Over time the media has provided a set of generic codes such as camera work, mise-en-scene, sound, lighting etc but everything and everyone who either works in media or is associated with it manipulates these conventions, they may not change it completely but in one way or another they tweak it and develop it to suit the needs of their project. This is what we done in our project we were aware of the general codes and conventions within the media and specially thriller movies. For example; the colour red has many connotations such as love, passion but on the other hand it is very symbolic for danger and blood. We incorporated one main iconographic images into our project which was a red rose, it portrayed love so we twisted it and showed it being broken and ripped in half –this suited our title for the film which was ‘Love Me… Love Me Not’ we were able to play with this image in several ways, with typical petal picking of love me and love me not and the connotation of romance.
When looking over our finished project I realised that we didn’t really change the codes and conventions much, we just conformed to it. I think we done this unintentionally and we weren’t aware during the course of filming and editing whether we were breaking the conventions or not but in a way I think we did because if we didn’t, then our film could be somewhat boring and too standardised. One convention I think we stuck to was in our editing and filming. We applied the 180° rule and checked rigorously that we followed it.
I don’t think that our film represents any specific social group but there are only three characters in our project two of which are females we were young people, at the age of sixteen but I don’t think we were playing the part of young individuals but more so those of grown ups. As we do not represent any certain social group via age, gender, race or sexual orientation I think that we are very flexible and may attract a large cross section ranging in differences from class to age if we had created a whole film. However I think our film does challenge the usual, typical story lines as we have a female killer, the complete opposite to the standard so I think more people would be interested in our film because it isn’t predictable.
As our film complies to the medias set of generic codes and conventions it would be suitable for institutions to distribute our film I don’t not think however that it will be a big Hollywood film but that it would be successful for UK release as its initial idea for the film was inspired by the title of another that was out at the current time in cinemas, the film that inspired our group was called “My Bloody Valentine”. It had a horror element with a small twisted romance somewhere behind it, although we hadn’t watched the film we managed to come up with a story and shortened it to make our opening sequence instead of horror we also decided to used thriller elements combined with romance to create our finished piece of work. Eventually after UK release like many other films our film will be suitable to TV viewing. If we were distributing our film in the real media world then we like most film makers would like our film to be successful so we would have to have a unique selling point. To get our film to be a major success we would probably have to go through the big six companies such as Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox or Universal pictures this was we are able to break into American and the Hollywood scene which should and normally does, generate huge profits.
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1943308800/tt1179891 - My Bloody Valentine IMDB
As mentioned above I think that our film will be suitable for several audiences because it is flexible. However our film will probably attract a more younger, modern audience. Someone who is either single or in a relationship it doesn’t really matter, it should appeal to all of them. I think the film will be popular among the younger generations as they will be able to identify with the characters of the film, eg many females experience jealousy or have been in a situation where they are attracted to the opposite sex but encounter problems in trying to reveal their feelings. Also the characters are not ‘posh’ they are just normal people who the audience will be able to relate to. We would also attract our audience by advertising, I think mainly in magazines and internet campaigns as we are a young generation it is certain that potential customers and our desired audience will see our adverts and then pay to watch the film in cinemas.
Through our media project I picked up numerous skills and developed many that I already had for example; I was able to develop my communication skills and group work skills as this project required commitment from everyone and also patience so everyone in the group could have their say. A more hands on skill that I developed was how to use the camera and camera equipment, but the basics such as blogging came naturally as I use the internet regularly. However where I learnt the majority of skills was in the edit suite, using such programmes as final cut pro, live type and sound track it was the most challenging but also essential to the project making it what it is. The main and somewhat most challenging part of the project for me was the editing of the film because I had never used final cut pro before but over the course of the project I familiarised myself with the basic such as using in and out points, then gradually used more tools such as the razor and effects such as cross fades.
Looking back over this task and the preliminary task I see what we have achieved, how we progressed and how we furthered our knowledge. In the beginning we were very much amateurs with basic skills and still are but have grown confident in using equipments such as cameras, tripods and the more technical aspects such as everything on the macs from firefox to final cut pro. I have learnt from this experience that it is very difficult to make a short two minute video and that planning really is best also overall with filming and editing I think we would have been better off and not in such an anxious state I we stuck to the work instead of being relaxed and messing around. Our groups preliminary task was never actually completed as we were not committed and did not know how to use the equipment and didn’t really try. Our camera techniques compared to the newspaper project were must better e.g when we were in the graveyard, also we found that our footage was much more steady and saw that using a tripod made a real difference when filming.
