29th February

Lesson 25

Today we started to look at the clips we had filmed yesterday, some of them were rather successful, but others didn't look very good, so these might have to be re filmed. We seem to be missing a few shots so need to check the camera to make sure we transferred them. After looking at the clips, I realised how bad I was a filming as I kept letting the camera tip, despite it being on a tripod. Amy and I also discovered that we had filmed things differently, when they were meant to look the same. 

28th February

Lesson 24
We uploaded our footage onto the computer which took most of the lesson. Whilst this was loading we learnt how to save our preliminary task as a video and tried to upload it onto the blog. At first we tried to do it directly from blogger, but was instead told to use vimeo. When we first tried to upload it onto this website it wouldn't work as it was in HD so using up too much memory. After we decreased the quality it worked a lot quicker. I am gradually getting used to the apple mac computers and becoming more confident in using them. 

27th February

Lesson 22 and 23
The majority of our lesson was spent travelling to our filming location, we are behind with filming due to problems with the weather but we have no control over this, but decided it was not a good idea to have the setting outside considering the time of year. Our filming took a few hours. The shots with the children took longer than the rest as they found it hard to understand what we wanted. When filming we discovered that the children weren't similar to the the teenagers so we used a pepper pig watch to make this more obvious.

I found it difficult to film and me and amy had interpreted things differently which made this harder. I think my filming skills have improved from the preliminary task and I feel more confident using the camera, despite using a different camera.  

22nd February

Lesson 21
In the lesson we made the funeral program, but forgot we needed a picture to put on this, so we are hoping that we can edit this on after we have filmed. As neither of us had been to a funeral before we didn't really know what a funeral program looked like, so we looked at templates online, but the school computes had blocked all the sites that would have helped us with this. We decided that as it was child it would probably be colourful rather then dull. 

We had planned on filming today, so went to our location with our actors and the equipment and props we needed. Unfortunately it was raining and by the time it had stopped, the ground was to wet and it was beginning to get dark. This has caused us further delay and the earliest we can try again is monday, but the weather forecast doesn't go this far in advance to check the weather. 

21st February

Lesson 20
We had nothing specific to do this lesson so we started to create our story board, and transfer the photographs we took so we both had them. We tried to get the photos onto our storyboard but couldn't figure out how to do this. We never managed to work out how photo shop works, so decided to do the storyboard at home. We typed up the remaining of our location recce, and questionnaire so we could start to gather results. 

20th February

Lesson 18 & 19
We were scheduled to start filming today but Amy and I realised we are slightly behind in work so decided it would be a better idea to use these lessons to catch up. We planned our questionnaire

 and found a template to use for our photo board. We also completed our location research, remembering things from when we were there yesterday. The questionnaire was quite hard to write as we didn't not know if to make it suitable for our film or more generally, in the end we decided to make it for our film. We wanted to keep it short, so more people would be willing to answer it, completed it was 10 questions long, not including personal details. 


We finalized our actors:
Callum Harris = Sam (teenage)
Christopher Saunders = Sam (child)
Amy Holmes = Emily (teenager) 
Louise Cole = Emily (child)

18th February

 Today Amy and I went to our filming location (Danson Park)

 to take pictures for out story board. The actors who had agreed to be in out film were unable on this day so we used other people. We also took the location recce with us to complete. The photos took about an hour to take, we found it was hard to make the people look natural together when they weren't actually a couple so this might be a problem when we are filming out final film. We also weren't able to find a little girl to be in the photographs as we planned to do them at the last minute, but will find someone when we do our actual filming. We used a Nikon DX to take our photos. 

10th February

Lesson 17
Today we watched a documentary about the sound in 'Casino Royal'. I found out it counts for 50% of the final product, I found this interesting as films during the 'silent era' had no sound, but were popular. From the documentary I learnt that even little noises , that I was previously likely to ignore, are important. Although the clip was about a James Bond film, so was very large scale and everything they done was too advanced for out film, like the car crash foley sound. It was useful to illustrate how important sound was.

8th February

Lesson 16
Amy and I began to write a draft risk assessment for when we film our main task. We were told to focus on four main areas; risks facing the actors, crew, location and equipment. We found this quite hard to do as we could not think of any sensible likely risks, so starting thinking of situations that would never happen so we had something to write about. We're planning on typing our assessment outside the lesson. 

7th February

Lesson 15
We didn't do any individual work in today's lesson but instead we were told about the course work in more detail, being given more information about how me are marked overall and told briefly about the seven stage evaluation we will need to complete by the 20th April, along with the rest of the coursework. We started to work on our audience research, and had a group discussion about questionnaires. Our questionnaires needs to be mainly psychographic, but a few demographic questions are needed, such as age, gender and postcode. We started to talk about what type of questions to use and briefly looked at the strengths and weaknesses of these. 

6th February

Lesson 13 and 14
Amy and I were doing different tasks during these lessons but we both contributed to both. I wrote the props list for our title sequence, and Amy checked that we didn't need any additional items.

Amy was writing our story board, at this time we have not decided if we are going to draw this or use photos as Amy is the only one who can draw so I won't be able to help with that part of it. We were also meant to write a shot list, but realised we had incorporated this to the storyboard so Amy is going to type up the information that makes up the shot list.
Whilst doing this we noticed how part of out script will be unrealistic to film so we made a few changes so the weather will not affect what we are doing. 

5th February

Today I typed up the script we had written in the previous lesson, adding extra detail when I thought it was needed. It was then emailed to Amy so she could read it and add anything she thought was missing. 

I also started to analyse the two sound recording I had recorded and looked at what music would be best for our sequence from the four examples we had already narrowed it down to. 

3rd February

Lesson 12

Before today, Amy and I didn’t really know what we needed to put in our script as there is no dialogue in our title sequence so we found it quite hard to begin writing one. In the lesson we were told that we had to describe exactly what we could see, so this made it easier. We stated to write what we wanted our sequence to look like, making some changes as we knew we would not be able to film them. We wanted everything to flow and our sequence to show a string of memories that connect in some way, so we used ideas such as running behind trees and zooming in on hands and then zooming out to show that the people had aged. 

We are finding it hard to find teenagers and younger children that look alike so it is clear that they are the same people so we were thinking of them both having an item, such as a bracelet, so it is obvious they have just aged. We also tried to listen to the sound clips we had gathered to incorporate into our sequence but they would not transfer from a windows format to the mac so we need to complete the work on them outside the lesson.  

2nd February

Today we were able to transfer our video from the camera to the computer. This was the first time we had seen the footage so didn’t know what it would look like. Most of our shots turned out okay, but a few did not lie up. When we were editing out video we realised that whilst filming we had not matched how far open the door was and at what height the package was being help, because of this we had to cut out a close up of the package being passed from the delivery man to the girl as it was being held too low down and didn’t match the previous shot. Whilst filming the camera turned off and we did not realise this caused a shot to be lost, so we did not have any footage of the girl saying thank you and closing the door, we also had problems following the delivery boy walking away with the camera but forgot to re-film this so he suddenly vanishes from the door whilst it is being closed. Despite our problems we managed to edit the whole of our sequence so it is roughly 50 seconds long.

We also started to plan the script for our main task and realised we needed more memories to film and that we were going to have difficulties showing that it is the same people they have just aged. 

1st February

Lesson 11

Our aim for today’s lesson was to upload our film onto the computer, but unfortunately the camera we needed to use in order to do this was in use by some other students so we were unable to do this. So instead Amy and I discussed what sounds we needed to make as extra from yesterdays post we decided we needed the noise of a big group of people in general conversation, and cars driving past. We aim to record these sounds this evening and tomorrow.