Preliminary task planning , video and evaluation

When planning for our preliminary task we first started by discussing our ideas and drawing  a rough sketch of our ideas to get a grasp of the idea in reality ; we started a story board to put ideas down with extra details of aspects like sound and shot types that we would use for these specific shots. Our story board allows us to develop our ideas on that specific shot and makes it easier when we are filming as we know what we are doing with that shot type.

Filming

During our filming it went quite smoothly as we have done a story board beforehand , By doing a story board it helped us to organise and have an over view of what we need to include and when we are going to include these. Also storyboard makes us a group feel more prepared and organised while filming. Due to us specifying what type of shot type we will be using it helped speed up the filing process. In addition this will also help when we go onto to editing as we will already have a brief idea of what kind of sounds we will be using.

At the beginning of filming we had a bit of a struggle to set up the correct lighting and scene however we compromised and shut all the blinds and then decided to turn on one specific set of lighting behind the camera to ensure the light wasn’t too bright. Then on we were sufficiently filming including all the required shot types. However after an hour of filing we then realised we had been filming with eh incorrect angle of portrait instead of landscape. But we didn’t intend to as the Ipad screen span itself. However due to our story board we could then just go back and re film it all within a short space of time as we knew what went wrong and how to correct but also we had our storyboard to follow so we didn’t miss anything out that we had filmed previously. After these complications our filming went to plan and was very sufficient and quick but also to a high quality as we were using the required shot types which are shot reverse shot , match on action and 180 degree rule. To ensure we had done the filming to the best of our ability we watched over each cut to see if there was anything else we could do to improve it to make it more effective. 

We are now going to go onto edit this short clip to add to it , this will help us to also link it in more with the horror genre that we have chosen.

Editing

After our filming we began to edit our clips to create our video for a required prelim task, 

Firstly we had to import our media from the I pad; we had issues doing this as they simply wouldn’t import off the I pad onto the IMac, However the managed to get them onto the IMac after a couple of attempts... I was frustrating however we got it done, we then imported them onto final cut pro
(which we managed on the first attempt), after this we then ordered them on our timeline on this software; our story board helped us with this as we already know the order. 
After we managed to upload it we then put them all in order on our timeline we created on final cut pro , I was worried as I didn’t think that the quality of the filming on the I pad would be very good however I could improve this when editing. After it was all in order on our time line we watched through it and saw where we had made filming mistakes and deleted them out built then we also watch it through again to see what we needed to crop out of the cut to ensure it flowed smoothly and there wasn’t any jumps, we then notice a few more filming error for example a thumb on the corner of the screen from the camera girl so we used to trim and crop tool to get rid of these to ensure we have a high quality looking opening scene. After we had done all the cropping and trimming we then watched it through again to see our progress and to discuss what sound and colours we could edit into it now, firstly we were looking for available sound on final cut pro however there wasn’t any suitable ones that would be extremely affective apart from the back ground noise, So we did some research and found a website called sound bible which had many horror based sounds that we could interpret into our short clip. We have used a fading in and out of the sounds to ensure it doesn’t sound too blocky. We turned down the sound of the backing music when there was dialogue during out 180 degree and shot reverse shot camera angles, we used these shot types during dialogue as we thought it would be most effective for the audience, also we lowered the sound so that the focus is on the dialogue, this hints to it being a sign. Towards the end there is a very intriguing section where one of the people playing a part saw something so we added a different sound affect here to suggest there was something new in the room that added to the scare factor. 

 We had some specific requirements(shot reverse shot , match on action , 180 degree rule)  we had to meet during filming and during the editing process we could ensure that they were there. Due to our clip being horror based we needed to ensure that even we were editing we sued a suitable filter to make it look more intriguing and 'scary' , we did this by adding a black and white 50's look which added to the interest of it. 

After doing this task I have developed my knowledge on final cut pro and how to use it more efficiently and how to import sounds from other places , all these row skills I have learnt and the old once that I have developed I will be able to use in my final piece (opening scene)

 

These are screenshots of where we used shot reverse shot but we also incorporated 180 degree rule in here as well to ensure it came across as they were talking to each other



This is an example of when we use match on action to show her walking through the door.