Showing posts with label Qiu Ling Lam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qiu Ling Lam. Show all posts
Friday, 27 March 2009
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Thriller Project
After officially being set our media thriller project we came together in our group once more and bubble stormed our ideas of what we could do, building on what one of the groups had thought of as one of the ideas we became very keen on the idea and chose this as the basis for our project. We drew several more bubble storms on ideas but this time making them more specific to our chosen idea, from that we had created small sub sections such as the music and images, characters, camera work and mise en scene.
However although we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do for our project we seemed to encounter many difficulties our main one was that we developed the story too much and ended up with a whole film instead of the two opening minutes and began thinking of ideas that would be very difficult. So, we decided to keep it simple and choose one part of our story line and incorporate it with our key images and icons for our opening scenes.
We were definite on using a rose and photo images as our main iconography for the project and for the music which will dramatically have an effect on our work we decided to use a steady beat representing the characters heart beat along with an assortment of strings and others. During this time we also thought of the camera shot we could use to make our work effective and we thought about how we can make our work interesting by using various angles, effects and match cuts.
After we were confident and positive about what we would be doing for our thriller project we decided on what roles we would have to play, we concluded that everyone would help in editing, sound and camera work. Although I was reluctant to take part in the actual film and be shown I was willing to let that go and do what was needed to help the group Krisztina who also held the same view as me previously also agreed that she didn’t mind. Eventually the characters and roles were cast hoping to please every one in the group and meet the aim of our project.
We decided on the story line of; two people – a happy couple were being stalked by another girl who was jealous of the couples relationship as she was in love with the guy. Our main scenes that took up the bulk of the two minutes were of the girl at the guy (Hamsa’s) gravestone because she had killed him we would also work in our iconic images of the rose as intentionally we came up with the idea that everytime Fouzia picked a rose petal and threw it to the ground it would go to a flash back of the happy couple and by seeing her doing this it also linked in with out title which was; love me love me not. The next step after planning our skit was to decide on roles and start filming.
Initially I was going to play the role main character and Hamsa and Fouzia agreed to play the other parts but as I was away for two lessons me and Fouzia switched roles because it would be best for the group as most of the film was based around the obsessive character. We had agreed on this but unfortunately on the days that I was not in, my group had done little filming as they arrived at the place of filming only to realize they forgot the tape. We knew we had lost time and we were behind everyone else. This should have made our group more focused but it didn’t as we still messed around and had a very laid back attitude to the project also we had put a lot of effort and though into planning, we knew what we were going to do, where we were going to do it, how we were going to do it but it took us a very long time to get round to actually filming. Thankfully we started working and knew we had to finish our project and no longer take it as a joke. It seemed that we were just very unlucky because college was also closed on the day we had media so yet again we had lost time that we were becoming very short of then on Wednesday despite the undesirable weather conditions we went out and starting filming, this day we got everything we thought we needed to complete our project now all we had to do was edit.
When we had sat down to look at our footage we realized some parts we had filmed were missing so we had to go and film extra but we also knew we had to re-work our story so we could use all the clips previously filmed to make a new story line as we had no time to film a whole new set. Unfortunately on Wednesday Hamsa wasn’t in so we decided to quickly short a scene where I was being followed, chased then murdered by Fouzia. We done this as fast as we could then immediately returned to the edit suite to continue editing.
Lesson after lesson we edited but it wasn’t until the week of the deadline like the practical filming that we actually starting editing, we worked extremely hard on it and would often miss breaks and lunched to edit our work. When we finally finished editing our video, we needed sound and music. As I said I wasn’t very good with creating music I helped out a lot with the editing and Fouzia done the music and sound and we put the two together and were very pleased with what we had achieved. Our ending story line was still the same but instead of having flash backs of a happy couple it was; a happy couple in the beginning, a scene of me being followed then a murder. On Thursday 26 February at lunch me, Krisztina and Fouzia went to one of the editing rooms to see our work we were pleased with it so went to lunch me and Krisztina said we would come back after lunch and work on it as we had a free period, we came back but we weren’t allowed to enter the room because there were other classes doing their work. So disappointed we left the last and final thing we need to do is add in the titles and then our work would be complete, again me and Krisztina said we would come in at lunch on Friday – the deadline and add in the titles we also let the rest of our group know and hopefully they will turn up too.
