Evaluation Question 7: What have you learnt from your preliminary task to the completion of your final piece?

I can say that I have definitely learnt a great deal from my time on this course since my preliminary task was created.

For starters, My continuity is much cleaner than it once was and I believe that I have learnt to properly identify where a continuity error has arose, as such the most notable use of this was my choice to cover up an error found in the characters placement between scenes with a line about an anonymous phone call leading to another shot of a phone booth. As you can see I mapped out what the problem was once I noticed it to illustrate the problem to my partner and we came up with this solution together as a team. This is quite a strong contrast to my old lazy attitude to continuity editing from my preliminary task, for example, in my original piece me and my original partner decided that it would be interesting to have a foot level shot of the character walking past, however, it didn't go as planned, we didn't actually notice the problem at first until it was pointed out to use by another individual. Originally we had the character walk from one scene to another, which was simple enough, however, we accidentally broke the 180 Degree rule to its greatest extent as the character walked to the left and emerged from the right, breaking the understandable flow of movement. To fix this issue we simply flipped the first frame but it could have been a lot worse if we were near a sign or something else where this would have been easier to see.

In realistic terms, this makes doesn't fit in with the
context of the story

Secondly, I believe my skills as a script writer have improved to some degree, I believe that I am getting better with the way I wish to show characters attitudes in film as my preliminary task was somewhat lacking in focus, indeed, the characters seemed very over the top and indeed very cliche, for example, the ending to the film itself is the main character turning to the camera and snapping his fingers to enter the title sequence, while it may have looked cool at the time it doesn't make any contextual sense and thereby makes it so that the entire piece is no longer believable, realistic and by that aspect absolutely pointless. In 'False Impression' we kept a much cleaner script with simple realistic dialogue moments where possible, we kept the dialogue realistic, occasionally delving into a bit of mild humor.

Scene Creation was a wonderful experience for
me and my team

I believe that I have developed a more creative sense of mind during the editing of these pieces, the most prominent of course being a new found trust in certain canned tools like warp stabilizers and the use of new and varied fades and dips, my original piece just stayed as a simple cut to cut style and it suffered greatly because of this. In connection to this I think that I have been a lot more creative in general camera use and certain effects, most prominently in this aspect are my use of Lighting, my low angle shots and my new found use of a moving shot as well as a stronger use of pans to really mix the piece up a bit to make it more exciting and interesting to view.

Indeed some of my most important things that I have learned stem from my having to work with a partner on this piece, In this sense, compromise and understanding have been a strong part in my learning cycle as I have gotten to know my partners style and genre skill just as they have learned mine.

I believe I have amassed a good bit of experience in this course which I hope to exercise entirely in the A2 Course greatly.

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

There are of course a number of things that I believe I have learnt during my time constructing this product, Firstly I would like to talk about what you can't see in the final piece before moving on.

Firstly, I have began to use a number of different media outlets as well as having planned to use certain ones in my evaluation. One of these particular outlets was of course Podbean, Podbean allows its users to create their own podcasts with ease as well as having a free reasonable 50MB of storage which was useful. On the other hand, I have also been given the opportunity to use Prezi Presentation software after it was recommended to me by my partner, and whose use in our Product Presentation was indeed useful.


Moving onto to technology that directly affected the content of the film, I have been utilizing the Full Adobe CS6 package frequently in order to achieve a number of interesting effects and fixes in our piece. Most prominently featured in our piece is the Film Dissolve effect between cuts, which fades the scene from the darkest parts first, then the lightest, giving it a very 'Cinematic' effect. The original piece we constructed had a number of shaky camera shots, but you'll notice that in fact the shots are actually rather smooth, this is because we utilized Premiere Pro's Warp Stabilizer tool in order to blend frames in a way that gives a much smoother movement instead of a shaky appearance which looks awfully amateur.

In terms of Hardware and tools we had a number of special items at our disposal, The most obvious being tripods but we also extended our scene's stylized look with some additional tools. One tool Being our Opteka X-Grip Portable Stabilizer which helped to reduce the shakiness before we finished the touch up with the Warp Stabilizer tool. Another key player in our film equipment was our use of a 160 Bulb Stage Lighting piece, It allowed us to brighten up key areas that were just too dark or unsuitable to work with, The Opteka stand also had a built in tool to allow it be attached. We accompanied the light with an orange filter to match the lighting coming from the orange drapes in the room. Finally, we have our final piece, I had managed to get a hold of a Blue Snowball Desk Microphone in order to do the voice over for the end scene, the clearer sound quality makes it more understandable and without it, we would have had to use a much lesser graded mic.

video001 from David Smith on Vimeo.

