Amber's Blog ( this is the best blog;D)

In our group this week we was filming and editing our preliminary film. We re shot a film called 'The White Room '. It was a possession film and it was rather easy and straight forward when we had found a location for our filming, and some one to play the possessed girl. We ended up filming in the faith room in college, and I ended up being in the film!


 Our finished work shows that we are capable of holding a steady shot, and are able to frame the correct shots appropriately. We used a variety of shots in the exercise, ranging from close ups to mid shots this helped reassured us that we knew our shots and the affect some of them had in the film. We also used the grid on the camera to make sure the the shots were following the ' rule of thirds '. We used the grid to also make sure that there wasn't lots of head room left at the top of the shots, and to make sure the shots were more accurate.


Our shots show some continuity errors! D:! in one shot my cardigan sleeve is down, the next shot it is up, an then again the shot after it is back down! We only realized this when we was editing so we didn't really have the opportunity to re shoot the shots! It wasn't a critical error, but at least we noticed it! Apart from this our film does flow together really well, altho I  have the stupidest scream! Ha-ha. Also continuity related, we didn't cross the golden mean! Wahooooo! Go us! When we edited it looked pretty good and we have managed to make it flow really well, there is no jump shots and the sound effects are pretty affective.


Our film was based on possession and I think out costume and make up flowed really well and made it look more realistic. we did choose and appropriate setting for our film,  it is called the white room we fount a white room to film in so yeah, it was pretty appropriate. I didn't like that fact, I ended up acting! but if I do say so myself, i did a pretty good job!;D. the only thing i would change about my acting is the scream!


To help complete the film, I was in it! Also i contributed to editing, also we sat down and wrote the shot sheets so we knew what shots we needed. We planned it rather well. Improvements  for the film could be things like, the continuity error we made, and the scream! we are changing our theme for our last horror film, possession was a bit, boring! We  are thinking of doing a slasher film now, and hopefully, our group is staying the same!:)

Abby's Evaluation of the Preliminary Assessment.

The finished work shows that we can hold a camera steady; most of the shots throughout the assessment are still shots so the camera had to be steady, it took a couple of tries but in the end we had it sorted. It also shows that we can frame a shot appropriately - although to do this we had to use the grid setting on the camera.
In the assessment a range of shots and angles have been used such as Close Ups, Medium Shots, Long Shots, Eye-line Angles and High Angle shots. 


On the other hand, not a lot of movement was used throughout the assessment, for example the only movement that was used was tracking. I don't feel like the composition was thought through very well and if we were to film it again we would assure that the composition was planned out in a better way and to make sure that we use a wider range of movement throughout the film because it adds variety and makes the film look more interesting and intriguing because everything would always be on the go.


The rule including giving a bit of head room hasn't been followed very well in the film as when the character's head is chopped off at the top when the camera tracks her whilst she's standing up, this is something we should make sure we stick to when filming something else because it ruins the scene a little bit. 


I have shown we can apply the rules of continuity editing by making sure that all of the shots flow together well, without jump shots and bad transitions from shot to shot this was hard to edit in but we all worked well together to make sure that the film flowed really well.
I feel that we used the appropriate editing transitions to put the shots together, I also realise that the use of sound FX helps that to happen as it brings all of the shots together as it plays through the changing of the shots making the shots appear to be very smooth.


I feel that the finished film shows that as a group we can choose appropriate costumes and make up for the film genre, the white walls in the room make the actress stand out which is emphasised by the stripy theme of her clothes. The style of make up helped to add an eerie atmosphere to the film and made the film look more realistic in a way because she had drawings over her face which someone wouldn't normally do which alerts the audience that something's wrong straight away. 


I feel that the location we used in the end was right for the shooting we needed to do, although there were some errors, such as the cushions in the bottom left hand corner, and the window you can see a fraction of on the left hand side, I think this ruined the atmosphere a bit as she was meant to feel trapped and you can see there is a window so she could easily get out this shatters the atmosphere we'd been trying to create, as soon as the audience catch on to the errors they won't be interested in the film or get engrossed in it for the rest of the film.


I think we chose an appropriate actor because she looked the part that we wanted the character to look like but she didn't keep a straight face throughout the filming which I think ruined it a little bit because it will bring the audiences attention to the fact she doesn't really act like she's trapped in a room she knows nothing about, I think a different actor/actress could have done a better job because they could have got into the right frame of mind.


I know I contributed my share of input into completing the film because I helped with the initial ideas such as what to do and how we should do it. I also helped with the setting by making sure we didn't have any interruptions whilst filming and did a lot of the final editing including the soundtrack and some of the transitions of the shots. I also changed the image colour of the whole film, distorting the colour and making it an eerie white adding a lot of effect to the film. 


I think that there are a few minor changes that could be made to the film such as the composition, with the mistakes with capturing objects that we didn't want to be in shot such as the window and the cushions. There is also one quite big problem which is that the actress swaps between having her sleeve down and her sleeve pushed half way up her arm in the shots.


For my final coursework film I will make sure that the composition is exactly how the group wants it to be and that all of the continuity rules have been followed. I will also make sure that I am more involved in finding the setting and researching places that would suit the style of film, rather than just going along with what other people think is best - to voice my opinion more.

Casey's Evaluation (:

This week in AS Media Studies we made our preliminary assignment which was to remake a 30/40 second clip of a student horror film from lat year. Amber, Abby and myself remade 36 seconds of a film called "The White Room" about a girl who becomes possessed when she and her friends hold a seance. 

