Friday 27th March

We re-filmed and edited the end part again. The continuity is much better than before and i along with the other members of my group are much happier with it. Unfortunately one of the member's of our group was absent today as she is ill, so we had to alter the scene with the three girls so that it was just two girls. We also had to cast another boy as the original boy was not avaliable. Despite these set backs the piece went well, looks more professional and although it doesn't necessarily follow the storyboard exactly it works well. We will try and get some feedback on the new ending over the weekend and failing that from other media students on monday. We will also be completing our evaluation presentation using the new feedback that we have gathered. I will also be posting my own personal evaluation over the weekend.
Here is the finished product:

Wednesday 25th March

We burnt our preliminary and final pieces onto a disk today and got audience feedback. The feedback was generally positive but frequently when asked "What do you think we could improve?" the general opinion was that the end section was not perfected and lacked continuity. We knew this all along but felt that it wouldn't have such an impact as it did.
Here is the original:


As you can see the editing on the end is very choppy and lacks continuity. We were conscious that our mark may have been pulled down due to this, especially as it was so obvious to the audience.

Monday 23rd March

We have finally found a suitable song from an unsigned band called "GoodbyeStereo" and put it in our piece. We found it and downloaded it courtesy of musicglue.com which allows unsigned bands to get their music distributed worldwide through the use of free MP3 downloads. The song is indie but is bouncy enough to suit the genre, i particularly like the effect of the build up to the chorus and how it fits with the action on screen - the chorus kicks in as the two leave their houses. Another accidental thing that i really like is the way the lyrics "paint your lips red" coincide with Jessica putting her lip gloss on in the mirror. I feel a lot happier with the piece now that we have this new song as the song from garage band was too repetitive which made the intro seem very long. I'm still a little unhappy with the editing of the final couple of shots but i think that is more down to being a perfectionist. The piece overall is good, and i feel it suits the teen comedy genre but with a British twist which is aided by the use of the song from the British band "GoodbyeStereo" and the references to British pop culture such as Jordan and Peter.

Refilming, Editing and Audience Feedback

Today we refilmed the last scene of the girls talking outside the school again today because the original was too jumpy and didn't flow well. After editing the result is much better although i am still not entirely happy with the very last shot as it doesn't quite fit with the shot before. The rest of the film introduction is good and i am very happy with it. The storyboard wasn't followed completely because we realised that it would be unfeasible, some of the camera angles written down and drawn looked wrong when filmed so we had to change some bits. We also began writing our audience feedback questionnaire which we we all get people to fill out upon viewing our film introduction. For next lesson we will all be trying to find a song which fits our piece.

Wednesday 18th March

We spent a lot a lot of time looking through unsigned and copyright free music but still do not have a song which i think suits the piece. We decided to put a song from iMovie but i still dont feel it suits the piece so we have all been researching a song which we think would suit it at home in preperation for tommorows lesson. We have also decided to refilm the second part of filming because the continuity is still not right and want our piece to be the best it can be.

Monday 16th March

In todays lesson we were looking for music for our piece but unfortunately did not find any which we thought would suit. We are looking for a song which is poppy or pop rock because they are the genre we have seen in a lot of teen comedies, however it is difficult to find an unsigned or copywright free song that suits the piece.

Friday 13th March

On Friday we began editing the footage we had, the majority of it fitted together well. However there were some problems with the continuity of some scenes, we improved this by cropping the scenes so that they fitted together better. We also solved the problem i mentioned in an earlier post where the fence was visible in the background by cropping the size of the shot down and deleting the part where she leaves through the door so that you only see her pick up the bag and leave the shot. We also came across some problems with the scene involving the "popular" girl's friends as a car was driving past when we filmed, making the dialogue more difficult to understand. So we re-shot these scenes, however one of the characters who was in one of the original shots that needed re-filming was not available so we had to re-think the shot. By changing camera angle we did not need her to be in the small part of the scene. After adding in the new scenes the continuity of the scene worked a lot better. We also added a fade in from black to the beginning of the film with the film title "Best Enemies". We decided to use font and text colour to reflect the film's narrative, putting "best" in pink girly handwriting and "enemies" in a sinister bold red font. The contrast of these two fonts and colours reflects the conflict between the two girls stereotypical girly friendship and the ruthlessness of the actions that take place later in the film. I think the lesson was very productive and that we managed to create a very good 2 minute introduction to our film. In Monday's lesson we will be sorting out any final editing and finding a song that will suit the introduction.

