steve, we found some filters + effects we liked,

Gaussian blur - this made the text blured and look distorted and then unblur its self by 1/2 way through the title leaving about 2-3 seconds of clear and concise title for the viewer to readv

to make the blur effect work well i had to manipulate the speed of it, the length that the blur went on for and how blured the text would be it took quite a lengthy time but the final outcome was worth the time, to make the titles consistant and flow smoothly, i duplicated the effects + filters from one title which i liked and aplied to the rest using "Paste Atributes (Alt + D)".

with the Main title i didnt want to over complicate it and spoil the clarity of the text, so a simple fade in with movement from the center of the screen starting it very small and getting larger as it comes closer to the screen, this was a very easy effect but strong



Written By:
Sassie Risino

Name Change.


After watching the Roughcut edition of the film our group agree (and i think that you probably will too) that it doesn't fit the name "Daybreak".
Because of this we have decided to change the name of the film to "Plagued" and change the font of the titles to fit with the film.
We chose "Plagued" because we think that it fits well with the film.

When choosing the font we wanted to reflect the gritty industrial kind of style that would fit most of the elements of our film.
Some examples of this kind of thing are :










We think that one of these fonts or one like them will suit our video best.

having looked at some font styles we chose a font called Resident Evil for the main title and a font called tablahoid for the rest of the titles in my opinion this font change and title change suited the film more with its jagged edge / distorted fonts this enhances the concept behind the film of the unknowing and helps create suspence.











So overall, as a group i think we are all really happy with the new name, we all think that this name is the perfectly suited to the new film idea.

Written By:
Henry Jones,
George Marino,
Sassie Risino

Thursday 11 March 2010

Peer Feedback



Opinions of the rest of the class:
Pros:
Everyone seems to agree that we had good shots and camera work, they liked our props and thought the film had good continuity.

Undecided:

The issue of the lighting is not in agreement some liked it being dark some didn't.

Cons:

The fact that the piece was unfinished clearly confused some people as to the plot and what is going on.

How to solve these problems?

Completing the film (adding titles, music and filming some more) should make it more clear as to whats happening and stop people getting so confused.

One of the biggest faults that I think dragged our rough cut down, was the absense of any music. Obviously we are going to add it, but that is a major factor that we thought really put a dampener on our overall project.

Written By:
George Marino,
Sassie Risino

T2-59 ROUGHCUT THRILLER

T2-59 THRILLER ROUGHCUT from SATMEDIASTUDIES on Vimeo.

Stop the video after it all goes black.

we just forgot to cut a small bit of film from the very end.
We apologize: T2-59

Wednesday 10 March 2010

Test footage



On the thursday, waiting for the filming weekend to come, we decided to shoot some footage that could help us prepare for the weekend. We idenified problems which if filmed on the actual night, could have ruined our editing. E.g. We had a shot of the camera paning around the gun held by the army person. This looked really, really cool. But we found that it just wasn't suitable to the thriller that we were trying to achieve.

Written By:
George Marino,
Jace Exton,
Sassie Risino

Filming shizzle

On the weekend we decided to film on, we encountered some issues:
- George wasn't able to attend on sat , henry on Sunday (originally )
so at the time this seemed somewhat doomed towards how to make this work. On the sat henry came down to film with us and us three realised that it wouldn't work to shoot without him being present on the Sunday so after a long talk, about how much we appreciate him dropping plans + events, we came back on Sunday and had a very successful shoot.
- the lighting seemed too dark at the time to work with and being very cold it wore the battery's down very quick to film so a lot of spare battery's came in handy.

some things we decided to cut from our film:
-the use of a bag to conceal items in, as for both of our characters, it seemed too hard to run realistcly and not drop it, this made the prop useless to us.
-the use of helmet/gas-mask as these both were incredibly hard to get hold of to use and also felt too much to be using it made the film seem to army based and we hadn't intended on it to seem that way
-also our location changed from corridors+tunnels, due to the fact that we all looked hard for places like we showed it we couldent find any and we setteled for more of a, urban style film.

As what has been set about me, george and henry not be able to attend on one of the two nights, saturday was the night that i could not attend, the original plan was that they all recorded the monster scenes, then on the sunday when i could attend we would record the soldier scenes. It turns out that this plan wasn't very good. However, henry managed to attend on the sunday so we filmed everything on that day. The saturday was just a chance to ffind perfect locations and test shots. To really get prepared before he filming on sunday.

Written By:
George Marino,
Sassie Risino

Filming Location and Idea


Eventually we decided on a location and an idea;

The location was outside the Grafton Center in Cambridge city center. It had several Pro's and Con's.
Pro:
- Lighting, most parts of the film where perfectly placed, by the immediate environment.
- Industrial environment, raises questions like "What could be going on in a city that's so abnormal".
- Secluded.
- Good variety and contrast of large and small areas.

Cons:
- Lighting, at some points in the footage we found that scenes were too dark to make out, rendering those shots useless. Also on some of the shots there are artificial lights that are too bright.
- Public area, some of the shots proved very hard to get because the general public/ the general public's vehicles kept getting in the shot, also the fact that there is a chinese takeaway or a design company logo in some shots removes some element of mystery and suspense from those shots.

Written By:
George Marino,
Jace Exton,
Henry Jones,
Sassie Risino