Production Log - Week 9.

Week nine of production was the final week of production. My partner and I had planned to film with our actress on Monday, but unfortunately were unable to due to unforeseen circumstances. However, on Wednesday we were able to re-film all of the shots we had listed that needed to be re-done and improved as our actress was available. By Friday, my partner and I had completed our opening sequence as we put in our new and improved shots and used Final Cut Pro 7 to edit our graphics in.

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

There weren't really any key issues for my post-production in this final week. If any thing the only issue was the delay we had as we couldn't finalise our opening sequence until we re-filmed a couple of shots.

What decisions did you make about the issues and why?

We couldn't really do anything about when we could film as it all depended on our actresses availability, therefore we just made sure that when we did eventually film, we worked fast and with precision in post-production in order to meet our final opening sequences deadline.

How have you taken into account peer feedback?

After allowing our peers to view our draft opening sequence, they said we should add some more shots into the smash mouth opening and shorten the duration of the current ones to make it more fast paced and to have the audience on the edge of their seats right from the start as it would raise plenty of enigmas within the audience. My partner and I took this feedback into account as when we re-filmed some shots we also filmed some new shots to include in the smash mouth opening and when editing we reduced the length of all of the shots in the smash mouth opening.

Why we decided to alter our narrative when in production.

My partner and I when filming decided to make some changes as we realized that some elements in our narrative just did not look good.

Old narrative (used in treatment)

(http://lorellethompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/treatment.html)

"We will start our sequence with a smash mouth opening in a non-linear format. It will begin with Leah packing up the few clothes she has in her backpack, as she is doing this she receives many texts from and unidentified male asking of her where about. She ignores these texts and calls and packs even faster. As she is leaving her room, a pregnancy test drops from her bag. As she leaves her flat she bumps into a neighbour who questions her about where she is off to with a bag like that. Leah takes out her earphones (listening to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncWv9YYop8I) hears her neighbour, looks back but ignores her and carries on walking increasing her pace. Neighbour shouts 'oi, Leah', with no reply from Leah she shouts again, 'well fuck you then'. (over the shoulder shot - deep and shallow focus). Jump cuts to her walking under a subway, towards the train station. Jump cut to arrival at station as Leah asks an assistant how much the fair is to Stratford. Assistant replies '£4.60', Leah says 'aright thanks'. She then goes to sit on a bench to count her coins to see if she has enough change for the fare when a male whispers in her ear, 'did you think you'd get far?".

Altered narrative (final)

We started our sequence with an establishing shot of Leah's flat and shortly accompanied it with a smash mouth opening of her running into her flat, in the same non-linear format that we had planned in pre-production, but with a few trivial changes. We used a series of short fast paced cuts in our smash mouth opening to highlight Leah's panic as she frantically packs her bag with clothes from her chest of drawers, wardrobe and a few toiletries from the bathroom. When packed, she runs back into her bedroom, closes her bag and takes the time to explore the result of the violence she previously experienced on her face (match on action with previous shot). After this, Leah then bends down to grab her bag and rushes out of her bedroom, grabs her keys and letter then hurry's out of the door. However, during all of this chaos Leah doesn't realize that the letter did not stay in her pocket as it had fell out, leaving it behind.  There is then a short close-up of the letter. As Leah leaves her flat turning into the street her neighbour comes running out behind her, yelling 'oi Leah'. Leah takes out her headphones, looks back at her neighbour but ignores her and carries on walking. Leah's neighbour takes offence to this non-reply and shouts 'well fuck you then!'. The neighbour then turns around in frustration and storms back into her flat (audio overlap). Leah is then on the bus looking out of the window. This then cuts to some hand footage - a point of view shot showing Leah's perspective as she is cautiously watching her phone and looking around the bus. The next shot is a an establishing shot of a subway sign. Leah then walks through the railings heading to the entrance on the subway. She then turns into the subway. The next consist of three jump cuts showing the same continuous action of Leah walking through the subway.

Why we decided to alter our narrative...

