Problems with Filming

During the filming process we encountered various problems. The first and most substantial problem was finding that we were not able to shoot ob the DLR as we had intended. In order to overcome this, we found another location and worked out ways in which we could use it to the same effect.

We also encountered problems with sound. We were attempting to film some dialogue on London Bridge but it was extremely windy and many people were walking and talking around us. This level of ambient noise made it very difficult to get any clear dialogue. We decided to crop the shot a little and then get a directional microphone as close to the actors as possible, just out of frame. At first, we thought this had been effective but when we came to editing we realised the sound was still not good enough so we dubbed over it.

We had further complications with the location when we found that the location for the final scene of our piece had different lighting to when we'd recced it and a security guard was there telling us he didn't think we could film there. Thus we quickly made the decision to film somewhere more open and urban but which still provided an alleyway of sorts to give the scene its dark tone. We actually preferred the compromise that we made as we believe it fitted in better with the tone of the film.

Final Task

Ident

In making our ident we wanted to create something that looked professional but not too commercial, maintaining the film's art house, indie feel. We went into Final Cut Pro X's title menu and looked through the templates there to find an effect with some character. We found one called 'Fold' which features a small animation of a picture of your choice and some text unfolding and then folding back up. We believed that it's simple and effective and it allowed us to use a copyright-free picture of a bridge to fit in with our production company's name (Under the Bridge Productions). We then added a small music clip that I played on ukulele.

Our ident

Evaluation Q4

Who are your audience?

Above is a sample survey carried out by a seventeen-year-old male that is a privately educated student, in their penultimate year of secondary school. Having questioned a fairly broad age range of people, I think it is safe to deduce that our target audience will be someone similar to the person questioned above. We aimed to dress our character in clothes similar to those of people our age, and his behaviour and dialogue were also supposed to be relevant to our audience.
Based on our collected data, I think that it is safe to deduce that our target audience fits comfortably into the 15-25 year-old category. They are most likely a student or young adult, probably either currently in higher education or entering/leaving higher education. Of the people that we sampled, the most complimentary and excited by our piece were most definitely people of a similar age to us. Although the themes of our piece would most likely encourage the diversion use and gratification, the actors we used were relatable to teenagers, meaning that personal identity could also be a reason for viewing our piece.
Although several films of similar genres to ours can be classified as 12 or 12A's, if we were conforming to the guidelines of the bbfc, we believe that some of the themes that we chose to include in our piece could be too violent for viewers younger than 15. When asked, the majority of our audience associated our piece with films such as Drive, Collateral, and The Bourne Identity. These films are all classified as 18’s or 15’s, suggesting that our original predictions were correct.

“The century of film has passed” Outline the benefits to both audiences and institutions of the growth of digital technology in the film industry. What are the problems associated with this technology change?

Digital technology has brought about a huge change to how the entire film industry operates. Digital technology has allowed films to be made for less money, has made films much easier to make by many more people and has allowed marketing and distribution to come a lot easier. This has also come with the ability for consumers to much more easily transport, view and share their films which is excellent for the consumer but can lead to difficulties for the film studios such as with the ease at which one can pirate films.

Until the ‘50s, films could only be viewed in the cinema. This meant that the entire revenue of a film had to come from cinema admissions. In the 1950s televisions became popular and widespread, allowing film studios to sell their films to television channels to be broadcast after the film has stopped showing in cinemas. However, the popularity of television led to a problem, that being that people may stop going to the cinema if they could watch films and TV shows in their own home. Thus, many gimmicks were developed such as an early form of 3D in order to draw people back into cinemas.

These proved to be unsuccessful though and by the late 60s VHS was available and people could have copies of films to watch at home whenever they pleased. Like television, this allowed a new ‘release window’ to open for films. Large technology companies caught on to this and began developing large televisions and surround sound systems for the home so that one could replicate the cinema experience in their own living room. Technology also moved on from VHS to DVD in order to allow better quality pictures and wider aspect ratios. These DVDs also offered multiple extras which encouraged people to buy them even if they already owned the film on VHS.

