EVALUATION; Question 7: What have we learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

This was our group member talking about the basic hardware and software that we used in the production of our video. We also used website such as google.co.uk, youtube.com, internet movie database.com, video copilot.net. They all helped us with our research whether it was researching movies and opening sequences or tutorials on how to best film and edit our movie. All of this websites contributed to the final outcome because without the research we wouldn't know about the 180 rule or what exactly is a match cut. I found it easier to learn Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effect because of those websites, showing me how and why would I use a certain tool in the software.

Final Cut Pro(FCP), Adobe After Effects(AAF) and Soundtrack Pro(SP) worked very well together. After importing everything to FCP and editing it all together we could export the footage to SP. This means that we could edit the sound and look where the sound would be in the movie without closing SP. This really helps while making a movie because it saves you time later on by eliminating the process of matching the sound in FCP. Soundtrack Pro is a great software that lets us use and edit and create new sounds. The Production Company logo (Candi Studios animation) would not be that successful if not the sound from SP. One of our group members is still fascinated and amazed by how well the sound and animation goes together.

We also used archive.org, soundcloudcom and photobucket.com to show content on our blog such as sound and images. Blogger.com was a major part of our project. We wrote about our ideas for the movie, sound and any other part of the movie as well as our research and more. We used archive.com and soundcloud.com to import sound on the website, youtube for videos and photobucket for slideshows (our pitch).

We used (two) Memory Cards because they are much cheaper as well as much simpler to import to Final Cut Pro. Also memory cards can be easily re used without the loss of video quality.

EVALUATION; Question 8:

EVALUATION; Question 2: How does our media product represent particular social groups?

Our main character (me) is a smart looking, successful, young businessman. We can clearly see that by looking at the suit that he wears and the hotel from which he leaves. Both the suit and the hotel look posh and expensive which clearly shows that he's a man of business. 

Because it would be almost impossible to find a main character which is simply a businessman we know from the beginning that that person has some secrets or something noteworthy about him.

Many thrillers and action movies have businessmen in them and it's starting to be a rule to make the main character look like a businessman at some point in the movie. Our character is a young, slim, attractive, smart looking male which seems to become a stereotype about businessmen. 

EVALUATION; Question 4 and5 : What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will we attract/address our audience?

"Spotlight"

To distribute a movie a lot of money is needed, thats why independent movies have such a hard time to get through to the public. There are service that could help with that for free. Sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion are a good start to distribute a short movie or even to promote a movie. Those websites allow to upload and view videos from all over the world which can make it difficult for a particular video to become famous (go viral).
I will concentrate on YouTube because it's the biggest of video streaming websites and if something becomes famous on YouTube, it becomes famous everywhere. For a video to go viral it has to impress the viewers so that people "like" the video (clicking a "Like" button causes friends of that person to see the video). This means that another group of friends see it and their friends see it causing an increase in number of views. The more views you get the more probable it is that you will be displayed on the homepage causing another avalanche of views. 

Youtube is full of people with talents, they can include entertainment/comedy, blogs, fashion knowledge,  editing and SFX as well as music and technology. Different videos become famous for different things. A music video by a talent(less), 13 year old singer Rebecca Black which became a youtube sensation with 76,458,961 views and counting is an example of a viral video that became famous because of it being really terrible. It was spread among friends through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as well as through the word of mouth. Now the "artist" is interviewed on TV and known among young people.

"Most Popular"

YouTube helps new film produces to become successful by creating contests, showing videos with little views on homepage and showing videos on "Spotlight"(right). 

Contests don't only allow new individual and low budget films to be seen by an audience but also if a movie wins it can get a funding for new equipment etc. 

Click for details

Showing videos on the homepage and "Spotlight" instantly cause an increase in views in videos that are noteworthy but not necessarily popular because they are viewed by every person who uses youtube. 

I personally think that YouTube is one of the best ways to distribute a movie because it's both, beneficial for the filmmakers as well as YouTube. It allows the public to find new talents and earns money for YouTube so it's a win-win situation :)


Here are few other ways of distributing media:

It's quite easy to target specific audience on the internet because we can see the activity of specific genders or age groups on different websites. Also the content that is viewed suggest what is the audience of that particular article, video etc. For example a video of a young(teenage), attractive, female singer would mainly attract female audience between the ages of 11 and 15 (depending on the artists age) and so the adverts often reflect that by advertising online stores with toys or video games. This means that the adverts can be quite precisely shown only to the target audience.