We decided to use a static establishing shot instead of a pan as we said we would in our shooting script  (http://lorellethompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/shooting-script.html) as we felt the pan didn't compliment our restricted narrative as it seemed to drag out the action, when we wanted to dive straight into the action (smash mouth opening). However, we wanted to keep an establishing shot of some sort to show the audience the environment in which our main  character (Leah) lives in order to portray the theme of poverty and class (working class), also to highlight the fact that she does not lead a glamorous life which increases the verisimilitude within our film. Moreover, in the mise-en-scene it is conventional of British social realist films to use locations such as; council flats/estates, etc. We also changed the duration that we planned to have the establishing shot on for in post-production as it looked visually better to have a very small duration of 2.5 seconds instead of 5 seconds. The shots of Leah packing her belongings in the smash mouth opening were reduced to a minimum of 2.4 seconds ranging to 4 seconds as we felt that the pace of these shots were very important in emphasizing her rush and need to leave. We done this change in post-production in an attempt to raise enigmas within the audience, for example; why is she in such a rush? who is she trying to get away from? what is she running away from? In the next shots we decided to use match-on-action from Leah closing her bag, rising up and removing her hood, to the next shot if her facing the mirror and seeing her beaten face. We decided to use match-on-action here instead of a cut as we wanted the audience to stay connected to the action and feel Leah's pain, hence why we decided to have a smooth flow through this match-on-action into a long take. This close-up of Leah looking at her reflection in the mirror is a long take to emphasize the extent of the violence. Another change we decided to make was the change of prop from a pregnancy stick to a pregnancy results letter. We done this because we felt it would be a wasted of money to buy the pregnancy stick and we'd need a pregnant person to urinate on the stick to gain a positive reading, therefore it was an unrealistic idea in the first place. We chose to use the letter as we felt it raised more enigma codes within the audience as it seems like an important prop as she enters the flat with it and tries to leave the flat with it but it drops. The close-up of the letter shows that it is of importance and it reveals what the content of the letter is. The next few shots in our film consists of the only dialogue that is heard in the opening sequence and none of this dialogue comes from our main character Leah, instead it comes from her neighbour which supports the theme of isolation in our film as Leah keeps herself to herself. The neighbour says, 'oi, Leah' this is the first real introduction to our main character as the audience learn her name and are a step closer to knowing a bit more about her disposition and her life. The fact that Leah ignores her neighbour, shown through a close up of Leah removing her hood and headphones connotes that she is in her own world as she seems out of touch with everyone around her also connoting that something is wrong in her life or possibly trying to hide something. We decided to use a close-up to see Leah's face to reveal her cuts and bruises more clearly, which could also connote the reason why she decides to be isolated. We included some shots of Leah on the bus to show her journey and how lonely and confused she is feeling. One of the shots is a mid-shot of her looking out of the window as the bus is passing some more council estates. We chose to include this shot as it conveys the theme of poverty as working class people tend to live on council estates - like Leah. This shot also shows the themes of escape and aspiration, as Leah is on the bus almost trying to leave and escape her old life on a council estate and escape from the clutches of her violent boyfriend. She is trying to escape these things because she aspires to live a better more fortunate life away from all of this poverty and danger for her unborn child. In addition to this shot on the bus we added a point of view shot showing Leah's perspective as she watches people on the bus, showing her confused state of mind through the shaky hand camera work and that she feels as if she doesn't fit in with society. In our final narrative we used an establishing shot of a subway sign, we done this to show the audience where Leah is going (to the train station) and to break away from Leah's action for a few seconds. The next shot is of Leah entering the subway, to do so she has to go through some railings similar to the concept of a maze. The railings represent the life in which she is imprisoned in and as she is going through them it shows her attempt to escape. We then have a long shot of Leah entering the subway to allow the audience to see the back of her to show her luggage and the Newbury Park station sign to show her locality and to emphasize her need to escape. The last shot is of Leah walking through the subway, we used some jump cuts to speed up her journey and to emphasize her isolation and confinement in the narrow subway. We felt that this supported the connations made in our title - Maze and our restricted narrative, therefore we put the graphic of the title over these shots. We then decided to have Leah walking out of the subway and into the train station just to make it very clear that she is trying to escape from her normal everyday environment and the people in that environment.

