Thoughts
The trailer is about a divorsed father who thinks he has mind control. Everything goes to chaos and he doesn’t know how to control it, turns out it wasn’t him doing it after all
Idea development
To come up with our ideas our group brainstormed on a shared word document.
Most of our inspiration was taken from a horror film made by students at All Saints College last year. This gave us the idea of horror except not a movie but a trailer as we were pressured for time.
For our group it was hard to discuss feedback with our teacher as he was away most of the term with a new born baby. So we gave each other feedback in our own group and did what we thought was the better idea. Our idea did look good in our heads but when we filmed it was completely different to what we visioned. In one sentence our idea for the trailer was that the father of the daughter thought he had special mind powers, as it was discovering them he accidentally crashed is bosses car and heaps of bad thing happen, but really the daughter was controlling these powers. I think that the Brainstorming phase was effective, we made a story board and everything which really helped, but the one thing we didn’t follow was our script, I am not sure how much better off we would have been with it since not many people say anything in the trailer.
Pre-production planning
The word document that we started with was collaborative, we used it to through all of our ideas on it for a horror film. Once we agreed on all of our ideas, we grabbed two big bits of butches papers and drew our story board. These documents were beneficial to our process as it helped to keep the story in line and helped to make sure we got all the shots and none that we didn’t need. And finally we got to our scripting on a online program called Celtex. I did not find the script to be overly beneficial, but it did give us some ideas one what to say. Sadly, I don’t have a digital copy of the story board but I do of the script and planning page.
Technology
- The technology I used were
- Cannon 200d mark II – used to film
- Cannon 750D – used to film
- 32gb 80mb/s SD card- used for capturing and offloading footage at high speeds.
- 18-55mm lens – used to film most mid shots
- 55-250mm telephoto lens – use for getting the character large while running away from the camera
- 20mm Prime lens – used for close up shots of the face
- Mr. Hamilton’s high-end Laptop for fluid editing and quick rendering
- Rode caster pro for recording the voices of the daughter and the father over the top of the black screen and the news report
Using Mr. Hamilton’s laptop was able to speed up the process with faster loading times and higher reliability. The rode caster pro was great for capturing great sounding audio that we could edit and play around with later. One thing that didn’t go well was keeping the prime lens in focus while moving the camera was difficult as it did not have an auto focus function.
Through the process of film making, I learnt the different lenses and what they are correctly used for and working under time pressure. I also learnt how to do work arounds with a scene in my trailer. We were supposed to use green screen and use a car to get a shot of the father having road rage at some one who cut him off, then have a car explode in the front wind screen was way to hard to do with Mr. Hamilton away the time we had to complete the project. We also had people away and some people had to change the characters who they played including me. Most of these things are unpredictable so I don’t believe there is anything we could of done differently.
Editing
I edited my project together Using Premier Pro. I first started to find footage and put them in folders according to the different scenes then I made a good video folder and put all the good shot in it before I began piecing them together.
In premier I used the
- Snip tool
- Select tool
- Constant gain
- Constant power
- Dissolve
- Speed of video
- Feather
- Opacity
- Color changer
- Am audio effect in adobe audition
- Gaussian blur
Just to name a few
I used Audition to edit my audio for the tv scene to make it sound like to was coming from at tv and not from another person in the room.
Most of the editing went well, I even self-taught myself how to turn of a source overlay on the video editor screen. Some of my group disappeared off to help other people film but I found that helpful as it made it easier for me to concentrate.
Something I could of done differently was check my emails more as I missed some important details. If I had time I would of gone into aftereffects to make Jasmin’s eyes glow red to help give the hint to the audience. Also I think it needed to have some music in the scene where I loose my job and used a mic to improve audio. I noticed some of our shots to where slightly over exposed and where different brightness’s in the same environment. One thing that I am sad about is that I kept forgetting to send an email if I could use a drone to record birds eye view of the chase seen.
How I could Improve
In After effects I would have made her have red eyes to indicate to the audience that she was the main cause of the plot and events of this movie
In this seen music was required but I had difficulty thinking for a good song to go here. I believe this seen needed a song as it was a part of a series of problems that would happen in this film and it was a important thing to the character. In this scene as well bens head has been burred as I have added gaussian blur around the edges to help make it look like a dream that the character is having, although it does look good when ben is sitting down.
In this snippet from the trailer and the one below you can clearly see that the exposure was different in the same room in the same scene. In high production films this would be a major problem.
This is the chase seen which I was hoping to use my drone for to capture an interesting angle that no one else would have had in their films. This would of also shown the distance that the characters traveled in the chase.
The best part of our production is definitely the chase seen, this is because of all the different elements that I included int the edit such as music, flashing in between scene quickly to a certain sound in the music, sound effects and flashing too a black screen and the video quickly a few times to build suspense. This all came together very well in the end. Things that were needed to be improved were our acting skill event though this is about media and production but I am also still interested in making it look good. Mostly the story line of the film once we put it together because it did get a bit confusing in the end. I learnt looking at a different way to do something when the first option wont be able to work. Something that I would work on next time is try and do what is realistic in the time that you have because most of my ideas were big but not achievable in the time that we had.
Below is the questions I answered