Over time the media has provided a set of generic codes and conventions such as camera work, mise-en-scene, sound, lighting etc but everything and everyone who either works in media or is associated with it manipulates these conventions, they may not change it completely but in one way or another they tweak it and develop it to suit the needs of their project. This is what we done in our project we were aware of the general codes and conventions within the media and specially thriller movies. For example; the colour red has many connotations such as love, passion but on the other hand it is very symbolic for danger and blood. We incorporated one main iconographic images into our project which was a red rose, it portrayed love so we twisted it and showed it being broken and ripped in half –this suited our title for the film which was ‘Love Me… Love Me Not’ we were able to play with this image in several ways, with typical petal picking of love me and love me not and the connotation of romance.
When looking over our finished project I realised that we didn’t really change the codes and conventions much, we just conformed to it. I think we done this unintentionally and we weren’t aware during the course of filming and editing whether we were breaking the conventions or not but in a way I think we did because if we didn’t, then our film could be somewhat boring and too standardised. One convention I think we stuck to was in our editing and filming. We applied the 180° rule and checked rigorously hoping we followed it.
I don’t think that our film represents any specific social group but there are only three characters in our project two of which are females we were young people, at the age of sixteen but I don’t think we were playing the part of young individuals but more so those of grown ups. As we do not represent any certain social group via age, gender, race or sexual orientation I think that we are very flexible and may attract a large cross section ranging in differences from class to age if we had created a whole film.
As our film complies to the medias set of generic codes and conventions it would be suitable for institutions to distribute our film I don’t not think however that it will be a big Hollywood film but that it would be successful for UK release as its initial idea for the film was inspired by the title of another that was out at the current time in cinemas, the film that inspired our group was called “My Bloody Valentine”. It had a horror element with a small twisted romance somewhere behind it, although we hadn’t watched the film we managed to come up with a story and shortened it to make our opening sequence instead of horror we also decided to used thriller elements combined with romance to create our finished piece of work. Eventually after UK release like many other films our film will be suitable to TV viewing.
However although we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do for our project we seemed to encounter many difficulties our main one was that we developed the story too much and ended up with a whole film instead of the two opening minutes and began thinking of ideas that would be very difficult. So, we decided to keep it simple and choose one part of our story line and incorporate it with our key images and icons for our opening scenes.
We were definite on using a rose and photo images as our main iconography for the project and for the music which will dramatically have an effect on our work we decided to use a steady beat representing the characters heart beat along with an assortment of strings and others. During this time we also thought of the camera shot we could use to make our work effective and we thought about how we can make our work interesting by using various angles, effects and match cuts.
After we were confident and positive about what we would be doing for our thriller project we decided on what roles we would have to play, we concluded that everyone would help in editing, sound and camera work. Although I was reluctant to take part in the actual film and be shown I was willing to let that go and do what was needed to help the group Krisztina who also held the same view as me previously also agreed that she didn’t mind. Eventually the characters and roles were cast hoping to please every one in the group and meet the aim of our project.
We decided on the story line of; two people – a happy couple were being stalked by another girl who was jealous of the couples relationship as she was in love with the guy. Our main scenes that took up the bulk of the two minutes were of the girl at the guy (Hamsa’s) gravestone because she had killed him we would also work in our iconic images of the rose as intentionally we came up with the idea that everytime Fouzia picked a rose petal and threw it to the ground it would go to a flash back of the happy couple and by seeing her doing this it also linked in with out title which was; love me love me not. The next step after planning our skit was to decide on roles and start filming.