In the late 90s the internet began to become increasingly widespread and popular and was used as a marketing tool by putting adverts up on websites and creating trailers and videos for the film and encouraging people to share them in emails etc. Eventually, internet speeds became fast enough that films could be downloaded relatively quickly. This meant that film studios could sell their films as a download, opening up yet another ‘release window’ in which to sell their film and make further profits. Of course, if the film companies are allowing people to buy digital copies of their films then these copies can be copied and shared with others, leaving the actual purchase unnecessary for anybody else. This is a problem film studios have attempted to tackle by creating anti-piracy measures such as security protected files and by suing websites such as http://thepiratebay.se which host multiple pirated film files for downloading.

One way in which film studios can stop people downloading files illegally is by offering their files through easy-to-use on demand services such as Love Film, Netflix and iTunes in high-definition and on servers that can allow the consumer to download the file as fast as possible. This at least provides an experience worth paying for as illegally downloaded files are often low-quality and slow to download. Unfortunately for the film studios, internet speeds are becoming faster and faster and these days it is not difficult obtain a broadband connection which allows one to upload or download an HD movie from a file sharing site so quickly that they can watch the movie instantly as it downloads.

More developments have also been made with physical copies of films with the advent of Blu-Ray which offers extremely high-quality 1080p full-HD video and 7.1 audio. Furthermore, as Blu-Rays are generally able to hold about 50GB of data which means even more extras can be put on BDs than on DVDs, further encouraging consumers to purchase BDs even if they own the film on other media. 3D Blu-Ray discs have also been created which allow consumers to watch films in 3D and HD on their 3D-enabled TV at home. This provides the benefit to the audience of being able to bring a technology previously only available in cinemas to their home. It also encourages more people to buy the film than download it as illegally shared 3D HD files are hard to come by on the internet and tend to be huge and difficult to download.  But while the film studios profit from the sales of 3D BDs, people become less inclined to visit the cinema, as they can have the same experience without leaving the house.

But digital technology also helps with this issue, as the continually progressing technology used in films allows films to be more cinematic (and thus more likely to draw people into cinemas), cheaper to make (which allows more money to be spent on marketing, making people so excited about the film that they want to see it as soon as it comes out in the cinema) and allows for more films to be made (providing more choice to the consumer and guaranteeing a visit to the cinema to be an enjoyable experience). One way in which this has been made possible is through the increasing use of DV cameras to make films. With DV cameras, one does not have to pay for celluloid, lighting is a lot more easily managed and the cameras are more manoeuvrable. An example of where inexpensive DV cameras have been used to shoot a film to great effect is David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006). He shot the entire film on a moderately priced standard definition Sony camcorder which allowed him more freedom with his shots and less budget pressure, especially helpful as he was literally making up the script as he went along.

CGI technologies have also helped to increase consumption of film as CGI is now cheap and extremely advanced and can draw in bigger audiences who wish to experience something that they don’t get out of real life when they go to the cinema. This teamed with cinemas such as the IMAX in which the screen fills the whole of the audience’s eyeline and peripheral vision and the audience is completely surrounded by speakers combines to make experiences that not only make audiences want to consume more film but to visit the cinema also and really immerse themselves in films. Film studios are now also able to make more money through cinemas as, with digital prints of films rather than celluloid, they don’t have to pay large amounts of money to have the film printed multiple times and distributed to different cinemas, rather they can just copy the film and send it digitally.

In conclusion, digital technology advances have led to a great deal more ease when it comes to making, distributing and watching film. While this primarily provides benefits for the audience who now find it easier than ever to watch a huge variety of films whenever they want, it can also be exploited by film companies who can charge consumers for providing this ease of use when it comes to watching films. However, copyright theft loses the UK alone about £531 million each year and this number will only grow as it becomes easier and easier to download films illegally. The battle between this and increasing ease and lack of cost involved with making films will continue to rage. It is worth noting, however, that the biggest targets to film piracy are the popular blockbusters which are made by film studios to whom a few million pounds lost does not seem very substantial.

Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies form the process of constructing this product?

Blogger.com – This was very useful for displaying our progress, planning, constructing and evaluation.

YouTube.com – We used this to research thriller openings, which helped inspire us. It was also used to display our preliminary task and our final piece.

Google.com – Arguably one of the most useful forms of technology, as it allowed us to search for and access images, music, and information about similar films for our research section.