EVALUATION; Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challange forms and conventions of real media products?

We didn't have a specific inspiration involving different shot types and angles but we were inspired to use a simple opening. We went to the website: artofthetitle.com where we found film openings that looked very much like our film. Dirty Harry, Duval Disco and Juno had many shots that we have used.

I really like the fact that those shots are very similar. In both the main character is crossing the road, facing the camera, holding something the their hands and the

 actors name is displayed.

The "Juno" opening sequence is made to look like a cartoon with the main character (Juno) walking to the drug store. The whole sequence shows her walking and drinking SunnyD. The whole idea of

My attempt at recreating the shot from "Juno"

the sequence is similar to our movie, it simply shows a person walking. It also introduces the character showing that she is a bit different, unique.

Even though those movies have a completely different genre I think that the opening work for both of the films.

Another movie that has many similar shots in the opening sequence is "Dirty Harry". As you can see the shot are very similar. They are both close ups of the face as the main character is walking. However the character is coming from a different direction and the setting and lighting is different. The shot from the movie is dark and sinister and our shot is light but doesn't look happy, it looks quite sad and serious mainly because of the facial expression of the character.

There are two more shots from the movie "Dirty Harry". The next one is a close up of an envelope (in the movie its an extreme close up). Both of them show an envelope with some writing on it and a hand. This time lighting is also completely different. The use of dark colours and little lighting creates suspense where as in our movie its less suspenseful because the lighting is different.

The next shot is from the movie opening of "Juno", it shows the main character, Juno, walking. Thats pretty much the only similarity. Our shot is a low angle, close up of the feet and the movie has a mid shot of Junos legs however there is something very familiar between those two shots even though they create different moods. Juno is funny and young and Paradox is mysterious and suspenseful.

Movies use less "following" shots than I thought. "Duval Disco" is the only opening sequence that actually used quite a lot of following characters. Darren Aronofsky is known for using this types of shots. You may recognise his work in "Black Swan" or "The Wrestler" which he directed.

This is another following shot from "Duval Disco". Its also a following shot but this time its closer to the person. The character in the movie really resembles our character. The shots however have different purpose, "Duval Disco' is more of establishing the location and simply introducing the audience to the characters but our title sequence is meant to, not only introduce the audience to the main character, but also create a feeling of suspense and mystery.

The last shot is again from "Dirty Harry", it shows the main character walking and the Production Company title appears. Its a mid shot from side/behind of the character. Our shot also shows the main character walking and the Production Companys name is shown. Its a long/mid shot from the front/side of the main character. Not only the shots are similar but also the message that it puts across. It shows smart looking businessmen (or successful men) walking in a fancy, posh and glamours locations.

EVALUATION; Question 3: Who would be the audience for our media product?

Here is an example of a person who would watch our movie:

Female:
Paulina, 23, restaurant supervisor. Paulina is single. She has a Dell laptop which is just enough for her computer needs. Paulina loves travel and music. She works full time in a restaurant but is studying and wants to work in "Event Management". She likes house and dance music and often attends concerts of her favourite bands and DJs.

 Armin van Buuren ft Sharon den Adel - In and Out of Love (sample of Paulina's music)

Her favourite hobby is shopping and partying. She likes to shop in Bershka and Jane Norman but constant working doesn't allow her to go out much. She is a workaholic which enjoys watching rented movies on her laptop or occasional movies on the big screen (IMAX). She doesn't have a car or even a driving licence. She is addicted to lip balm.

Male:
Chris, 20, student. Chris is a hard working student at a University, studying medicine as well as working part-time in HMV. Chris is in a long time relationship. He has a MacBook Pro which is used daily for education and occasional gaming which he enjoys. Chris tries to watch movies weekly in a cinema but he's overwhelmed by work and can only watch movies occasionally on his laptop. He likes music but mainly pop.


The Black Eyed Peas - Just Can't Get Enough (sample of Chris' music)

He doesn't like shopping for clothes but he loves discovering new technologies on the market.

