Storyboard

Make Up Design Sheet

The image above was our research and example of how we would dress the zombie up and the image below shows before and after shots of how we achieved this look.

Recce Sheets

Film Outline

Textual Analysis Grids

8. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Since our preliminary task we feel like we have come a long way in terms of developing skills as we have improved upon certain areas which significantly improved our final film.

After the preliminary exercise we completed various recce sheets for our two locations and we found that this really helped with limiting jump shots in our film as it outlined where the 180 degrees line was going to be and it helped us establish various rules to remember such as the 30 degrees rule.
The exercise also taught us in particular to watch our composition carefully and to consider things such as the rule of thirds at all times. This was as in our preliminary task a couple of shots weren't steady and they were either out of focus or things weren't kept in line for example straight lines were at a slight tangent and the camera would shake halfway through a clip.
However, there was one clip that was executed extremely well and we were actually so pleased with the outcome that we included it in the beginning of our final production.

The image above to the left was taken from our final film and is positioned much better than the image to its right (taken from our preliminary task). It is kept in a straight line and the bars don't block of her face, which is the main purpose of a close up shot, to feel unnaturally close to the actor/actress and close enough to see how they're feeling.

We have also learnt from our mistakes which weren't made during the preliminary exercise but in actual fact were in our first shoot of our final production which in hindsight was a real eye opener as far as continuity is concerned. This occurred as an actress accidentally left a torch (that wasn't in use at the time) in the shot and we didn't check the scene at the time to make sure that it was clear of any unnecessary items. It was only when we came to edit our shots that we noticed this mistake and this is when we had to re shoot and we became even more organised then before. We were also very careful when it came to the lighting in the first shoot as the two torches we were using for extra light sources ran out near the start of filming which left us with very little light to work with. Although this looked fine on camera as soon as we uploaded the film to the Mac we realised that the lighting looked a lot darker than we expected. After this, we made sure in future re-shoots that we would always charge the torches up for hours before we started filming and we also ensured that we used too much light rather than too little as we could always darken it when it came to editing on iMovie by altering the brightness and contrast effects.

The screen shot to the right was darkened considerably here and also the contrast was increased too darker the image even further and to make the blood more visible. In our opinion, this made the film look more effective than our preliminary task as it was all one colour with the same lighting but adding more/less darkness can also add a sense of time to a film sequence.

Our improvement in organisation definitely helped us as we could keep on top of what shots we needed to do, what time we needed actors to come round to do their hair and make-up, what we needed and how we made fake blood and what shots we needed to shoot/re-shoot (This was also helped with our shot list however our lists helped as we added in extra scenes as our project progressed which weren't included on the shot list). We also made sure that we shot everything at least twice just in case one has a minor fault that we didn't notice from playback on the tape but it becomes apparent once it had been uploaded onto the Mac.

**An example of planning and organisational skills before shooting some scenes.

Other skills that we have just generally improved on since our preliminary task was that when we start to film everyone would silently count from 1-3 before the actors would start to act and from 1-3 again after the shot has finished to ensure that we didn't miss any action by cutting the shot too shot. We figured that it would be better to have a lengthy amount of film which could be edited quickly then to have too little film and have to spend hours planning and re-shooting any scenes that missed something. We also feel that since our preliminary film we have improved our camera skills by using a variety of shots and angles to make sure that no clips became too long and consequently boring and we hope that this somewhat contributed to limited jump shots and gave the film a fast pace.

We would also like to think that our technological skills improved and aided our film making and editing skills from our blog, Garageband and iMovie. Blogger wise, we have learnt how to make the most of using the space to carry out research regarding colour schemes, target audiences, help to post any articles/websites/links/trailer/clips that we found and that we could keep coming back to, which continuously inspired us throughout our production.

Adding links helped us refer back to trailers/statistics
useful websites etc.

Regarding iMovie, our knowledge has helped us to make jump shots more seamless, helped to lighten/darken and contrast shots to achieve correct exposure, helped to re arrange and shorten shots to make a structured narrative. Finally, the last technology that we used to improve our film was sound, something which we could not include in our preliminary due to lack of time. Through Garageband we learnt how to find different sounds, shorten/lengthen and even loop these tracks and how to add different sound effects and pieces of music and overlap these to create a solid, suitable piece of music for our chosen genre. We also learnt how to adjust the pitch of this music, how to pan sound from one earphone through to the other and how to record our own sounds, or to record our own soundtrack.

Increasing the volume from high/low and looping.

If we could do this differently we would perhaps like to have another person in our team, as we felt the workload was quite tough when it is just down to two people compared to other groups that had 4 members. If we had to improve with just us two together then we would definitely make sure that we were aware of the final deadline from the start so we could plan accordingly which this time we were not aware of our deadline was fast approaching until 2/3 before. This meant that although we were pleased with our end result, our soundtrack could have been better if we had planned more appropriately at the start  as we spent more time updating the blog, planning our film, producing it and editing it than we worked on the sound.

Overall, we believe that our preliminary task was purely experimental- some shots worked and some didn't and due to lack of time there was no time to film outside of college, out of lesson time or to re shoot.  This resulted in us always allowing ourselves time to plan ahead and to never leaving filming until last minute, just in case we need to re shoot one more scene. As it was sprung on us we improvised and as a consequence didn't perform as well as we could have as if we had have time to think through, perhaps make a shot list or storyboard and this contributed to our good organisation skills throughout our project. When we originally started to edit this task we had never used iMovie or Garageband before and our effects, transitions and sound were very limited and we hope that in comparison to our final film we have come a long way.

7. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Internet:

The Internet was very helpful during the making of our film. It enabled us to do a lot of research, for example, target audience research, genre specific research etc. It helped us make our film more effective and realistic as a zombie horror film. For research into zombies, we had access to websites such as Youtube(http://www.youtube.com/), which allowed us to watch trailers and clips from other zombies films to inspire our film. It also help us determine the key characteristic of a zombie horror film, for example the dominance of the colour red and the darkened scenes to increase suspense, all of which we tried to include in our horror film making the end result as a zombie horror more effective. 

 

Another website that was essential to the making of our film was imbd (http://www.imdb.com/) This was very important, for when we were establishing our target audience, it enabled us to see what kind of film we would be doing and the type of audience we wanted to target. This helped us cater our film to our specific target audience and therefore making it more effective as a film overall.

Print screening, this is very help tool when doing research, and wanting to document it. It allowed us to save an image of the web page we wanted making easier to carry out research and write about what we wanted on our blog.

Blogger:

Blogger overall was very helpful during the making of our film. It allowed us to document and write about things we wanted for our film.

The main feature of blogger that enabled us to write about what we wanted was posting.

While writing a post we learned key skills that enabled us to add more to our blog, such as:

Adding Videos:

Adding videos to out blog was a very important part to making our film, it made easier to view videos that related to our film, for example, trailers. This helped us a great deal as it made it easier to view we could look at the videos more closely, seeing the key characteristic of what made a zombie film and applying it to ours. This also helped us exhibit our work, films that we shot and films from previous exercises.

Adding Images:

Adding images to our blog was also important to the making of our film, it was very similar to the way videos helped us in that it made it easier for us to view images of zombies, and look at the details and make of a zombie characters so that we could apply similar details, for when we did our zombies make-up. It also helped us to document our progress, for example, designing our zombie. Step by step images of how we did our zombie make up.

Links:

Links were very helpful as well, even though we didn't use them as much as we added videos, putting links in made it easier for us to visit different websites, that would help us make and plan our zombie film.

Tool Bar:

The tool bar was very helpful when publishing posts on our blog, it enabled us to highlight,

Make words, bold, italic, or underline them, change colour and re-center. This made it easier for us to distinguish between what was really important and it also helped is colour coordinate, to make things easier to read and understand.

Blogger also made things such as organization much easier as it labeled things in date order, making it much easier for us to revisit our work. For example, looking at blog entries such as our target audience research, an essential piece of research that we had to refer to many times to ensure that during our film were meeting the criteria for our target audience. 

iMovie:

Overall imovie was one of the most effective piece of technology during the making of our film. It enabled us to edit, add effects, help with organisation and overall helped us produce the best film we could. Helping be more creative with our film and helping us improve the structure and the control we had over our film piece. 

Editing:

Editing in imovie, was a very important process to the making of our film, this particular piece of technology gave us more control over making our film. It helped us improve the structure of our film, moving the different clips around to create a more seamless film. iMovie allowed us to cut, paste and crop our film, this made it easier for us to create our film, giving us more control on how much and what we put in our film. Overall it helped us achieve a film that was more seamless giving it a greater sense of authenticity. 

Video FX:

Video FX, was key in the making of our film. It allowed us to be more creative throughout the editing process. Key characteristic of a zombie is the darkened scenes, with the video effects this made it much easier to create a more ominous atmosphere with the film, helping us achieve more suspensful scenes. simply by changing the darkness and contrast of a film.

Clips, Organisation:

In the imovie there was a section where we places our clips from the movie. This was extremely helpful as it helped us to organise our clips more effectively making it easier to identify which shot we wanted and therefore making the editing process quicker and more efficient. 

Exporting:

We learnt how to export our film into an Mp4 file. This was very helpful as it made it easier for us to document our work and add videos to programs such as Garageband. This made it more straight forward, for when we wanted to add a soundtrack to our film.

Recording Sounds:

We also recorded sound for our film, however we choose not use it as we didn't think it was effective when put together with our film. The option to record sound gave us more control of what we could choose the audience to listen to, and gave us more creative power.
we were going to record the squeaking on the window as the zombie was peering through the door, however we didn't feel the sound was very effective.

Garageband:

Garageband was a very effective tool when it came to creating our soundtrack. It enabled us to be very creative when making the soundtrack as it gave us hundreds of different sounds to use for our film.

Editing:

When editing our sound on garage band it gave us lot of control and how we wanted it to sound, for example in some parts of our film there was unwanted sound, so therefore we were able to mute the sound improving the scene. Also we we wanted to create suspense using silence we were able to do it easily, create a more suspenseful scene.

The image above show the little icons that enabled us to isolate and change music individually, overall giving us more control and making it easier for us to make the sound track.

The image below shows the control of how much volume we want, we have made this piece of sound gradual build up so it wasn't as sharp and didn't sound out place when it began. This also demonstrates the control garage band gave us over the making of our film. Making it easier for us to make our film.

The tool bar at the bottom was also very effective as it gave us loads of different sounds that we could have used to create our film. We were given a variety of different sounds and categories, where we were able to personalize and easily find the type of music we wanted

Exporting the sound track was also an important thing to learn as it helped us add the sound to our film with ease making the production of our film much easier.

Garage band also allowed us to easily but the sound together, giving us more control over what sound we wanted to hear first to create and build tension in the scene.

In this image we were able to cut different sounds so we could loop, or change what we wanted the audience to hear. And then ordering them according to how we wanted them to sound, all of this giving us more control.