Re Shoot

We needed to re-shoot a few of our scenes, however I was not there to do the re-shoot because I was on a school trip.
After we had gone into editing we found that we had a few shots missing and we needed to re-shoot those. We also needed shoot new shots, because our opening did not flow and it did not look professional due to the fact it was quite obvious that scenes were missing.
To do our missing scenes we needed to cast another character that was older. So we decided to ask a relative of our original actress to do the shots we needed.

Minutes, Hours, Days - Draft

This is our draft for our main task, called 'Minutes, Hours, Days'

Music Update

For our draft we used a piece of music called 'Tomorrow' by Bensound, we originally wanted to use this piece of music as we felt it fitted well with our opening. However after looking again at film openings in the genre of psychological thriller, such as 'One Hour Photo', we thought that the music didn't fit the genre.
After this we searched for another piece of music and we eventually found a piece called 'Here With Me' by Susie Suh and Robot Koch. This piece fitted our genre and opening much better than the previous piece we had found.

From this I have learnt that by taking more time and care into researching music, we could improve our film opening. We were able to portray the genre we wanted and the music helped to do that, as it can help to make an audience feel a certain way. After doing more research and understanding this, we were able to find music more suitable for our film genre and improve our film opening

New Shots

As a group we planned to do two new shots of the letter, because from our final draft we believe that it was not clear enough to the audience that it was an important prop/McGuffin object as it helps our to guide our film. We thought is was not clear as our feedback from our peers suggested that they did not realise that it had significant importance to our storyline.
So we felt it's significance needed to be shown in the opening and to also create more enigma surrounding the letter and we planned new shots that we would film. Two close up shots of the letter in someone's hand. We wanted the shots to just focus on the letter and for it to then to be turned over so the audience could read the name 'Callie' on it.

First Draft

A2 Student Feedback

Once we had finished our final draft our our film opening, we asked A2 students to critic our openings and gives us feedback on what we could do to improve upon it. We got a varied response from the different students.

• One student said 'Overall it is good, however there are certain shots such as the one of the bedroom     door that could be improved'

• We were also told that our opening '[was] to fast, so to improve should try to slow down the pace of it, maybe by slowing down some shots, or not crop some as much' 

• Another student said 'The music could be changed. It doesn't really fit with the genre of the film and doesn't match the pace of the opening as the music is slower than the opening'

• A frequent comment that many students made was 'You need to add in white noise'

From this feedback we were able to understand how we could improve upon our opening before finishing our final product. Such as changing some of our shots and lengthening others to slow down the pace of our opening. By slowing down the pace our opening would fit into the genre of psychological thrillers better than in the draft.

Music

We have been finding it quite hard to find music that we feel is right for our film. We have spent a few lessons and spare time looking for music on copy right free websites, such as freeplaymusic.com and mobygratis.com.
We wanted to use a piece of music called 'Tomorrow' by Bensound, however another group was already using it, but we still used it as we felt it was the piece of music that we had found that fitted our film the best.

Editing 18/02/16

We started editing our film at the end of January, straight after we had finished filming. By getting into the film straight after it meant that we all still had our original idea for the film in our heads, making it easier to get all of our editing done as we knew exactly how we wanted it.

However this showed our inexperience, because once we had finished editing we found many things wrong with it, and lots of shots that we ended up not liking. For example when filming we did a shoot which was the camera being turned in a circle, we wanted to represent the feeling of our main character's head spinning. But when we put it into the film, it didn't fit and it also didn't look very nice as you could see the camera shake so we took it out.

We had taken many of our shoots out and altered others before we had our final draft.

Editing 15/02/16

We have progressed in our editing process and have been trying out different techniques, such as speeding up and slowing down shots. At the start of our editing process when we were deciding what shots we were going to use we found a shot that we hadn't originally planned to do where the camera pans down some fairy lights, however we found that it was the perfect shot to do some of our credits over, such as our production company name. We slowed down the shot, to make it longer and it fit perfectly within our opening.

We have come across some difficulties with how to do certain things. For example we did not know how to insert texts over the top of shots, so I went onto YouTube and looked up how to do it and taught myself. This way I am more likely to remember how to do it.






We also had an issue with white noise in our opening. Our background noise was some how deleted, so we had to spend a lesson retrieving it. This slowed our editing process down, as we could not edit our opening during that time.

New Media Skils

Whilst working on the main task I have gain and improved my skills. I have learnt new camera techniques to use when filming, by experimenting in previous tasks and improving them during the main task. For example one of the shots we use in our opening was us experimenting with focus and blur whilst panning the camera.
I have also improved my editing skills, as I have had to use final cut pro more often. I have learnt shortcuts and many different features within the software that create various effects that can add to the film opening.

Started Editing

We started to edit our film opening today. We hadn't done any editing in a few months so it took us a while to get used to the software again and remember how to do certain things, for example we had to remember the process for uploading all our files and converting them before putting them in final cut pro.
To convert our files we used a program called MPEG Stream clip, before converting all our footage had to create a new folder for it to be saved in. This made it easier for us to find all our converted footage when we needed to put it into final cut pro.
Once we had loaded all our footage into final cut pro we had to sort through it and choose which shots we wanted to go where in our film. To start we found all the shots we wanted and put them in no order, but we could see them all. Next we then started to order them all and watch all the clips through and edit the length of some of them.