In general, I have learnt a great deal about technologies, I believe that they can be used to both enhance a piece but also stylize it properly, How you use technology can be a real saving grace at points and while I may be sad to see Analogue equipment being used less and less I can still really get behind the new technology of today, In the future I hope to use a number of different pieces of tech that interest me including green screen effects and possibly even tracks for moving shots.

False Impressions Equipment from David Smith on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 4 and 5: Who would be the audience for your media product? How would you attract/adress them?

video005 from David Smith on Vimeo.

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 1 : How does your piece use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Originally during the construction and planning of our piece we considered a wide variety of ideas, quite a lot of these ideas were direct influences from films including roles, setting choices and style. Other ideas used were created by me and my partner to tailor the piece more to our own styles.

The most notable use of existing conventions we could find in our piece was the idea to set the story around the detectives as found in many films in the Crime/Thriller genre including more recent films like 'Red Dragon' (2002) but also extending back down the line to films like 'Donnie Brasco' (1997) and 'Serpico' (1973). 

Serpico (1973) 

Once we had decided on a concept fully however we decided that we would actually prefer to have two main detectives, the main inspiration of this of course being David Fincher's 'Se7en' (1995) because of the strong and always interesting conflicts and relations between the two characters and how the audience can get a sense of enjoyment in watching these two connect over time, witness the struggles they face as a team rather than being individuals and truly understand how this case stumps even the mind of an experienced official, never mind a new one. Essentially this is also the grounds for our choice of dialogue between the two as we thought that it would be important to ground in the fact that these two have a strong bond, hence the light humour found in lines such as "You must be Cross" "You would be too, sir".

Other Films that also inspired our choice for two detectives include films such as 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The French Connection' for notable mentions, yet 'Se7en' had the strongest influence for this setup out of all of these choices.

However, while we may have taken the concept of having two detectives from 'Se7en' we deviated from it in some pretty strong ways. For Example, in 'Se7en' the two detectives meet together yet it is Brad Pitt's younger character that is seen first and indeed acts as the main character overall, Morgan Freeman's character tends to act more as an moral conscience to Pitt's actions. In our film we switched this concept to some degree as the first person we properly focus on is the older detective because we believed his role as an elder granted him much more respect. In this aspect we can express how the underlying theme of our film is the concept of Age and how being a young spry individual does not necessary make you more capable in matters of the mind. In addition to this the final use of 'Se7en' as an existing convention was the visuals, we really wanted to make our crime scene seem dark and dingy as well as having our victims on display to some degree though we left out the proper reveal of the body to the opening credits to make sure that the audience was really seeing what was happening.

The Crime Scene itself was something that we really wanted to develop to make a little more Realistic, with ample opportunities for the audience to really understand what was happening, hence my partners suggestions of adding in a series of shots of the crime scene to use as a title sequence, something that I had already been fairly interested in doing from the start because of that methods exceptionally interesting use in the film ‘Red Dragon’ which I had researched closely before the films production. I felt that it really helped establish the situation and also add additional context to the issue that wasn’t necessarily found or shown in the piece prior to the credits. 

Our Film generally likes to stick to the safe guide rails in terms of conventions to potentially follow a more safer and successful role amongst other product, However, we have still expressed some creativity through a wide variety of creative shot styles and little dialogue quirks to make it more stylized.

Interview With Writer and Cinematographer of 'False Impressions'

Writer and Cinematographer Interview from David Smith on Vimeo.

For part of our course we were required to take part in an interview for our piece, in said interview we discussed a number of issues about our piece and some of the tones and conventions based it on aswell as out opinions on a number of issues.

General Evaluation of Piece

Final Cut of Film

False Impressions from Amy Washbourne on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/88865887
I will Follow this video up with a conclusion in a short while

Important Aspect of Re-editing the Piece

Because of some of the continuity errors in the piece and indeed problems concerning some of the lighting, I believe it would be in our best interests to re-shoot portions of the piece, both the fix the continuity and indeed also boost the shot quality of the piece. In Addition to this the most major change to this piece will be the placement of the credits as they will be placed at the start of the piece instead of being placed at the end, this allows us to use an actual title for the film instead of omitting one from the piece.