Production Log - Week 8.

In the first lesson this week my partner and I continued editing our footage. We had to finish cutting and repositioning a couple of shots. When this was complete we started paying attention to more detail in our opening sequence. The only piece of dialogue heard in our opening sequence from a character comes from Leah's neighbour. In a couple of the shots we decided to use an audio overlap as it is very conventional of the British social realist genre and we felt it worked quite effectively in our opening sequence. Looking more into detail, as we see the neighbour coming out of the flat behind Leah, we decided to edit the dialogue coming from the neighbour in the audio overlap and make it quieter as it was better for the sound perspective because there was quite some distance between the two characters.



In the second lesson this week my partner and I put in the song we decided to use composed by a friend of mine - Camille Andrea titled 'O.V.E.R', (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncWv9YYop8I). We had to pay a lot of attention to detail as we had to cut the song in a range of places to make the audience think it was diegetic music that Leah was listening to through her headphones, this took a lot of playing around with the volume of dialogue from the neighbour and the actual song.



In our third lesson of the week we had 15 minutes at the beginning of the lesson to complete our draft opening sequence. After this 15 minutes my partner and I had to showcase our opening sequence to the other pair in our class, based on or draft opening sequence they gave us some feedback on what was good about our current opening sequence and what we could do to improve it. We also watched their opening sequence and gave them some feedback. The feedback we had received was constructive criticism, as well as some strengths of our opening sequence so far. My partner and I were very appreciative of the criticism we gained as we felt it would help us produce a good final opening sequence along with a better grade.

In the fourth and final lesson of this week of production we listed all of the shots that we needed to re-film based on the constructive criticism we received, we also discussed what shots we had to remove due to the amendments we were making.

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

The key issues for my post-production this week were figuring out how to extract the audio from a clip of our footage to place it elsewhere, over other clips to create an audio overlap.

What decisions did you make about the issues and why?

After playing around with different tools and options, my partner and I learnt how to extract the audio and managed to do the audio overlap we intended to do.

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.

Call sheet 2.

Production Log - Week 6.

In the first lesson this week our teacher let us look at our finished treatments and make any amendments that were necessary.

In the second lesson this week we were given the lesson time to finish of our shooting scripts as they had to be completed by a certain date.

In the third lesson this week we had to start following our production schedule, therefore we had started looking at different styles in which our graphics/credits would be written in. My partner and I done some extra research into these styles by looking at a range of styles from the website 'Dafont' (http://www.dafont.com/). After selecting 5 styles we favoured, we evaluated these styles by discussing what connotations they made in relation to our films narrative. We then made a decision and chose a style that we liked, explained it and justified why we chose it. (http://lorellethompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/possible-styles-for-our-british-social.html).

In the fourth lesson this week we downloaded the font/style (N&D from http://www.dafont.com/) we had chose to use for our graphics in the previous lesson. My partner and I downloaded it to the software programme 'LiveType' a programme developed by apple inc. This was our first time using this sofware and therefore it took a while for us to adjust to it as we usually use Fireworks to create our graphics. However, our teacher felt that this software was better for the production of our graphics as it offered a wider range of tools specific to the production of graphics. This programme was soley created to produce animated title sequences, thefore it is a programme that specialises the resouces to create graphics, so it was perfect for us. After a while of practicing using this programme, we eventually got the hang of it and it became easy to use and we could see the differences in Fireworks and LiveType. We found that LiveType produced graphics that were more effective. By the end of this lesson my partner and I had produced our title credit 'MAZE' and our directors credit.

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

The key issues for our production this week was just learning how to use the new software programme 'LiveType' as it seemed like a very complex and difficult programme to use to create our graphics. It appeared to be very complex as the layout of this programme was very different to Fireworks which is what I was used to.

What decisions did you make about the issues and why?

My partner and I decided to proceed in using this new programme 'LiveType' to create our graphics because after much trial and error we actually started to prefer this programme, as it had a range of tools in which we could use to produce some very conventional graphics for our British social realist film.

Possible styles for our British social realist film's graphics.