Production companies

Before our opening started we knew that we had to place a few production companies in to help give the opening a more realistic feeling. We decided to be quite adventurous and choose the first piece of footage from my own camera roll on my phone. Using previous video footage of myself on a motorbike. However we had to cut down the footage due to myself screaming my friend's name! In the last couple of seconds, however we still wanted to include the motorbikes itself sound during the beginning. We also decided to name the first production company as 'Fast lane productions' due to the evidently fast pace that the bike was going. Our second production company was a lot simpler being named 'Stained glass films' with an background image of a glass window. Our editor Sophie firstly attempted to have the text circling the glass window however due to the overall difficulty of this challenge we ended up with a simple yet sophisticated straight line animation.

Recording sound

We had to use foiled sound over the top of some of the action sequences in the opening. This was necessary due to failure of being able to hear the phone we used for the ringing and the message sent to voicemail sounds. We also added sound to where i had filmed myself receiving a call and hearing a voice to suddenly then declining it. Luckily my reaction time to the voice we recorded separately fitted perfectly within the editing, making everything look in sync.

Music

We decided from the beginning that we wanted our music for the movie to start off as quite simple and then suddenly turn to more dramatic. It started off as quite a difficult challenge considering each member the group was imagining the sound we wanted to use quite differently. However to find the music that we required, we pressed on and found a website called epidemic sound that to our opinion gave the largest amount of choice and variety. We looked through most music choices for dramatic and running music and ended up choosing:

Editing the film

Our main editor for this project has been Sophie. However we have all tagged in on making decisions for the movie and how it would be edited. For our first time editing we realized that we was still had missing some valuable film footage which we required. This meaning that me and Izabell had to return back to Oakwood park to fill in the missing points. Once we were able to complete this task, we were able to start editing more adequately. During editing we also began to decide on titles and the fonts that we would use. We came up with the idea of placing the title of the movie where I would begin to run, and as I run past the letter, it would disappear. For the rest of the titles we decided that we wanted them to appear in a typewriter animation, as gave a dramatic and edgy effect.

Preliminary Task

Match on match action:

This refers to film and video editing techniques where the editor cuts from one shot to another that matches the first shot's action. One example can be a man walking up to a door and reaching for the knob.

The 180 degree rule:

This is a cinematography guideline that states that two characters in a scene should maintain the same left/right relationship to each other. When the camera passes over the invisible axis, it is called crossing the line and the shot becomes what is a reverse shot.

Shot reverse shot:

This is a film technique where one character is shown looking at another character, and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character.

Filming for the project

We decided to base our setting in Oakwood Park, as provided us with lots of filming space, and for the majority of the time was mostly empty. In my group we all took on different roles of the positions which we would fill as the film crew. I volunteered to star in the movie, as for Izabell did the filming and Sophie did most of the directing. We came across having quite a few problems whilst filming the footage. To begin with the first time we filmed my hair was in plaits, and the day that we had returned to filming I had forgotten to put my hair in plaits and had no hairbands to be able to tie my hair with when we got there either, making us re-film what we had done so far due to continuity reasons. However we had only filmed very little footage so far meaning that it was not too large of an inconvenience to film again. Another issue we had was that the camera we first began to film with begun not working properly due to needing to be replaced with a new battery. Meaning we had to resort back to our first original camera that was given to us from the school. I had low hopes that both pieces of footage would match each other however as we have began to edit the movie, Sophie was able to change the saturation of the content making them blend in more nicely together, as well as now having less noticeable quality differences. Overall the filming experience was very fun, even though it took us multiple tries, and lots of visits to Oakwood Park we was able to understand how difficult and exciting it can be to film a real life movie.

Final Story-Boarding

To begin the preparation for our group film project of an opening scene to a movie. We first had to draw out a storyboard to get a rough idea of the type of angles and scenes we would be shooting. We decided to base our opening scene off the beginning of the movie 'The life of David Gale'. So we started picturing that the setting would be an empty field area, allowing enough running space, and good scenery to shoot good establishing shots. We also planned out the script as well as drawing out the scenery, we were able to establish from all the planning that we would need the availability of quite a few props. We also decided that we wanted the quality of the content to be as high as possible, deciding that we would use a more efficient camera than what the school gave us to film with. We began planning out when we would start filming and arranged dates that all of us was available, we initially thought the filming would take 2 days.