Yan's Week Eight

Week 8 2^nd December 2010

Beginning of the class, we updated our group’s major project. By finishing the script, storyboard and confirming the role of the characters, we decide to do the film shooting during week nine.

Also, we have tried the Sony HD video camera which is different from the one that we used in our previous film shooting. Even though I have not done much film testing with this camera today, I have seen its footage and it has an extremely clear ‘look’ on the computer monitor. Thus we believe that we will make a beautiful picture of our major project by choosing the Sony HD video camera.

As we finalized most aspects of the major project, the experience and skills that we are going to contribute during the film shooting will be very helpful for us to obtain an effective filming result. Moreover, with a clear schedule of our plan for the film shooting, I will start in applying permission for our shooting places and at the same time arrange such properties that we may need through the filming process.

Yoko's Week Five

In this week, we had chance to present our idea about final video project in front of the class. It was a very good opportunity to interact and share our ideas with other classmates, and also we got several useful comments and feedbacks from classmates and tutor. There were two questions impressed me a lot and made us to find out the limitation of our draft plan.

The first question was asked by our tutor Toula when we said we are going to use split screens for our four characters in the film. She asked us that how we are going to control the time of these four small screens. Be honestly, this question our group has not considered yet before this presentation but then we realised it was a key point of our entire film. The screen will look very busy and crowed and audiences will not know which part they should pay attention on if we make four split screens showing at the same time. Therefore, we decided to make the four split screens playing one by one. This means while a single screen is playing, the other split screens will be frozen.

The second important question was asked by our classmates, they thought it was unrealistic which the characters are going to sign up to our website by receiving the flyers on the street. They said there were not too many people will care about what the flyer said and keep it. This was a good question for our group to think about for this week group meeting and we will figure out for next week’s blog.

Sound plan

Last semester we have learned about iMovie and Garage Band. iMovie can helped to add music and sound effects for the film with different layers and timing. It also can slightly edited the sound task, but it did not as well as I want. So this time we learn about Final Cut Pro, which is a more professional film edit software for us to achieve our goal such as multiple screen and better sound edit. Now when did not design our final plan of film yet, but we already notice that we want something happy, positive, gentle and emotional for out film. Therefore, pure music and a little bite rock style may be suitable for the film.

Also we has been ask for the type of our film. I personal think that documentary is not our prefect choice, because our PR company is tend to an airy style but not too formal. An reason is link to our target audience, which is teens and parents, therefore our campaign should also be interesting, may be more like an advertisement style.

Yoko's Week Four

In week four’s class, Toula taught us more details about camera control and also showed us some fabulous short films to us. They were very impressive and creative, especially these short films displayed on website which expressed the way very different to television broadcast. It may not be very professional as television broadcast does but the ideas of these short films are usually very fancy and diverse. It probably because these short films were created without the settled framework like broadcast so the directors could make the film just followed their thoughts. I have to admit these films definitely gave the valuable inspiration to our own video project like how to attract the audiences at the first time through changing the story narrative order.

Toula also asked each group to prepare a short presentation about final video project in next week so our group had discussion and finally decided the general conceptual framework of our video. We will choose four to five performers to represent different age groups and occupations, and we will shoot them individually about their regular lifestyle. We were thinking about that created a way to make them notice about our campaign and this would be the common thing among them. From this point, we wanted to split screen into four parts, which may show these four performers’ actions at the same time. This is our rough framework about our video and we are still thinking about the performers and the opening sense and ending.

Yan's Week Seven

Week 7 26^th November 2010

In week seven, each group shared their script idea in the class. After working on the script, this is the best way to receive useful feedback in terms of developing each group’s script idea. Hence, the development of storyboard will be followed by the script idea.

The book “Operating cinematography for film and video: a professional and practical guide” written by William E. Hines effectively provides a diversity of essential information relating to camera operating. There is no doubt that this useful guide can facilitate us during the process of drawing storyboard in terms of creating better result for the major project.

Meanwhile, we need to start thinking about our second assessment which is based on the script and storyboard. As Toula mentioned, it is a good experience for everyone to try the different aspects of the project not just focusing on their own role. Therefore, I will be selecting Editing Style statement of the project by giving evidence of the creative approach. As I am the production manager, the way of writing an Editing Style statement is a useful benefit for me in understanding the editing style and how editing style play its role in filmmaking.

Wini's blog Week7

I have taken all the suggestions that Toula gave me last week and I have finished the new edition of our script.
Today, we have to present our script in front of the class and gain opinion from our fellow classmates.
I think this is a really meaningful practice because it would be good for our group to know the ideas of our 'target audience'.
I found that there are a lot defects of our script. As Toula suggested, the method of promoting our campaign to the characters is a bit boring, and there should be more variety. After considering others' advice, I have added more elements into our script and I have described the actions of the characters in a more specific way.
I think discussing the script with different people will help to make a better script. Since our script have nearly finished, our group started to draw our storyboard. It is important to create a storyboard before we start filming, because storyboard is like a proposal of our video, it can remind us the angles and settings when the video starts.
We planned to start filming in week 9 and we will finish the storyboard and the documents before week 9.

Style and Genre

Everything that goes on the screen or into the audio of our film affects how the viewer perceives it, so it is important for our group to talk about how genre is affected by stylistic choices, both technically and otherwise, we can classify our goals somewhat by focusing on this subject. In our project, the main genre will be documentary as we decided to create a non-fiction story of exercising prevent obesity. This will be demonstrated to inform and educate the viewers about the important of exercise by using some simple facts of being healthy which can be done by everyone.

Also, since everyone in our group have a sense of humour and want to create something that make the audience laugh while acknowledging them with several facts and ways of exercise that can really be used in real life. So, the genre of comedy will be considered as a sub-genre for our project and we believed that this genre will be a great vehicle for our group to reach the target audience more easily, and we will be grateful to see the viewer watch our project with a smile on their faces. =)