EVALUATION; Question 6: Audience feedback and comment

In our class we had a discussion about our opening sequences. We watched every single opening and gave a feedback to the members of the group that made it. We all wrote the strengths and weaknesses on a piece of paper so that the group could analyse and acknowledge what was good and bad about their film. I think that our movie was a success because the responses were quite positive. We used wordle.net to create a nice looking image showing the words that were used to describe our film. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. As we can see our main words are good, soundtrack, editing, works and titles. Apart from the word "good", those words can be either bad or good depending on the context.  

"editing works well with the soundtrack"

"good use of slow-motion"

"interesting jump cuts"

Those are only few of many positive comments about our product. Many student also said that they "can't find any cons" which I think is very flattering and it shows that we did a good job.

Among the disadvantages we found out that some titles were unclear for some people and that the whole sequence is "kinda slow" (which was an advantage for some saying that they liked that nice, slow, consistant pace). 

From the beginning we knew that not everyone would enjoy this opening because not much happens in it. Some might think something along the lines of: "you knew that and still went with it ?!". Well yes it might not attract 16-17 year olds (4 out of 18 students would pay to see the movie) but that's good because it is not our target audience. We didn't want to pack the whole movie in those 2 minutes, we wanted something subtle that simply introduces you to the plot.

Here is the class discussion after watching "Paradox":

Here is a video from the Cinema Screening of our opening sequence:

Final edit!

Titles

We had few problems with our titles thats why I've decided to make a separate post. After looking through the LiveType gallery of various typefaces and fonts and all of the transitions we've decided that we will use something simple, like in "The Stepfather". We choose a font (...) which is quite simple, serif font. We also wanted to keep the colour plain i.e. black. Unfortunately we didn't have the background in our footage light in all of the scenes which created a problem of the titles being hard to spot. We tried making them bigger or moving them around the screen but it didn't work. This was mainly because then they were too eye-catching, grabbing the viewers attention while the movie was in the background, unnoticed. We put the titles in the order that we've discussed few lessons back. There is a sheet that i've posted a while back with a list of titles that should appear in the opening sequence(right). I'm glad that I did post it because it was very useful when creating the titles and also few other groups asked me about this list. :)

After sleeping on it we had a great idea on how to make some of the titles bolder. We could use contrasting(white) borders around the letters. We thought about this idea earlier but then it sounded tacky. We opened FinalCut Pro (through which we were adding the titles) and we tried to add those borders but we couldn't find any options that would allow us to do it. Thats when I came up with an idea of using two layers of titles, one white and a size bigger(left) and the other one black. This would both, give us the borded as well as a cool effect which would be impossible to do with normal borders. This white layer wasn't right behind each letter which made this kind of 3D look which i personally liked very much. (down)

Editing

Today we officially started to edit our opening sequence. We had all of our footage already chosen from our rough cut but we are not strict to the exact bits of the film, we are open to changes. I think that organisation is the key to well... doing anything to the best standards :) Thats why from the first day we organised all of our footage into folders depending on the day they were filmed in (Day 1,2,3,4 and 5) This helps us find footage quickly which saves us valuable editing time. We all did a little bit of everything, it was truly a team work. Few weeks ago we set tasks that each person will be only responsible for, but at the end we all contributed to all of the parts of making the movie and I thing thats why its going so well. We received the song from Goz's friend today which means that we could finally manipulate the sound and song so that it fits the movie well. Most of this type of editing was done by Goz as she is really good at that but we were watching the process closely and commenting/suggesting what and where should be done. Here is the raw track that we got today:

Overall we almost finished our piece except some glitches such as using black font(of the titles) on a black background. We did that in some scenes because we didn't want to change the colour of the font during the movie. We want to keep it simple, black, nothing extraordinary. We will have to figure out how to make some of the titles to stand out more from the dark background because they are not as clear to read.

Music!

Well although it was last minute (more like second), we hav finnaalllyy received the songs! Also, due to the fact that we got the song directly from the makers (the band 'Diafora') we have zero copyright issues and their full consent to use the song. The song has quite a simple melody and and a quite solemn tone which i think is extremely suitable for our opening. Once we finish editing the footage itself, we'll put the track on, editing the music at suitable times (obviously), then, put on the rest of the titles and thenn... finitoo!

Due to our amazing music, I think (without realising) our group has created a music video style opening, slightly similar to the 'Taking of Pelham 123' movie, which happened to be one of our favourites anyway.
So, it seems like our movie isn't going to be anywhere near as a disaster as some of us thought!
yay!

