1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
What genre of film have you made? How does it compare to other films of this genre in terms of structure, camerawork, use of sound, mise en scene and editing? You could refer to your research into other films of the genre for this. Also, does your product do anything that is new, interesting or original? Analyse any of these aspects.

Before starting our filming we had to plan out the storyboard and before that we had to select our genre, there were many possibilities, but in the end we decided to go with action as this would have been unique to all the horror movies our peers were planning. But action was also a hard decision as most Hollywood action films are funded in the millions. so we had to improvise with what we had so we decided to make a chase scene. Instead of having all the equipments, like camera cranes, or helicopters, we instead found a good location and had to work with it as it have a good stand or a establishing shot.

We managed to find a very good fast paced soundtrack which fitted with the sequence and sounded very professional, luckily it was royalty fee. But unfortunately because it was not our movies score so it wasn't made for it so we had to do some audio editing to get it perfectly lined up with the movie.

We also did not have any ‘big name’ actors to our film but we manage to fit in three amateur actors who fitted very well into our movie. We also did not have enough crew members for our camera and editing but instead we had one guy who used one camera throughout our opening scenes and did all the editing using programs like after effects and V-cut Pro. We also did not have the technology that big budget Hollywood films have to edit our film and to add special effects we wished to add. We manage to locate a good location for our chase scene in Castle field, instead of searching around the world for exotic places for our film.

We also managed to get another group to be our associated production for our own productions. Unlike any other film production companies we only managed to gather a few group of people who we intend to be our target audience, instead of having a hundred people watching it in a cinema. We would have loved to have our film to be produced by Universal but with all the low budget equipment and effects, we had thought that this film could possibly only be produced by Working Title.

Questionnaire

When we were finished, we distributed a questionnaire through-out our peers which are our target audience, and returned with an average of 7.9 out of 10

Rush Hour & Hot Fuzz

Contrasts between
Hollywood
and
Working Title

Like the films Rush Hour and Hot Fuzz, Our film has a very similiar way of how the two movies approached and attracted their audiences. Similiarly to both films, our movie has main genre; action and a sub genre; comedy. Both films have their main target audience but at the same they also made sure they attracted different interests. The only main difference between the two films is the organisations they came from. The film Rush Hour has been produced by big Hollywood companies, in contrasts The film Hot Fuzz has been produced by Working Title (UK).

We have thought that our film would be based and produced by working title, for a number of reasons; we did not have any of the technology and equipment Big Hollywood companies have used, We also did not have the amount of budget that we would have hoped for and that we did not have enough actors and crew members.

We also thought that special effects would not be as 'special' or 'brilliant' as Rush Hour. This also helped us to realise that our film is more of a Working Title productions instead of a big Hollywood company like Universal etc. Our film was also filmed in England which narrows our decisions down.

Red Commentary

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

During the production of our 3 films we learnt developed skills in 2 crucial parts of the filming process, the camerawork and editing. After the 2 pre-limenary movies we had become more comfortable, filming and knew which shots would be best for certain scenes. With the camera we found out you could manually change focus to give the depth of field to the main focus, we only found this out in the last stages of the film making though. We also used a tripod wheel attachment to make a tracking shot, but this wasn’t used in the final video because of limited time.

We already had some basic knowledge of Adobe After Effects, which we used in the credits.

But for actual film editing we had to learn Final Cut Pro, as it is the perfect program for it. We used it for audio editing and video editing and in the end compiling into a video file.

Final Cut Pro also has many features that came in handy in our work, like using transitions and special effects, e.g. fades to show passage of time. We also used tools like the splitter and roller, which allowed for easy cutting and lining up of the video to the music. Because we used other software the video ratios and resolutions were sometimes off, but using the video properties we easily modified the video resolution with-in the software. We also used Final Cut Pro to do audio editing as it allows modifying audio levels and sync video and audio.

After doing the first batch of editing we found out that we should always film more of a scene than needed, as you never know when you might need extra footage, because of audio timing or video lining up.

Later on in the production we started noticing that we had more video time than the limit 40 seconds more in fact, so we had to increase the speed of some sections which actually worked well with movie as it was a chase scene. We also had to take out some scenes that we liked to get it to the limit time.

We used the masking feature in Adobe After Effects to make the credits be in the video and interacting with the actors this gives a flare to the credits and making them a little more interesting for the viewer.

After doing the pre-limenary movies we noticed we were using mostly still camera shots, this think of made the movies boring, so we decided to have some first person and mobile shots for the final movie opening to make it more compelling and adding to it as it is a fast paced action sequence. We also noticed that filming this sequence would have been a lot easier if we had the allowance of multiple cameras as we had to repeat sequences like jumping of a tall wall 4 times to get each angle that we wanted, this certainly slowed down the film making and tired out the actors.

In conclusion we have learnt many new abilities via the using the camera and using the post production software, including changing depth of field, special effect credits, various types of shots, using a mobile tripod and many more

Pre-preliminary commentaries

The "Pen"

The "Lift"

Post production work

For Video editing I mainly used Final Cut Pro as this allows easy and fast editing, and the video can be compiled into a good size to upload.
I also had some previous experience with Adobe After Effects
so I used it to give the title and credits and extra flare

I used the Final Cut Pro built-in audio editing software to line up the song with the video making it more effective