Monday, 16 June 2014

Skills Review

Research and Planning

I have learnt how to research and plan the project effectively and understand what we are expected to learn and how to relate our ideas back to the target audience. We researched our target audience by asking them to complete a questionnaire on Surveymonkey.

Before this project I didn't know a lot about the conventions of a gangster film but throughout the time I spent researching and watching gangster film openings like Layer Cake and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with my partner Hannah, we soon had a better understanding of what a gangster film looked like and the main things that we had to include. Once we had a few ideas we made a storyboard of the best idea we came up with so that we could plan how we were going to film the opening scene and it helped visualise the film opening. While we were filming we decided to change the narrative so that our film opening would fit into the gangster genre more.


Digital Technology

When filming the opening scene I used a Canon EOS 600D and to edit I used Adobe Premier Pro. I had little experience using a Canon camera so before I filmed the scenes I decided to practise filming some of the locations with the tripod so that I knew how to position the camera and the different techniques I could use. I had more experience with Adobe Premier Pro because I had used it when I edited my GCSE music video but I did have to go over a few things that I had forgotten. 

Using conventions from real media texts

Me and my partner were not that familiar with the conventions of a gangster film so we watched film openings like Dead Man Running to get inspiration. We paid a lot of attention to lighting, camera angles and also the main colours that were used in a gangster film. We decided to challenge the conventions by having a main female character but we made sure to stick with the other conventions so that the film opening would still fit into the gangster genre.

Creativity

Whenever I had an idea I would write it down so that I could come up with new ideas based on the original and then choose the best one to do a storyboard on. I also picked the outfits and props for the film opening and I made sure to chose items of clothing or props with the traditional gangster film colours, for example, I chose a red scarf for the main female character to wear.

From my research of the gangster genre I noticed that the film openings flowed between cuts, so I wanted to make sure that my film opening looked similar. When we were editing the footage we decided to use video transitions like cross dissolve that gave a similar effect as to what we saw in traditional gangster openings. Because we had flashbacks we decided to make the scene black and white to show that it was a memory.


Post Production

After all the scenes were filmed we uploaded the footage on to an editing computer and used Adobe Premier Pro to edit the footage together into a two minute clip. I had used the editing software before but I didn't know how to use any of the effects but I quickly learned which ones made the footage look professional and tie the clip together. The music was quite load and the dialogue was really quiet so we had to go through and adjust the sound and dialogue so that you could hear everything clearly.


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