Initially I was going to play the role main character and Hamsa and Fouzia agreed to play the other parts but as I was away for two lessons me and Fouzia switched roles because it would be best for the group as most of the film was based around the obsessive character. We had agreed on this but unfortunately on the days that I was not in, my group had done little filming as they arrived at the place of filming only to realize they forgot the tape. We knew we had lost time and we were behind everyone else. This should have made our group more focused but it didn’t as we still messed around and had a very laid back attitude to the project also we had put a lot of effort and though into planning, we knew what we were going to do, where we were going to do it, how we were going to do it but it took us a very long time to get round to actually filming. Thankfully we started working and knew we had to finish our project and no longer take it as a joke. It seemed that we were just very unlucky because college was also closed on the day we had media so yet again we had lost time that we were becoming very short of then on Wednesday despite the undesirable weather conditions we went out and starting filming, this day we got everything we thought we needed to complete our project now all we had to do was edit.
When we had sat down to look at our footage we realized some parts we had filmed were missing so we had to go and film extra but we also knew we had to re-work our story so we could use all the clips previously filmed to make a new story line as we had no time to film a whole new set. Unfortunately on Wednesday Hamsa wasn’t in so we decided to quickly short a scene where I was being followed, chased then murdered by Fouzia. We done this as fast as we could then immediately returned to the edit suite to continue editing.
Lesson after lesson we edited but it wasn’t until the week of the deadline like the practical filming that we actually starting editing, we worked extremely hard on it and would often miss breaks and lunched to edit our work. When we finally finished editing our video, we needed sound and music. As I said I wasn’t very good with creating music I helped out a lot with the editing and Fouzia done the music and sound and we put the two together and were very pleased with what we had achieved. Our ending story line was still the same but instead of having flash backs of a happy couple it was; a happy couple in the beginning, a scene of me being followed then a murder. On Thursday 26 February at lunch me, Krisztina and Fouzia went to one of the editing rooms to see our work we were pleased with it so went to lunch me and Krisztina said we would come back after lunch and work on it as we had a free period, we came back but we weren’t allowed to enter the room because there were other classes doing their work. So disappointed we left the last and final thing we need to do is add in the titles and then our work would be complete, again me and Krisztina said we would come in at lunch on Friday – the deadline and add in the titles we also let the rest of our group know and hopefully they will turn up too.
Over time the media has provided a set of generic codes and conventions such as camera work, mise-en-scene, sound, lighting etc but everything and everyone who either works in media or is associated with it manipulates these conventions, they may not change it completely but in one way or another they tweak it and develop it to suit the needs of their project. This is what we done in our project we were aware of the general codes and conventions within the media and specially thriller movies. For example; the colour red has many connotations such as love, passion but on the other hand it is very symbolic for danger and blood. We incorporated one main iconographic images into our project which was a red rose, it portrayed love so we twisted it and showed it being broken and ripped in half –this suited our title for the film which was ‘Love Me… Love Me Not’ we were able to play with this image in several ways, with typical petal picking of love me and love me not and the connotation of romance.
When looking over our finished project I realised that we didn’t really change the codes and conventions much, we just conformed to it. I think we done this unintentionally and we weren’t aware during the course of filming and editing whether we were breaking the conventions or not but in a way I think we did because if we didn’t, then our film could be somewhat boring and too standardised. One convention I think we stuck to was in our editing and filming. We applied the 180° rule and checked rigorously hoping we followed it.
I don’t think that our film represents any specific social group but there are only three characters in our project two of which are females we were young people, at the age of sixteen but I don’t think we were playing the part of young individuals but more so those of grown ups. As we do not represent any certain social group via age, gender, race or sexual orientation I think that we are very flexible and may attract a large cross section ranging in differences from class to age if we had created a whole film.
As our film complies to the medias set of generic codes and conventions it would be suitable for institutions to distribute our film I don’t not think however that it will be a big Hollywood film but that it would be successful for UK release as its initial idea for the film was inspired by the title of another that was out at the current time in cinemas, the film that inspired our group was called “My Bloody Valentine”. It had a horror element with a small twisted romance somewhere behind it, although we hadn’t watched the film we managed to come up with a story and shortened it to make our opening sequence instead of horror we also decided to used thriller elements combined with romance to create our finished piece of work. Eventually after UK release like many other films our film will be suitable to TV viewing.
As mentioned above I think that our film will be suitable for several audiences because it is flexible. However our film will probably attract a more younger, modern audience. Someone who is either single or in a relationship it doesn’t really matter, it should appeal to all of them. We would also attract our audience by advertising, I think mainly in magazines and internet campaigns as we are a young generation it is certain that potential customers and our desired audience will see our adverts and then pay to watch the film in cinemas.