Filming - 11/3/09

We got all the major filming done yesterday, i was very impressed with how quickly and efficiently we worked. We stuck to the storyboard initially with the scenes filmed in the home, however we deterred from it slightly when filming the school scenes due to the unpredictability of the scene (e.g. other students etc.). The majority of filming went well and the home scenes i believe will edit well. However, some of the school scenes may lack continuity but we will not know until we edit. Also when viewing the home scene where "the geek" leaves the house after filming, we realised that it lacked continuity with the scene where she leaves through the front door as the door is different and a fence can be seen through the window so unfortunately we will have to re-film it.

finalising storyboard, cast and shooting schedule

9th March 09 - Today we finalised our ideas and began casting some people to be in the film intro. However, we were coming across problems....it was difficult to find people who wanted to be in the film and even more so to find people who were all free at the same time. We eventually decided that it would be best to act some of the parts ourselves to ensure that we had reliable and would work to task. We got one of our group member's close friends to play the remaining part for the same reasons. We then drew up a shooting schedule and cast list. We are hoping to get all the filming done in a couple of weeks, 3 weeks maximum.

Storyboarding

In todays lesson we began storyboarding our piece, as we had already discussed what would happen in the intro this was very straight forward. The only things we did have to discuss were camera angles and camera movement.However, we didnt really disagree over this so we finished our storyboard within the hour. One problem we did come across was estimating the time for each camera shot as we have little experience with filming so cant estimate accurately how long a scene will run for. When we did attempt to estimate the total time for out intro exceeded two minutes which may be too long for an intro. Despite this we arent going to change any of the camera shots as we could have estimated the times wrong. All the scenes in our storyboard are very straight forward and are only in three locations so should be fairly simple to film.

Wednesday 4th March

In todays lesson we presented our pitch. I feel that it went well and i over came my fear of talking infront of people. We ran through the pitch a few times before presenting it,so it flowed quite well and we all had our own specific area about the film to pitch. We covered everything required of us in the pitch so i feel it went very well.

Slideshow

Here is our Slideshow for our film proposal:

Opening Of A Teen Comedy

View more presentations from lauren12345.

Continuing planning

Today we mostly continued with the planning, we finalised our ideas and put them into a powerpoint in preperation for our pitch to the institutions. It all went very smoothly as we generally agreed on the portions of planning that were remaining. We worked together on creating a script for the opening and came up with a name for our film "The best of enemies" which is perfect because its short but tells the audience the basic storyline of the film without giving too much away. I will post the powerpoint pitch which has all our planning on it in the next post.

Friday 27th

We began planning our film piece and came up with some great ideas, however we all settled on one which i am very hopeful about. Using research we had done previously we began drafting an opening, characters profiles and the story line for the film in preperation for pitching our piece to the institutions.

Our idea is based on the classic teen comedy: the main characters are a popular boy, apopular girl and a geeky girl and the events in the film revolve around slightly slapstickhumour but come to a moral at the end of the film, which is something we nboticed from both British and American Teen Comedies. We decided to stick to conventional character types as teens can both relate to them and they have been popular in previous films. We didn't have a lot of British teen comedies to base our piece on so we primarily based our story line on popular American teen comedies. We noticed that a lot of British teen comedies were set in boarding schools, whereas most American teen comedies are set in highschool, by setting our piece in a college we feel the film will relate to the "everyday" teenager more than other British teen comedies. We are still going to keep the film British by incorporating everyday British life into the film.

In Monday's lesson we will be drafting up a script for our opening, finishing character backgrounds and our storyboard. I feel this will be very straight forward as we worked well and efficiently together on our preliminary task and in the other aspects we have drafted for this piece.