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R&P = 15
Production = 50
Evaluation = 16

Total = 81 A

Targets:
Evaluation activity 2 - can you explain why you made the choices about character, dialogue, props etc based on the characters you compare yours to?
Audience profiling posts - each needs a summary of what you learn about who the typical audience is for your chosen genre and an explanation as to how you intend to appeal to them in your opening 2 minutes.

Evaluation Activity 7

After finally completing the opening two minutes, we can now look back on the progression from the preliminary task to the finished opening two minutes. Naturally, many changes in the choice of camera angles and changes in the style of editing have occurred after much research into other films. The biggest issue with the preliminary task was the lack of flow, it was very choppy and didn't look professional at all. Another major issue with the preliminary task was the changing colour between shots, this was caused by changing light outside, one shot looked very yellow and sunny, then the next shot looked dark grey and cloudy, even though it was filmed all at the same time. We have learnt from these mistakes and have made as much effort as possible to make sure that the final opening two minutes contains non of these.

Preliminary task:

Opening 2 Minutes:

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Although there are many major differences between the preliminary task and the final opening 2 minutes, i would like to start of by mentioning a few similarities. These two shots are remarkably similar, this is because I liked the shot from the preliminary task and decided it would look good in the final opening 2 minutes, which it did. This is a very generic shot type and is used in a lot of movies; therefore, using it in our film gives it a professional look.

Colour changes/improvements:

Preliminary task

Opening 2 minutes

As you can see from these two screen shots look very different in terms of colour. The preliminary task had not colour correction applied to it; this made it look very bland and un-cinematic, the colour correct however adds to not only the look of the video, but also makes it look much more cinematic. The colours after the colour correction look much better, even though some areas are a little over exposed, but this was a small sacrifice we had to make in order to get much darker blacks by raising the contrast. The colour correction also brings out much more detail in the shot, making it more pleasing to the eye.

Another major improvement that the opening 2 minutes has over the preliminary task is the sound/audio. The sound on the preliminary task is just dead awful. After learning from my mistakes, I made sure to put each audio track in a separate channel; as can be seen on the technology post (Evaluation task 6), this allowed me to make sure that the volumes of all the tracks is the same, making sure that the audio does not fluctuate wildly like in the preliminary task. I also added cross fades to the beginning and the ends of each track, this meant that the different audio tracks merge perfectly.

Another impr

 

Movement that the opening two minutes had over the preliminary task was the location. The location for the preliminary task was very boring; the opening two minutes had a much better location, the location for the opening two minutes was far better and suited the genre of the film nicely.

 

Props were used in the opening two minutes, whereas no props were used in the preliminary task. This gave the film a much better feel, making it look more like a Hollywood blockbuster, which is what we were aiming for. The props look like they belong on the film and not out of place; they blend nicely into the film without the viewer really noticing that they are there, but noticing them just enough to take notice.

Match on action was improved in the opening two minutes, even though the match on action in the preliminary task was actually quite good. The match on action in the opening 2 minutes was much more extensive than the preliminary task. The fight sequence is what I am most pleased with, the action matching is almost perfect and flows very well, there is plenty of match on action elsewhere, but the fight sequence has accurate match on action in rapid succession. In regards to the 180 degree rule, after watching the final edit of the opening 2 minutes, I am certain that we did not break the 180 degree rule, which is important as to not confuse the audience. After looking back over the preliminary task I only saw one incident of the rule being broken, but once is one time to many, so for the opening two minutes I made sure that the rule would not be broken.

Evaluation Activity 3

Evaluation Activity 6

This is the camera that we used to film our opening 2 minutes It is a Panasonic HC-V500 Full HD camera with features such as anti shake, which will stop any camera shake when recording by hand, however it was not needed as we were using a tripod. The camera also features a stereo microphone which is good as it helped to give our film a more professional feel. One major problem with the camera though was the inability to manually control the focus, which meant we could not experiment with different with different depth of fields but it did a good job overall and produced good quality images.




This is the tripod used during the filming. It is just a simple £20 tripod but has the ability to go to a height of 5 ft, which is good for getting those eye level shots. The tripod also helped to keep the shot completely still, as does any tripod. It also provided a way of setting down the camera without putting it on the floor, which was convenient.