Through our media project I picked up numerous skills and developed many that I already had for example; I was able to develop my communication skills and group work skills as this project required commitment from everyone and also patience so everyone in the group could have their say. A more hands on skill that I developed was how to use the camera and camera equipment, but the basics such as blogging came naturally as I use the internet regularly. However where I learnt the majority of skills was in the edit suite, using such programmes as final cut pro, live type and sound track it was the most challenging but also essential to the project making it what it is.
Looking back over this task and the preliminary task I see what we have achieved, how we progressed and how we furthered our knowledge. In the beginning we were very much amateurs with basic skills and still are but have grown confident in using equipments such as cameras, tripods and the more technical aspects such as everything on the macs from firefox to final cut pro. I have learnt from this experience that it is very difficult to make a short two minute video and that planning really is best also overall with filming and editing I think we would have been better off and not in such an anxious state I we stuck to the work instead of being relaxed and messing around.
Thursday, 18 December 2008
A Thrilling Read
Qiu Ling Lam
Media Studies, Set 4
A Thrilling Read Project
We came together in our group; me, Krisztina, Fouzia and Hamsa and briefly came to a decision on who would be the character in our brief film and we chose Fouzia. The next day we given a short introduction tutorial on how to use the camera and tripod correctly and also given the chance to try out the camera and its effects/settings to familiarise ourselves with it.
Next we had a discussion about the film and we came up with numerous ideas of what and how we could make our film. We all seemed to agree on our ideas and so we combined a little part of everybody’s ideas together, for instance I came up with the idea of just filming the characters feet walking away and Hamsa came up with the idea of making the newspaper drop in slow motion.
Once we had agreed on what we were going to do, we wrote it down on our film story board sheet as a rough guide to what we was going to do, we then explained our story to our teacher who also gave us some suggestions of how to use the camera effectively. Shortly afterwards we were presented with our equipment; the camera and tripod and then went off to film our work in roughly an hour.
We had already decided to do our filming on the sofas in the college hall, but when we got downstairs we saw that it was currently being occupied to make a slight change to our location, it was still in the hall but not on the sofas. We did not decide on who was going to do what apart from Fouzia doing the acting but when we started filming we all seemed to automatically fall into our places. Hamsa was doing the camera work, Krisztina was in control of all the props and showed/told Fouzia what she had to do, I was directing.
When filming we encountered a few problems but we overcame them at times of confusion we all stopped and talked about what individuals wanted to do and incorporated it the best way possible then continued filming. We discovered that the project wasn’t as easy as first thought because we had to film the same scene several times and from different angles in hope that when we had to edit it, it would give us more choices have it exactly how we wanted it. It was a rigorous process of filming but we still managed to enjoy ourselves and get the work done.
We learnt that mise-en-scene was a very important element into creating the right surrounding and atmosphere because unintentionally we were filming in a place where you could see a Christmas tree in the background which gave the wrong atmosphere. That particular mise-en-scene did not help generate or suit our ‘thriller’ theme.
When we were filming we remembered the five second rule but we has seem to of forgotten about the headroom. During playback of our filming we noticed this and it was present throughout the filming however we were happy with all our shots especially our close ups and extreme close ups (Fouzia’s facial expressions). We also noticed that not all of our camera shots turned out how we wanted such as our handheld camera work in attempt to create a spooky, tense atmosphere. Once we completed our filming within the time limit we returned to the classroom where all of the equipment was put away and told what we were going to be doing next lesson which was the editing.
We entered the editing suite next lesson and went through a short tutorial of basic editing and followed instructions on how to connect the camcorder to the computer in order to gain our work. We went through the whole of our film and created little sections/scenes that we would be using in each section/scene we had roughly two or three that we could choose from, we watched it carefully and decided on which was the best to use then we deleted the others till we ended up with separate scenes that when put together created out short film.
