Over the AS segment of the media course we created several pieces designed as preliminary tasks, which led to an overall final piece of an opening sequence of a film. We began with a one minute copy of a film of our choice, which was to be filmed on a mobile phone. This was a task simply designed to introduce the course, and begin to get us looking at camera angles. Our second practical task was to create a short film, around three minutes long, in which we encompass the 180 degree rule and shot reverse shot. Following this we created a first draft, of what would be our final piece, comprised of a three minute opening sequence focused around the theme of a thriller. After addressing and reviewing our first draft we went on to create our final piece, reflecting upon feedback of our first draft whilst doing so. We had a very loose consistency of themes over the course of these practical tasks, beginning with 1980s horror, then evolving into modernised situation comedy, and ending with the theme of a thriller, as used for our final piece. The likely reason for us incorporating these themes is because they are all generally popular with modern teenage culture including ourselves. We had a considerably diverse range of influences, the comedy aspect coming from popular sitcoms such as Friends and How I Met Your Mother, contrasting from our horror and thriller influences which were derived largely from An American Werewolf in London and Reservoir Dogs. We likely picked these as influences as they again, are generally quite popular with teenage culture. Reservoir Dogs was the largest influence for our final piece as we tried to incorporate the use of a psychopath in a similar way as to how Reservoir Dogs did.
We used a considerable variety of technology in the creation of our final practical task. We used a digital camera for the purpose of the filming, however also used multiple pieces of equipment to aid in the filming, these include a steadicam, a tripod and a skateboard. For the post work after filming I used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro to do the editing and add any final effects in, such as the titles. As I was editing, the technology I used the most was adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, I liked and enjoyed both pieces of software however probably preferred using Premiere Pro as I found it slightly easier to use in comparison to After Effects.
I was editing for our final piece, and while I did understand the fundamentals and the basics of editing I still learnt a considerable amount especially with regards to editing to help to construct a story. We decided to incorporate parallel editing into our film, which involved me editing it in such a way to portray two different events happening at the same time along side each other. The difficulty with this was attempting to get the music to transition smoothly between each version every time the setting switched. Another difficulty which I will attempt to avoid in any future work is, when putting titles over the film it emphasises any movement and shaking of the the camera and makes it incredibly clear, even when using a tripod the wind still had a noticeable effect on it. This is something I will be aware of in the future and will attempt to avoid as it does degrade the quality of the work.
Our entire film contained no dialogue, only the overlay of a song. This I think worked very well especially the choice of song, as to the vast majority of the audience it was unrecognisable meaning it didn't serve as a distraction. All of the sound effects we used I thought worked well as none of them contained any background noise and so they all fitted into the film nicely. I also felt that the lighting was successful, we employed a heavy contrast of lighting between the two settings - one being natural daylight, the other being mostly darkness with a small white artificial light. Although in any future work I may attempt to be more experimental with lighting as in our current film the lighting was very basic.
Over the AS year I felt my blog was okay, and that I did put several of the required posts up, however I often waited a very long time to do it, which likely resulted in them being slightly less in depth than what they could have been. I think I could have done more posts on research and deconstructions of other film opening sequences, which would have both improved my blog but also helped improve our final filmed piece. In addition the vast majority of the posts I put up were in reference to the practical side of the course, I documented very little of the work covered in the theory side of the course.
For my next practical piece I have a choice of either creating a short film or music video, both interest me however initially I am more drawn towards doing a short film as I think I will have more creativity with that. I think reflecting upon AS work it is more likely I will work on my own, as this way I think i'll be able to get things done quicker. In previous work when in a group it often took a considerably long time to get things done, as we had to wait for everybody to be available at the same time before we could do any filming, this resulted in us getting things finished very close to the deadline which likely had an impact on the overall quality of our final film piece.