This was the PC in which the opening two minutes was edited on. It features dual monitors, the wide screen monitor on the right displays the editing program (Adobe Premiere Pro) and the 4:3 monitor on the left displays the video in full screen in real time. Having two monitors really came in handy when performing colour correction, as having two different monitors allows for two different references of how the video will look, this meant the video could be colour corrected to look good on both monitors, rather than just one and will hopefully look good on all monitors and TV's. Headphones and speakers were also used during the editing, again for the same reason as having two monitors; to get to different references to make the audio sound as good as the video looks.





This is the recorder which was used to record the music for our opening two minutes. It is a hand held recorder the uses an SD card to store the recorded data on. We used this to record the acoustic guitar for the sound track. It has great quality, almost studio quality, so it was perfect for us to use. It was easy to set up and took very little time to record the music, which was a big time saver on the production of the opening two minutes.




This is a screen shot of the main editing program used during the production of our opening 2 minutes (Adobe Premiere Pro). I think that this was the perfect choice of editing software, it has a simple interface making it very user friendly and easy to spent long periods of time editing on. It also features plenty of video effects; such as colour correction, and transitions such as cross fade and wipe. It also has a very effective title creating system allowing for custom fonts to be used, which we did. It also features a good audio mixer, making the audio editing easy. Even with all the features found on this software, some elements of our opening two minutes could not be done on this software.





This is the second piece of video editing software (Adobe After Effects). This software is used to add the special effects to the film such as the gun shot, blood and fire. This software is not as simple to use as Premiere Pro therefor took a lot longer to get the hang of using and it took many attempts to get the special effects looking acceptable, however in the end, they turned out good; not pro standard but OK. After effects features motion tracking which was very important for the blood effect, without it, the blood effect would not have been possible. After Effects was used in conjunction with Video CoPilot's action essential; which provided the blood burs, muzzle flair and the fire effects, as well as the sound effects for the punches, gun shots, reloading, shell bounce and fire sounds.






Audacity was used to edit the sound track to the film, it is simple and easy to use and features the effects that we needed such as delay and reverb. It would not be used by professionals but it was perfectly fine for us and to add its free

Evaluation Activity 5

I think that the unique selling point for our film is that it is something a little different to your everyday blockbuster film. A lot of gangster films are very cinematic, something which we are aiming to do with our film, but not go overboard with. We want our film to be a gritty gangster story with realistic characters and events, something that is hard to accomplish but something that will pay off in the end. There are very few films that have the same feel that we are trying to achieve with our film, therefore we based our film of the ones that we could find, analysed them and tried to achieve the same feel that they had.

Evaluation 4

Our target audience was young adults age 18 and above; as the film would be rated an 18, but we were aiming to attract an audience of between 18 and 30 year old's.

The film would be rated an 18 because of the violence and some of the content and themes of the film

The type of person that would go and see a movie of a similar style to our film or even our film is in an era where the media over glorifies blood and violence, so therefor adding lots of graphic content and violence would help to attract our target audience. I also feel the our film would attract a slightly older audience maybe even up to 50 or 60 years old, that's still a good thing even though the film was aimed at a slightly younger audience.

Evaluation Activity 2

We've compared me and Elijah suited characters towards the two mexican drug cartel twins in the american telivison series known as Breaking bad. Although not generally about gangsters it is about crime quite a bit. We vaguely based our characters around these two as a mysterious duo who have little to say, but whom are excessively violent they also seem to have no feelings for the people that they kill, just like the characters we tried to create. They deal in business quickly, brutally and unforgivingly. Whats Strange about our characters much like the ones from Breaking Bad is the fact in how calm they are in killing someone really quite brutally and really don't bat an eyelid. and thats why i think these characters work really well

In contrast to this, one film we've always compare ours to, snatch. However to compare our main characters to theres being Turkish and Tommy. Who are almost too far in the deep end trying to get out of the London gangster world.  but is much less dominant than our gangsters. He never really sticks up for himself and is always being ordered around by the other gangsters, this is not the case with the gangsters in our film. The gangsters in our film do as they wish, when the wish, this gives them a more intimidating feel, which is what we were aiming for with the characters.

We made the decision to have characters like this in our film because gangster films almost allways have theese characters in them. Our characters are still sterotypical but are unique enough that it gives our film a unique feeling, and is not just another gangster film.