Further Evidence of Planning our Evaluation Tasks

Although all of our Evaluation tasks have now been completed, here’s some evidence of how we organised them. Below is a screenshot of an email that I sent Esther containing some brief notes and initial ideas on some of the evaluation tasks. Given the limited amount of time we had to do these tasks, we began immediately, managing the little time we had effectively by sending each other our initial thoughts on each task- thus saving time when it came to typing them up. Esther sent me some similar notes in response for some of the other tasks, and when we next met up we collated our ideas, expanded on them and produced the Evaluation posts that we have on here now. This was a simple way for us to organise our ideas, acting as evidence of how we began to plan for these momentous tasks and manage our time effectively!

Planning when to work on our Evaluation Tasks

This is a screenshot of a note regarding the time we have reserved to work on our evaluation tasks. We have 5 lessons (5 hours) worth of class time to complete these, and have reserved ourselves 3 extra hours of extra time in case we do not finish our evaluation within these hours. if need be we can fit in extra time to work on our evaluation together at the weekend, but hopefully this should be enough time to get all eight of our tasks completed.

FINAL CUT

This is the final cut for our AS Media coursework. Since the last final cut we produced, certain small changes have been made to our film opening, as can be seen here. This is the final version of our work.

Overcoming a Disastrous situation

As you know, filming our final cut took place on Monday evening, as this was the only date which we could get our child actress (Willow) to film for us. Although myself and Esther were fully prepared for filming, and the actual process of us filming went without a hitch, as we managed to get all of the shots we wanted (minus the camera dying half way through our filming), we had one rather large problem. This occurred once we had started filming with our camera, a Canon which we had hired from school. After taking a few shots with this camera, we watched back what we had recorded and noticed there was something inherently wrong with what we had filmed, everything had a yellowish tinge to it.

Given the fact we had filmed in daylight, with the blind in my room open for our rough cut, we thought that perhaps this issue might be due to lighting, as filming our Final Cut took place at night. In order to attempt to resolve this, we adjusted the lighting, with the dimmer switch in my room, also seeing what it looked like when we added extra lighting from lamps, torches, fairy lights etc. After doing so, we soon realised that the problem we had was not due to the lighting in the room but due to the camera itself.

Having used a Nikon to film last time, we were slightly ignorant to how to fix the Canon camera; nevertheless we both attempted to google our issue in order to look for a resolution. We tried the Canon website help page and looked at several Youtube videos amongst other things in order to help us, but to no avail. Eventually we decided that the best thing we could do would be to go ahead and film our piece and hope that we could alter the quality of our filming once it had been uploaded for editing. This is what we continued to do, working in  to the night to re-shoot our film opening.

The next day, I went in to school to upload the videos from the camera SD card to a computer and begin to piece together our final cut on Adobe Premier Pro. Once i had uploaded all of the clips to the computer, to my dismay we noticed that their quality was no better than it had been whilst we were filming. Again, I tried to resolve this by playing around with the filters Premier Pro offered, in the hope that by adding filters to our filming it might appear more naturalistic and less Yellow. However, this also did not work and I began to loose hope, as when looking at what we had filmed I noticed that the shots did not only have a Yellow-ish tinge to them, but they had a grainy quality and were often out of focus.

As soon as our Media teacher entered the school, I asked him for advice, spending a further hour and a half trying to resolve the problem. Eventually, Esther was able to meet me in the Media department, and the three of us contacted the School’s technician via text to ask if she was aware of what the problem was. Luckily, she was able to help us and inform us that there was probably a problem with the camera settings. We then sent her images of what we had filmed in both our rough and final cuts, from which she further identified what the issue was, informing us that it was an issue with the white balance of our camera.

Despite all of this being extremely helpful, we still had a further problem- we could not restore the footage we had already shot, nor could we find a date when Willow was free to film it all again before our deadline. Thus, we had only one option, to use the shots we already had of our child actress from our Rough Cut, drafting in some parallel editing to our piece of the child’s mother, which would be shot once I had fixed the camera

Filming Our Final Cut

After receiving the feedback from our rough cut, we thought it would be a good idea to begin planning for our final cut straight away. This is something which would be filmed in our Easter Break, meaning that much of what we had to organise would be done via text. Below can be seen a few screenshots of the text messages sent between us.

The conclusions of our communications meant that on Monday I went I to school to pick up a SLR Camera for myself and Esther to film with, alongside a tripod and camera charger in case the camera died during our shooting. I then went home and began to prepare the setting for our filming and organise the props, before meeting Esther, Willow and Harry (who was accompanying Willow) later on in the evening. The images below, show the varying steps I took to set up for our final cut alongside some images of the props we used.

Whilst preparing for filming, I had a checklist with me which I used to ensure that I had the right props with me and that we would be ready to film as soon as Willow, Harry and Esther came to my house. To ensure Willow would be ready for her role as the protagonist in our opening, we texted Harry to check that she had a change of clothes suitable for the role with her.

When everyone arrived, filming took approximately 4 hours, as we decided to re-shoot the entirety of our piece, adding in a few extra shots to our shooting script. The reason filming took so long was because the camera we had ran out of battery half way through filming, and thus we had to wait for it to recharge before we could continue filming once more. While filming, we got Harry to take a few photos on my phone of the process.

After filming, we began to plan when to come in and edit our video, choosing Thursday as the best time. On this day we decided we would come in to school to start the editing process and also to rerecord the voice of the bear.

Time Management, this week

This is another picture of the Media Lab sign in sheet, depicting all of the times myself and Esther have done work outside of our lessons in the lab this week so far, working on things such as editing of our second rush, collecting sounds from Freesound (as can be seen in the post before our last) and planning our rough cut, which has a deadline set for the 24th of March.

Filming our Second Rush

Here are some photographs that I have taken during the filming of our second rush, depicting both the props and setting which were used. Though what was filmed will not be exactly the same as our final piece, many of the props we have used here (such as the tea set) will be used again in our film opening. Filming this rush has also allowed us to recognise that other props, such as the bear will need to be changed in time for the filming of our rough cut.

Filming for this second rush took approximately 2 hours, with a little extra time to set up the tea table and select the appropriate props, the rush was filmed again on my Panasonic camera, with the aid of the mini tripod. In this rush, my sister acted several times, moving the tea party equipment around accordingly (her face was not visible, and so she was able to act in place of our child actor). Overall, the filming process ran smoothly and many extra shots (other than the ones on our storyboard) were taken, in the hope that we will be able to assess this part of our narrative and see which shots work best when filming the child setting up her tea party.

Planning our Second Rush

Given the fact that our second rush is due next week, we have decided to plan in advance, all of the equipment we will need to film it. Shown below is the plan we made during lesson time of all of the props we will need, who will provide them and other additional things we must remember when it comes to filming this.

Blog feedback

We met with our teacher to discuss our work so far on our blog. We identified which area’s of our blog are successful and where we could improve our blog. This is what we found:

Recent Time Management

This is an image of my media logbook, depicting the recent work we have done during lesson time on both our film preparation and group blog. Given the fact that lesson time we have to work on this project has been cut recently, due to the occurence of year 12 mock examinations, we have had very little time to complete much work within in lesson time. This means that we have had to manage our time very carefully, doing much of our media coursework outside of the allocated lesson period, editing our rush during free periods and lunch breaks (evidence of this can be seen in a previous post of the media sign-in sheet) as well as writing the post on ‘setting/loaction’ from home. Having said this, the work we have done within lessons has been managed carefully, as we have tried to make the most of the time we have and to do as much work as possible.