Sound design plan

After group discussion, we decided to divide our sound design in to mainly two parts in our film. The first part is environmental sound, which means the sound come from nature environment when people are filming. It gives the nature feeling for every location such as the sound of birds, playing computer game, people's talking, foot step, elevator's sound, wind blowing, cars, etc.
These sounds can create different feelings. For example, the sound of air condition was record for create a feeling of “classroom” or “office”.
Therefore, recorder need checked the sound setting and equipment every time and set the microphone at the right place in order to catch the sound. However, because of the problem of equipment, the result may not as well as our expectant.

Another important part of sound design is music. Music should be also fixes the personality, gender and identify of the character and the location. Our group design to use five different styles of music for four characters and the final part of film.

Story Board- angle

As I mention before, angle is the most important when we are drawing the story board. Different angle and create different feelings. For example, when the camera shot the character from up to down, it make the character looks powerful, horrible and big. If we shot the character from above, it make the character looks small and weak.

This video has the example of both high angle and low angle.

For camera shot and movement, it is another difficult issues needs to be design when we are drawing story board and filming. As the image below, mostly we used medium long shot (MLS) size and filming with the eye-level. However we also need to use camera movement, mainly zooming and pan left to right( right to left). The pan movement is depending on the view. I personally like to shot from the views which not so important, and move to the most important one, usually is the character who going to moving or act, or the location where the main character is going to come out.

However, after started to film in these few weeks, we find that some shot sizes have problem with the distance. The final result is different with the story board, so the filming location need to be very clear when we filming in the real case.

Project proposal

By making film that invite people to notice the important of exercise, our group have decided to create it in a different way from those projects in the previous semester. Our project will be separated into 4 stories which mean that we have to show the story of 4 people by making them connected and attracted to the audience. These 4 characters included teacher, office worker, student and housewife, will portray their usual lifestyle which is lack of exercise and physical activity. The group have chosen ‘split screen’ technique to separate the lifestyle of these 4 persons into 4 screens.


But as Toula suggests us after the group presentation in week 5, by using this technique, the film will be quite hard for the audiences to focus on only one action thus it might create the confusion to them. As a consequent, we will still make the four split screens but playing one by one. This means while a single screen is playing, the other split screens will be frozen. This will helps the viewers to understand the scene more easily as well as decrease the mess of this technique.

Working with camera controls

As the camera is the main equipment for shooting film and my role is cameraman, knowing all the controllers on it will help us to a better understand and utilise of this equipment. According to what I have learned from the lesson and my experience as a cameraman in last semester (Ghost in UTS), the ability to manually focus the camera is a critical skill at any level of video production. Professional cameras which we will use in our project usually have a manual focus ring near the front of the lens housing. Consumer-level cameras usually have a small dial (Note: we need to select "manual focus" from the menu).

After we make sure the camera is set to manual focus, we have to zoom in as tight as we can on the subject we wish to focus on, then adjust the focus ring until the picture is sharp and turn the ring clockwise for closer focus, anti-clockwise for more distant focus. After all, zoom out to the required framing, the picture should stay nice and sharp. These basic steps to control the focus on camera will be our first consideration on real filming days.

Crew role (cameraman)

As we have divided the role of our group members for the major project, my responsibility will be in the role of camera operator. Working as a cameraman is one of many staff on set in news, film, or movies, and my position is the one shooting the actual footage. In narrative filmmaking, the camera operator will collaborate with the director, director of photography, actors and crew to make technical and creative decisions. Therefore, in our project my role is to work significantly with Yoko (the director) and Angela (sound manager), in order to capture the film image and sound as required by the script, and under supervision of the director. Also, I can use my specialized training from last semester to manipulate factors like angle, lighting and psychographic effect in the career field.

Yoko's Week Ten

In this week, we finally finished our shooting project with a few unexpected challenges. As our shooting schedule, we went to Tee’s place and finished first part of this week shooting, it was smooth because I thought each group member was corporative and active. Therefore, all we needed to do was that just followed storyboard and script; I can say the first part gave us more confidence to both project and our group members, and also practiced our filming skills with the new camera. Unfortunately, we encountered some unexpected problems during the second part of film shooting. The second part shooting is outside shooting, we supposed to use external microphone for getting high quality sounds. However, the external microphone was not available due to other students didn’t return it on time. In order to solve this problem, our group finally decided to change camera angle and make camera get closer to our characters. Besides, the weather was windy and suddenly began to rain. We had to stop filming and used umbrella to cover camera.

Fortunately, it was raining only for a while. We continued film shooting and finally we finished the tough second part. At afternoon, we went my place for shooting Wini’s part, everything was going well and I was so glad about this, especially after the difficult time in the morning shooting. On Friday, we finished remaining shooting as we planned and also injected the video to Wini’s laptop. The editing is only one thing left we need to do. We believed we could create a great short film after Christmas holiday.

Yoko's Week Nine

In this Week, we got film shooting place permission from Janet and my landlord because our senses would be shooting in UTS area and my place. After group meeting and took suggestions from Toula and classmates, our group finally finished the script and storyboard and we also made a shooting schedule for effective time management. And, our characters are all our classmates so they are busy for their own project as well. Therefore, efficiency would be the most important issues we considered about. In this week, week nine, we will shoot the first part of Miji during Toula’s class. Miji acts a role as a tutor in UTS insearch, she will show her working condition to audiences like she is so busy on teaching and working with computer. And then the mysterious narrator will interview her about her lifestyle and exercise frequency. This sense will be finished inside our classroom, then we will shoot that she is going to have lunch and meet another characters Tee in the lift, Tee takes a role as a UTS student. As our script, the moment they meet together, this particular sense will be frozen for emphasizing.

In week ten, we are going to shoot from Wednesday to Friday. On Wednesday, we will go to Tee’s place to shoot his regular lifestyle after class and on Thursday, we will go to my place for shooting WIni’s part as a house wife because my place is the nearest one to the University. On Friday, we are going to shoot for both Alina and Miji’s part because Alina is only available in Friday. This is our shooting schedule in first place; we hope everything would be going well!