Improvement Proposals to Piece

Above is a list of proposed changes to the Piece. I will use this as a guideline for the most part and will refer to it when editing my piece. I will attempt to describe how I will be changing things in the piece to create a better cut in brief here, but I will also clarify once I have created an edit to one of these items in the Blog as usual.

Comments on Proposals:

I whole heartily agree with these statements in full and I would like to go through them to maybe clarify my mistakes and why I may have made them, essentially this would help me to understand how I managed to make these mistakes and avoid them in the future.

First off, I think the reason why I misplaced the studio logo was simply because I didn't clarify to my partner well enough that after I made it, that it would be placed second, Because I made it second, we accidentally placed it in based on the order we imported them in without having enough thought put in. In addition to this most of the credit choices we made were in fact misplaced, this was partly due to a misunderstanding concerning how long the credits would be, without thinking to clearly we attempted to put as many credits within the piece, not essentially which ones were the most important, leading to a lack of order. still concerning credits, I think that we made the credits longer to string out the end sequence but a better method for this could be to include more pictures or even relating to my research in the film 'Red Dragon', the inclusion of newspapers could also be effective.



The Continuity Issue:
Caused by accidental
movement of the cast

Secondly, In the music aspect, we had some trouble in editing the song to see where the best fade out would be, consequently, we thought that maybe a fade wouldn't work well in the scene, However, after some consideration after reading this list, I think that maybe if the song starts sooner, we could fade before my character enters the main crime scene if we overlayed it with the sound of crime scene ambiance, the addition of which would give us something to allow the audience a strong audio transition into the scene.

The Continuity factors of this piece seem inconsistent and I think we could benefit from a clean cover over our footage to make the footage tighter in a sense. I personally have issues with the shot reverse shot factor between the two detectives while walking because of both where they start and the general shakiness of the camera, It isn't a huge issue, but I really think that we are probably going to re-shoot that scene just for the sake of a cleaner look. As I have illustrated the main problem for the continuity we accidentally created, was that the characters start closer to the set item in the centre of the room, while not expressing any time where they have moved between the shots, disorienting the audience as a result.

The gap at the end of the piece was an unintentional mistake while rendering on my part and it was simply a minor error that can easily be fixed, however, the gap after the narration was intentional to create a sense of seriousness, as if the information was relevant and required processing, I think that can be edited into a better shape however and I will be doing so accordingly

The Props for the piece, were something that my partner was very proud of and I thank her strongly, she was in fact the main contributor for these items and indeed was the one who came up with the suggestions for what our characters were going to wear during the piece.

Finally, I very much agree with the last comment, the credits with the crime scene photos would in turn give the film a much more interesting start, essentially it has the opportunity to create some high quality impressions from the get go, instead of what is essentially a plain black text title, It would help the audience to grasp the aspect of the film as well as it would indicate from the start the theme. While the original piece proposal didn't include a film title, I have some strong ideas for a title now, involving typewriter fonts, in addition to newspaper style credits to give the film a slightly rougher style.

In total, the film isn't a lost cause in any sense from what I have seen, I think that given our time frame we have plenty of opportunities to clean the piece up a bit and maybe develop a few more shots to give it more variety, while my partner is absent today, I'm sure she shares many of my concerns and also has her own ideas for improvements which I will gladly develop with her as she develops mine.

 

Rough Cut

False Impressions from David Smith on Vimeo.

This is our first rough cut for our piece, False Impressions, to save time we decided to use a placeholder for the actors names, they would essentially be placed in the sections of each picture that have the most room, e.g. tape on doors has room on both the top and the bottom of the screen.

Production Company Title

• For the production company title at the beginning of the movie before the Momentum films logo, I have created this indent for us to use, as you can see the name of the company is RisingStar Entertainment but what you cannot see is that this is also accompanied by a wolf howl that Amy is adding.

Creation of a name for the Film and Age rating change

For the films's title we have decided together that False Impression is a strong title to use, it is quite closely related to the piece story after all, the killer is constantly deluding the detectives, Giving them "False Impressions".