Filming?!

Yesterday after putting all the parts together we realised that we didn't have an ending. We filmed the last scene at the cemetery but it didn't have a definite ending. Just few days left until the deadline which means that we cannot film anymore. Fortunately at the last minute I (we) thought about filming outside of college in a way that it doesn't seem that it is not filmed at the cemetery. This meant that I had to bring my suit again. Fortunately it was just the trousers and the shoes because our scene consisted of the letter falling and landing on the ground with the sinister (and cheesy) line: "I Know". After all I think that this ending and overall movie will be a (surprising) success :)

Candi Studios

Because our production company is not Paramount or 20th Century Fox we didn't have a good animation at the beginning of the movie stating that the movie was made by Candi Studios. College Studios does have an animation but it is widely used by other groups. I don't like being like everyone else and so not only our movie would be different to others but also the Candi Studios animation. I've used Adobe After Effects to create this shattering effect which I think looks ok :-) Since I've made this(with help of www.videocopilot.net) I can edit any bits of it such as colour. I tried to make it orange/red (colours on candi logo) but it looked a lot like fire which I thought is a little bit cheesy.

Here are some screenshots from the software at the early stages of the animation:

Titles.

So, while we were waiting for our new footage to upload, we began to look for potential titles for our Movie....

We are also thinking of re-naming our film,
Potential names, (excluding our original idea) include;  Enigma and Paradox.  We believe these would create a sense of mystery and hopefully help build a little suspense.

However, it seems like we've encountered a small problem. The computer won't allow us to use downloaded fonts, so, our attempt at becoming a little more unique is failing.

Filming (Day 4)

Today is the last day of filming. We almost completely changed the plot of our movie. We have decided not to use the footage from our last shoot because it didn't make much sense and we don't want to confuse our audience in the first two minutes. Also the ghost idea would be more effective in a long run and not just the opening. We decided to film at the cemetery again but at a different grave and I will not be haunted anymore. We had an idea of using some mystery object and putting it on the grave but we were not sure what. WeWe had many ideas for that so we brought a range of props such as a pillow case (kidnapping), an envelope, a big coin (mystery item) and few pieces of paper (a message from the dead?).
We decided to use the coin and a letter in an envelope. At the end of the shoot I though it would be good if we film from someones perspective as if our main character was watched. This gave us a variety of shots and proved useful because later on we decided not to use the coin which was hidden in the envelope. Using shots from further away allowed us to create the illusion that I opened the letter and went straight to reading it and not looking for a coin.

Soundcheck: My attempt at adding music to blogger...

On this little window, if you click the play icon, you should be able to hear a potential track for our movie.
But, if we do use this song, it would be without the vocals, so it's not too much like a music video :-)

The Rough Cut.

Copyright

We really wanted to use "real" music for our opening sequence i.e. music made by other artists. Unfortunately that won't be possible because we cannot use copyrighted music. This means that we can only use music that is not copyrighted (if we have a proof of that) or we could make the music on Soundtrack Pro or Garage Band. This really limits the choice of music that we could use and might affect the final outcome, but we will try our best to find/make music that will make the our sequence exciting and suspenseful. ;)

RESEARCH/EDITING: Colour

"Colour" is a program from the Final Cut Pro package that allows us to improve the look of our movie by changing the colours, hues, brightness etc of our footage and making it look better. This also allows us to match the colour of footage that could have been recorded in different light conditions. Most of software of this type allows us to change the colours using colour wheels which makes them easy to use, they are categorised as lows(shadows), mids(midtones) and highs(highlights). Depending on which one you choose, different area of the image would change for example highs change the bright objects (highlights). There are many options available and some of them are explained in this video:

Filming (Day 3)

It's the third day of filming our movie. It's freezing outside and all of our footage is recorded out... There isn't much time left so nothing will stop me from getting to our location and record the rest of the film. ;) Although there is no school today, we managed to book the equipment for the weekend so that we could record as much footage as possible. Today we were filming a scene outside the hotel again, this time without the "ghost" following me and a scene in a grave yard. We had very limited time today because Goz had to get home at 5pm and Azeemah couldn't come so we had to film in a bit of a rush. Hopefully this will not reflect badly on the movie. We filmed every scene few times to make sure that it's just right but there were few moments where we rushed and didn't record a scene that precisely.