Evaluation Questions and Power Point

1.       In what way does your media project use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real made products?

War as a genre isn’t the easiest to talk about. Compared to other genres there isn’t scope to create something new and different. The war genre is restricted to parts of historical events that have happened and to go into wars of the future would then be considered as sci-fi. What I have done with my introduction of my war film is to obviously use as many of the conventions as possible to match those of a real made product however I introduce the story with one character on their own, normally in the war genre it is about comradeship and a band of brothers but with this I introduce only one character in the woodland lost and psychologically damaged.

 My inspiration for the idea of a single soldier running was from a short clip in Band of brothers which I talked about earlier on in my blog. With my introduction I wanted to get a sense that this person isn’t really getting anywhere. I wanted intense running scenes. I also admired the use of editing in terms of saturation and the contrast, the gritty effect adds to the atmosphere for the audience.

Attention to detail is very important and the way they are portrayed. The 2007 film Atonement starring James McAvoy is a good example of my main character. I picked my actor because of a certain look he has. Blue eyes blond hair and that the British look is why I chose him. Make-up was important the character has to look tired and dirty so that it gives connotations of the character living outside in the open, seeing a lot of action and a lived feel. In terms of costume I have done research on everything they wear during the second world war. Everything has been thought of you can see my footage at the bottom which closly matches whay James McAvoys character is wearing (might be slightly different because of the few year gap in which my film and attonement is set). The costume consists of 1940s officers battle dress with shirt and trousers, ammo boots, beret, 37 pattern web set including water bottle, badges on arm of the paratrooper brigade, Lee Enfield rife etc. The costume has been thought of and is historically accurate which is important because you want the audience to believe the time period of the 40s and be sucked into that world. Audiences enjoy attention to detail because it makes the film more realistic and believable. In my introduction I cutaway to a type writer and documents that I pan across.

The main focus of my introduction is to have opening credits all I am giving away about the story is when it is set which is the Second World War and the single character I am introducing. The panning over documents allows me to use it for putting credits over so I don’t interrupt the scenes the character too much. I don’t have any reference to the idea of panning over objects it was a creative idea that I had which I thought would work and it did because of the composition which flows through to the whole opening.

Evaluation questions 2 4

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Evaluation questions 5 7

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The Courage of Men

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In the editing room with Jordan Reynolds

In the editing room putting the project together, i am working on final cut Pro instead of express. It has a slightly different layout but still similar. Its nice to see a project come together seeing the idea form, very rewarding.The first stage of editing was to upload all of the footage selcet the ones needed draging them onto the time line and create a story. Its improtant to select the right shots and make sure the shots are well framed and work.

In this screen shot you are able to see the comparison of before and after editing. The original footage is well framed but i wanted to create the cinematic film feel and also make the footage look gritty and dark. I did this by adding contrast lowering saturation and having a letter box effect over it. 

This is where I put a letter box over the footage. There is a setting that once the film is finished you can render in a letter box effect however this squashes the footage I wanted to crop in a bit so using the crop function in motion I cropped the top and the bottom by 10 which frames the footage making it look alot more pleasing to look at.

This is Colour Correction 3-way it is a brilliant way of controlling all of the colours. So there are 3 different colour circles. There is one for blacks mids and whites, some of the shots needed to be edited using this but mainly i used the saturation bar and lowered it to just over half way from middle to full saturation.

I added a audio file for music in my piece. It was hard finding royalty free music and i wanted a instrumental piece, either violin or piano. I looked at Mozart and Beethoven, in the end i found a great piece by Beethoven called string quartet in c sharp minor which is a violin piece that suits the mood of my opening.

I created the title on Live Type. This was my first time using Live Type, at first its difficult but once i messed around on it i understood how to get what i wanted from the program. Basically its similar to editing footage because of the time line set up. I wanted the title to be clean cut so fades in and out with a quote from William Shakespeare which is conventional with the war genre to have a famous quote about war, death etc.

Post Production

The Set

Update

Problems that Occurred

There has been a few problems when production started. The first was one of my main actors is in Dubai for longer than he first thought. The deadline for filming and production is the 4th of January  however he will not be back until the 10th of January. This poses a big problem, how I am going to tackle this is to have him record the narration that is needed (see screenplay) and send the audio file and that will get that out of the way. There are a few scenes in the flashback that I intended for him to be in so I am either going to wait until he is available or get one of my other actors to take his place. Another problem is that another two of my actors are away for a week of the Christmas holidays which is another inconvience there is nothing I can do about that so i will have to film on a weekend when they are back. Actors what are they like!

Good News

Filming stated on the 23rd of December and went very well, i managed to get all the shots i needed for that particular part of the opening. I will need to pick up one of the shots because the camera picked up some unnatural blues which were noticeable to myself I will need to check the footage again to make sure. I viewed each shot through my laptop onto my LCD TV via a HDMI cable, pure HD goodness. All the shots were crisp and worked it was pleasing to see that something in production is going very well.

Something I found slightly difficult was shooting the running scenes and making them  look good, on the day I wore footwear that was appropriate for the weather and condition of the ground but not for running with the camcorder with the actor.I think i need a few more close ups

I had about 80 shots that day in the end and there is still about another two days of filming left so I should have plenty once I start editing, just want to make sure it is perfect, its looking good so far so please keep viewing to check for updates

Jordan Reynolds

Production