Over the holidays I watched numerous films and noticed that the 'thriller' genre can be further sub-divided into smaller more precise categories. I watched action thrillers and horror thrillers such as DOA, Transporter 1,2,3 and Saw, all of them are able to fulfill the viewers feeling of want but they add other key elements by incorporating other genres to produce a more satisfied sensation for the audience. This helped me to broaden my ideas about what my group could do for our thriller project in hope to keep it as original and the best possible.
During our lesson on the 16th we were aware that we were behind on our thrilling read project and decided to split the group into two, one group would complete the editing for the thrilling read project and the other would have a discussion and take notes on the practicality or new project and the ideas that they had come up with. We done this in attempt to catch up on our previous project and not fall behind in our new one. We had successfully completed our project and on Monday was completely revived and fresh for our new challenge.
Media Studies, Set 4
A Thrilling Read Project
We came together in our group; me, Krisztina, Fouzia and Hamsa and briefly came to a decision on who would be the character in our brief film and we chose Fouzia. The next day we given a short introduction tutorial on how to use the camera and tripod correctly and also given the chance to try out the camera and its effects/settings to familiarise ourselves with it.
Next we had a discussion about the film and we came up with numerous ideas of what and how we could make our film. We all seemed to agree on our ideas and so we combined a little part of everybody’s ideas together, for instance I came up with the idea of just filming the characters feet walking away and Hamsa came up with the idea of making the newspaper drop in slow motion.
Once we had agreed on what we were going to do, we wrote it down on our film story board sheet as a rough guide to what we was going to do, we then explained our story to our teacher who also gave us some suggestions of how to use the camera effectively. Shortly afterwards we were presented with our equipment; the camera and tripod and then went off to film our work in roughly an hour.
We had already decided to do our filming on the sofas in the college hall, but when we got downstairs we saw that it was currently being occupied to make a slight change to our location, it was still in the hall but not on the sofas. We did not decide on who was going to do what apart from Fouzia doing the acting but when we started filming we all seemed to automatically fall into our places. Hamsa was doing the camera work, Krisztina was in control of all the props and showed/told Fouzia what she had to do, I was directing.
When filming we encountered a few problems but we overcame them at times of confusion we all stopped and talked about what individuals wanted to do and incorporated it the best way possible then continued filming. We discovered that the project wasn’t as easy as first thought because we had to film the same scene several times and from different angles in hope that when we had to edit it, it would give us more choices have it exactly how we wanted it. It was a rigorous process of filming but we still managed to enjoy ourselves and get the work done.
We learnt that mise-en-scene was a very important element into creating the right surrounding and atmosphere because unintentionally we were filming in a place where you could see a Christmas tree in the background which gave the wrong atmosphere. That particular mise-en-scene did not help generate or suit our ‘thriller’ theme.
When we were filming we remembered the five second rule but we has seem to of forgotten about the headroom. During playback of our filming we noticed this and it was present throughout the filming however we were happy with all our shots especially our close ups and extreme close ups (Fouzia’s facial expressions). We also noticed that not all of our camera shots turned out how we wanted such as our handheld camera work in attempt to create a spooky, tense atmosphere. Once we completed our filming within the time limit we returned to the classroom where all of the equipment was put away and told what we were going to be doing next lesson which was the editing.
We entered the editing suite next lesson and went through a short tutorial of basic editing and followed instructions on how to connect the camcorder to the computer in order to gain our work. We went through the whole of our film and created little sections/scenes that we would be using in each section/scene we had roughly two or three that we could choose from, we watched it carefully and decided on which was the best to use then we deleted the others till we ended up with separate scenes that when put together created out short film.
Over the holidays I watched numerous films and noticed that the 'thriller' genre can be further sub-divided into smaller more precise categories. I watched action thrillers and horror thrillers such as DOA, Transporter 1,2,3 and Saw, all of them are able to fulfill the viewers feeling of want but they add other key elements by incorporating other genres to produce a more satisfied sensation for the audience. This helped me to broaden my ideas about what my group could do for our thriller project in hope to keep it as original and the best possible.
During our lesson on the 16th we were aware that we were behind on our thrilling read project and decided to split the group into two, one group would complete the editing for the thrilling read project and the other would have a discussion and take notes on the practicality or new project and the ideas that they had come up with. We done this in attempt to catch up on our previous project and not fall behind in our new one. We had successfully completed our project and on Monday was completely revived and fresh for our new challenge.
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