31st January

Outside of the lesson, I started to think about what music and sound we would want in our main task. For the first part of our film we want a teenage boy sitting in an empty park by himself, whilst this is happening we wanted incidental music with a depressing tone to it and a slow rhythm and possibly the wind howling around him. As neither Amy nor I are very musical we searched online for music with no copyright that we could use, I found a website that we plan on exploring in more detail later on. I listened to previews of instrumental music that matched the description of what I imagined out incidental music to sound like and narrowed it down to four clips that I will show Amy to see if she agrees. The next part involves this teenager looking at a photo he had in his pocket, the camera will zoom into this photo and the picture will begin to move showing happy memories for his childhood. For this we wanted to have happier music with a high pitch that gives the feeling of laughter and enjoyment, to go on the top of this we wanted ambient sound of birds tweeting, light wind, dogs barking and children laughing as these are all things you accept to hear whilst at the park. 

30th January

Lesson 9 + 10
Our task for today's double period was to write a 25 word pitch for our main coursework task, Amy and I realised to do this we needed to have a plan for our coursework so first had to discuss this. We spend the first 15 minutes of the lesson watching the opening to a Pixar film "Up" 

and decided we liked the idea of time passing in our title sequence. So we decided our main task would involve two different generations of people and someone would look back at the past after a tragic event  had struck. After we had sorted this, we were able to get back on task and write our 25 word pitch, I found this quite easy to do and we done this relativity quickly. Our second task was to create a mood board containing text, fonts, colours and images, due to our set back at the start we were unable to finish this in the lesson so we need to complete it outside the lesson this evening. As Amy and I were not together we both looked for pictures and I send ones I found to her, which she joined with hers and created the mood board. I found most of my pictures from Tumblr. 

This is our finished mood board. The Images on the left are in colour to illustrate his happiness, and one the right it changes to black and white to show his emptiness and unhappiness. Although the girl died of natural causes, the coffin was a good image to show someone died, despite suggesting drugs were involved. 

27th January

Lesson 8
Today Amy and I were able to film all the footage for out preliminary task. We thought it would be quite hard to find people to agree to be filmed but luckily two people from our class offered and so we able to film straight away. 

As we could only film in the school we found it difficult to make it look like a home, and also we think there will be people talking in the background of the film as there were classes going on around us as other people working in the same room we were filming in. Half way through our filming we noticed that we kept opening and closing the door so we are worried that this will not line up when we edit it, this is something we can improve during our main task. When we were filming our over the shoulder shot, it only occurred to us half way through to do all the filming from the same angle at the same time rather than following our storyboard in chronological order, because of this we found it hard to match up the angel each time and it wasted a lot of time. Unfortunately we ran out of time to view our footage so have to wait until Wednesday (1/2/12) to see if we have everything. 

26th January

We had planned on filming today, but unfortunately this was unable to happen so we rescheduled, and will do this in our study period tomorrow (27.01.12).

25th January

Lesson 7:
Today Amy and I finalised our plans for our preliminary task and sorted out our props. We are planning on filming our sequence outside the lesson tomorrow (26.01.12). This has been quite hard to organise as we needed people to have the same study periods as we did so they could be in out film. 



Props
Plane Ticket. (I designed this on paint, and transferred it to Microsoft Word to print, first I had to research what plane tickets looked like, the one circled in red is the one I used as a template)

This is what our finished packaged looked like: inside we put red tissue paper as the tickets looked silly just being at the bottom of the box by itself, as the box was a bit big.

24th January

Lesson 6:
Outside the lesson Amy and I had thought of ideas for our preliminary task, we decided we liked the idea of the audience not knowing who sent the parcel, but the receiver clearly recognizing the name of the sender. It took us a while to think of what would be inside the parcel, but in the end we decided a plane ticket was a romantic idea, and would link with the note on the parcel 'see you soon' as it created mystery about why they have't seen each other in a while. 

Me and Amy started to work on our story board for preliminary task and decided what camera shots we would use. 


We created a scrip as well and also discussed what props we would need to use and who will be in our preliminary film.


Cast
Delivery Guy: Ciaran Pinnell
Miss Jones: Evie Anderson

23th January

Lesson 5:
Unfortunately I wasn't in this lesson but I continued to work on my essay comparing the title sequences. In the previous task I had gone into a lot of detail to help with my essay but I did not want to repeat myself so I tried to think of different things to write. This made it quite hard to do. As I had chosen different genres it was easy to compare and contrast the film sequences. This task helped me to realise what features were present in all title sequences, such as the main actor names and what things were selective to the genre, such as the type of incidental music playing.

19th January

Lesson 4:
I continued to work on my four title sequence annotations, the last three films I chose were 'Fragile', 'Panic Room' and 'The Dark Knight'.  Looking at different genres made it easier to analyse the sequences as they all had different things to comment on. 'Panic Room' was the hardest to annotate as it only showed buildings, although I have not seen 'The Dark Knight' it was the easiest to annotate as I was only using the title sequence and not trying to link it to what happened in the film. To upload my work onto my blog, I had to set up a slide share account 

18th January

Lesson 3:
After being set the task of annotating 4 title sequences from different genres of film, I worked on this for the whole lesson. The first film I started to analyse was 'It's a boy girl thing' as I liked the cartoon animation mixed with real life. To start with this was quite hard but then i specifically tried looking at the mise-en-scene, cinematography, sound and editing it became easier. I also updated my blog, by adding the different pages to it.

17th January

Lesson 2:
This lesson we watched three title sequences: 
1. North by Northwest 

2. Spiderman

3. Amelie. 

We spoke about the representations and how they show the genre of the film. We started to look at other title sequences and individually annotated them. Looking at film sequences has helped me feel more confident about making my own as there are so many different ways to do this so I there isn't really a limit to what I can do.

16th January

Lesson 1: 
This was the first lesson based around course work for our AS. I was given an overview of everything involved in the rest of the course, this included recording 2 minutes of the start of a film, which will be worth 60 marks out of the final 100. As part of the planning for this film, I will be required to make a story board and learn how to use the cameras, this is included in the remaining 40 marks. The whole AS is out of 200 marks, 100 of these coming from the exam and the remaining 100 from the course work we are about to begin working on. I am quite worried about this task as I have no previous experience in filming.