Production Log - Week 7.

In the first lesson of this week my partner and I continued to make the graphics for the opening sequence of our film 'Maze' using Live Type. We found this very engaging as we could play around with different fonts, colours and sizes until we eventually found the perfect look for our graphics that was conventional of the British social realist genre.

In the second lesson, my partner and I were allowed to leave school at break with the permission of our teachers from the media department to film the final few shots for our opening sequence in Newbury Park, a location that is a 10 minute bus ride away from our school.

By the third lesson of this week of production, my partner and I had filmed all our shots. So in this lesson we uploaded all of our footage on to the apple macs which took a short while. Once this had been done, we started organizing the footage. We reviewed all of the shots and chose the best ones that we will use in our film and deleted the rest. But because we filmed most shots multiple times to allow us to have choice, we kept two of each shot so that we had back-ups in case anything went wrong and it would save us time rather than having to upload all of the footage again.

In the fourth lesson this week my partner and I started post-production properly as we started putting our footage together in order. We done this first to clarify that we definitely had all of the shots we needed to produce our British social realist film. When our shots were in order, we started to cut the shots in accordance to their importance and what the length of each shot would signify to the audience, also keeping in mind the time limit on our opening sequence (2:00).

What have been the key issues for your production/post-production this week?

In post-production, when me and my partner put all of our shots in order we found that we exceeded the duration of 2:00 almost tripling it. We were very concerned as to how we were going to shorten our sequence to just under 2:00 to also allow time for graphics. We felt that as we did not have many shots in our opening sequence it would be impossible to cut the shots enough to reduce the current duration as we thought it would force us to cut out a lot of key features in our opening sequence and possibly have to remove shots.

What decisions did you make about the issues and why?

We decided to cut all of the shots in our opening sequence first before making any rash decisions and as we progressed in pre-production the duration of our opening sequence was reducing, because my partner and I worked through each shot thinking about how long its duration should be and why? Asking ourselves the question; what effect will the duration of each particular shot have on the audience? For example, our opening sequence starts with an establishing shot which is then immediately followed by a smash mouth opening. The shots in our smash mouth opening are very short as we wanted the main character - Leah's actions seem very fast, frantic and panicked. This was to raise enigmas within the audience, like; why is she in such a rush? Who or what is she trying to get away from? Where is she going? Etc.