Final Cut Pro X – This was used to construct our film, our recce and preliminary task, and also to edit them using things such as filters, titles, colour balancing, and sound balancing that were available with the software. For example, we used an expander to make sections of our dialogue clearer, and we used frame matching to equilibrilize the colour of certain shots. It also had a built-in automatic save feature, meaning that our work was less easily lost.

Apple Macintosh iMac desktop – I found this computer extremely easy to use, and the display was very clear, making editing easier, as we could see problem areas that required correcting.

Sony HD Camera – We used this to film our piece and our recce. We learnt how to use it whilst shooting our recce, and I found it easy to manipulate in order to achieve the necessary shots.

Tripods – We used this to steady the camera, and this in turn helped achieve key shots, such as the wide-angle opening shots of Tower Bridge and the surrounding areas.

Microphone – These were most definitely essential, as even though we had minimal dialogue, the lines that we did choose to include were very important for the audience to hear, therefore we used microphones.

Kaiser Video lights – We decided to include these, as some of our locations were badly lit and therefore required lights, but we also used them in naturally well-lit shots, as it created a better atmosphere, and helped reduce graininess.

Imdb – This was used a great deal to acquire information about directors, films, and production companies, it therefore contributed the most to the research and planning sections of our piece.

DaFont – We found the font that we chose to use in all our titles and the main title of our piece from this website, it was called ‘Bank Gothic’ and we felt it was distinguished from any of the fonts that could be found, both on Microsoft Word and Final Cut Pro X.

Free play music – We obtained the majority of our sound from this website, most importantly, our main music track, called ‘Ascension from the well’ by Peter John Ross. It was useful because it had a wide range of copyright free music.

I feel as though the thing that I have learnt the most about the technologies that we included is how to manipulate them in order to achieve the desired effect. In some cases, such as with Final Cut Pro X, I found it slightly harder to be fully confident with using it, but once I was competent enough, I felt as though it was a lot easier to create the final product that we had envisaged.

Evaluation Question 3

Evaluation Question 2 - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 7 - Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

In comparing my preliminary task to my finished product, one can see that they are very different pieces. My preliminary task was a fairly unambitious attempt at a simple match-on-action and then short dialogue. It required very little planning or technical ability to complete. The final piece that we created, however, involved a great deal of planning and a lot more precision when it came to sound and lighting.


My prelim

Thus, one of the main things I have learnt from making my full product is how to plan such a project and the importance of planning to the project and its end result.The first thing we did was to research both what a thriller is and what other thrillers were like and how they were made. This involved watching the openings of multiple thrillers and also researching the production companies behind them. This gave us an idea of what kind of tone our thriller opening would have and how we would present it. We then began coming up with our film idea and constructing a plot before storyboarding it to see how we wanted to compose our shots and to gain a sense of how many shots we would need and how they would be edited and sequenced.


It was then time to go on a recce and it was then that we learnt the importance of proper reconnaissance as we quickly realised that our previously decided-upon location of the Canary Wharf DLR was simply not going to work. We were told that we couldn't shoot on there for security reasons by an official and all the carriages were filled with people despite it being late on a Sunday. Thus, we decided to take another recce the next week in which we would decide how to change our location whilst keeping our plot and visual style. On this recce, we decided to film around the London Bridge area as it allowed us to keep our urban style whilst not particularly affecting the story. As abandoning the train journey took away some of the opening's mood of progression and motion, we added in some walking through what we hoped were interesting, fairly dramatic locations.


Our recce




Having changed our location, we were now filming completely in the open air rather than enclosed in a train carriage for most of the opening. Thus it became a lot more important to operate the audio recording equipment proficiently as there is a great deal of atmospheric sound from other people and wind on London Bridge. Through this we learnt a lot about how to optimise sound with the equipment and I felt much more at ease with the equipment by the end of it.

Many people were walking up and down London Bridge and it was extremely windy

Of course, the technical side does not end there, as we then moved into the editing suite where I was, at first, baffled by the software and the plethora of functions and effects. However throughout the process of editing our film, I got more and more to grips with the software and actually found it to be incredibly intuitive. By the end of our editing, I felt I had a very comprehensive knowledge of how to edit a film and how to add effects, titles and perform various other tasks on Final Cut Pro X.

Layout of Final Cut Pro X

In conclusion, I feel I have learnt most about the importance of preparation when it comes to film making as thinks such as storyboarding and performing recces proved to be incredibly useful when you are taking on a relatively large project.