However, on a more important note, we have decided to up the films Age classification as well to a 15. We are well aware of the reduction in the box office result due to the less open nature of its ticket sales, but it would be dangerous to keep it at a 12. In terms of the BBFC guidelines, the exposure to gore would be safer in a 15 than a 12. As the story continues the Murders would get more violent and it would be difficult to keep a clean shot as a lot more blood would be visible, and indeed the concept of mutilation would be brought into play.

Choice of Location and Characters and relation to Research

The Location: The location of choice was originally going to be a warehouse, I thought that many in my research a number of locations are rather rough and industrial. Batman Begins for example effectively uses this effect. However, along with the key issue of finding such an area in addition to recieving permission to use it, I found that a House as a crime scene can actually be done rather well. as it has been in films such as 'Se7en', Given that two of the more gruesome murders took place in 1. An apartment block (Sloth) and 2. A suburban house (Gluttony). The story would also carry on to show murders of an increasingly violent, disturbing and confusing style later on in the film and that would essentially work as a inpromptu time frame, that if the detectives couldn't figure out the case the next would be increasingly horrific. The murder aspect essentially gives the film its crime element while the time frame idea gives it that strong pacing found in thrillers, essentially working against the clock.

Characters: As it stands there are two main characters in our piece, Both of which are detectives yet one is older and more experienced, not only was this idea concieved from yet again, the 'Se7en analogy. But more specifically, from my Skyfall research, I found that two main characters that vary in style and attitude can be rather refreshing for a concept. In 'Skyfall' Bonds Reckless attitude conflicts and contrasts with that of Moneypenny's, yet that is rather interesting in itself, the audience is treated to two different working styles, and the fact that both characters have their own pro's and con's in our piece, the concept would lead on to Alex Cross, the younger detective, finding difficulty stomaching the Murderers MO and why he would commit the crime he has. For the older detective the concept would work around him discovering how innefective his police force is in handling this case, which in turn would lead the two to work outside of the normal box of thinking.

On the spot weather problem solution

 

Giving the camera a fashion makeover allowed us to take it outside without its feet getting wet.

Keeping the proposed 12A Rating

Concerning the BBFC's Age Guidelines I think that our film would sufficient follow the following guidelines:

Discrimination- Discriminatory language or behaviour must not be endorsed by the work as a whole. Aggressive discriminatory language or behaviour is unlikely to be acceptable unless clearly condemned. Next to no language of this sort is actually present in our piece, it is essentially rather clean. No violent behaviour.

Drugs- Any misuse of drugs must be infrequent and should not be glamorised or give instructional detail. No theme of drugs is actually present in the film.
 
Horror- Moderate physical and psychological threat may be permitted, provided disturbing sequences are not frequent or sustained.  The scene with the dead body isn't sustained much. Only lasts for an incredibly short while, Pictures found in the credits are mildly disturbing but are balanced out with visual breaks of items such as newspapers
 
Imitable behaviour- Dangerous behaviour (for example, hanging, suicide and self-harming) should not dwell on detail which could be copied, or appear pain or harm free. No such visible behaviour

Easily accessible weapons should not be glamorised. No proposed weapon to avoid such a claim

Language- Moderate language is allowed. The use of strong language (for example, ‘fuck’) must be infrequent. Barely recognised use of the word 'Damn' but that barely scratches the limit

Theme- Mature themes are acceptable, but their treatment must be suitable for young teenagers. Themes are kept reasonable and do not exceed this limit.

Violence- Moderate violence is allowed but should not dwell on detail. There should be no emphasis on injuries or blood, but occasional gory moments may be permitted if justified by the context. Sexual violence may only be implied or briefly and discreetly indicated, and must have a strong contextual justification. Violence is something that is lacking in this piece, this shouldn't be an issue

Set Breakdown From Sundays Film Shoot

G:MVI 0202 from David Smith on Vimeo.

Narration

The last portion of our scene involves a portion of Narration, I will be recording that later on with my Blue Snowball Microphone and Audacity, I will then transfer the files to a USB Stick and then we will be able to add it to the proposed scene of time lapse.

Edit Starts Today

Today we are going to start the edit for the footage we have recorded, the order we are going to do this in will be:

1) Assemble the First Scene
2)Add in the Ambient noise
3) Record the Narration for the end of the First Scene
3)Create the Credits and attach them to the Assembled scene
4) Add the Music for the credits
5) Check continuity