I think that our preliminary assignment shows that we can hold a steady shot as the different shots we used were all straight and didn't wobble. We used a variety of shots such as close ups, mid shots, and long shots, we didn't however use any high angle, low angle or canted angle shots. I think that these may have helped the impact this clip had on the audience as a high angle would have made Amber look slightly more vulnerable. We also used a camera track to follow Amber as she stood up. To help us frame the shots correctly, we used the grid on the camera screen to help see that everything was positioned rightly and placed along the Golden Mean, following the rule of thirds. We managed to keep a decent amount of head room and lead room in each shot. 

For our editing, we used iMovie HD. We managed to cut the amount of shots that we recorded down to the vital few and edited them down to the vital few that we needed. I think that they flow reasonably well together. The main issue we had with continuity was that from one shot, Amber's cardigan sleeve is down, the next it's up, then down again. As we only noticed that this morning it is too late for us to go and re-shoot and we should have watched the footage back when recording to see if we had any issues like this. The only editing technique we really used was changing the exposure of the film to make it look very white and exposed. I think that this worked really well as it is a similar technique to the one used by the original students with the original film. 

We used stripes for a lot of our costume; Amber had a stripy cardigan and striped socks and we also drew striped on her face for the possession marks. I think that this suits the sub-genre we chose as dark colours contrasting with white is seen in different possession based horror films. It took us a while to find a location to film our horror in, this is because we needed to find a white room and none of us knew where we could find one. We ended up filming in the college faith room. We were very lucky we were able to film here and had to follow strict rules. I do think it was worth this as the white room really helped the effect this has on the audience as it looks like the sort of place you would find in a mental asylum. The actress we used in our film was actually one of our group. this was because we had issues trying to find someone who would be in it willingly, however, I do think Amber did a great job of being a possessed person and looked right for the part as she has long hair which was easy to mess up and skin that was easy too draw the markings on. 

As my contribution to the finished project, I helped to make the shot list before we filmed by sitting and watching the 40 seconds we were going to remake and going through each shot with Abby slowly and noting down how long each one was, what happened, what sort of angle and the camera movement. This took us around 15-20 minutes to do. Me and Amber did the test shots together of her make up for when she became possessed. I also did the majority of filming during the making of it.  During editing, I imported the footage and added a few sounds after it had been cut down, though we did remove some of them as Abby found some that would suit it better. A few improvements could be made to the finished film by assuring there isn't as much background noise as there was, e could cut it our during editing and record the heavy breathing and scream over the top. This would make the film seem a little bit more professional. 

When it comes to my final horror film coursework, I think that I would like to change the sub-genre I am working in to a slasher film. This is because I think that a possession film would actually be quite difficult to come up with, whereas a slasher film seems a little easier. We will also get to use different props such as fake blood. I'd like to stay working in the same group I worked in as I think we worked quite well together and live close enough to each other that it isn't impossible to meet. 

Scanned Copy of Storyboard Sheet.

This is a scanned copy of the storyboard sheet we used to film, we did this before we shot so that we had a simple sheet to follow whilst filming.

Scanned copy of shot list.

This is a scanned copy of the shot list we came up with from the student film we re-made. As you can see, we used a variety of shot types for different lengths of time. 

Preliminary Exercise..

Today we filmed our preliminary exercise, we filmed in the Faith Room at college because we wouldn't be interrupted by a lot of people and the room was suitable for how we wanted the setting to look like in the section we were re-making. 


We made up one of our group to look like she'd been possessed, to add to the effect we wanted to create, along with this we used a few different shot types such as extreme close ups, long shots and medium shots. 

Composition Exercise.....

This is our composition exercise. For this we had to think about how the shots were positioned along the "Golden Mean" on the screen. To help us position the shots as best as we could, we used the grid marker on the camera. 


We used a variety of shots including mid shots, long shots, close ups and camera panning to help vary it and make it flow better. 


At 00:06 we had the issue of dead space. We didn't position this correctly for the camera panning and ended up with a large area in the middle, this then draws the attention of the audience. 


We also had the issue of our actors laughing when saying that their cat had died, this distracts the audience.


On the other hand when editing, we tried to make sure that the transitions were perfect with no jump shots. We assured that we didn't have any jump shots but the transitions aren't perfect but it's bearable to watch.


We are now going to go through the film that we are going to remake and make sure that we know exactly what we're doing. :) :)

Continuity Exercise :)

We feel that we have achieved continuity editing, with seamless editing after a lesson of putting our clips together. It took a while but we got there in the end! We filmed a master shot just incase one of the seperate shots didn't work out well. 


On the other hand, in some of the shots we have it doesn't look like we have white balanced the camera before shooting, we figured out that the camera was reacting with the lighting in the location we were recording in. 


We have evidenced our skills from last week by following the 180° rule (as shown in the exercise) and the master shot which helped us to make the exercise flow more fluently. 


We framed our shots properly using the sheet we were given for an example of how to shoot it properly. we intended on including six shots, which we did and that gave us a range of shots to choose from for the final cut. 


Our piece has a good pace that is continued throughout the exercise which will keep the audience watching intently. The atmosphere comes along with the pace, because there is continuity it keeps an atmosphere going along during the exercise.


The camera work could be improved by making sure that the white balance is properly set to white just in case, and making sure that the shots are straight and what we want to be the centre of attention should be in the centre of the shot avoiding too much 'dead space' making the audience avert their gaze to another part of the screen.