BFI

On Thursday 2nd December our Media class visited the BFI for a conference. The people talking included Daniel Kleinman, who talked to us about his work on the James Bond title sequences and some of his adverts, and Colin Goudie, who edited the recent movie Monsters. Also there to talk to us was Pete Fraser, the senior examiner for Media A Level, who showed us a few different levels of AS project and showed us a few useful websites, including his own blog for media and a website called Art of the Title Sequence, which has lots of film introductions on  it and is a very useful source for research about a particular genre of title sequence. One of the sequences he showed us was for Catch Me If You Can:

Obviously, this isn't technology we would easily be able to get hold of, but it's interesting to see. The day was very useful and informative, especially Pete's bit, as it showed us what could go wrong with our movies and how easy it is to overlook important things such as good titles and soundtrack.

Update

When I can embed videos again, you will be able to see our thought process behind our video so far on our day of filming. We have now realised, however, that although there's a lot still to do with the editing, we can't really get the higher marks unless we re-film some things. We'll hopefully be able to do this in the holidays, as we have our own equipment that we can use while the year 13s have the school's. This will definitely be worth it, as we can't really progress with our editing until we do it. We're also planning to spend a lesson experimenting with garageband, as we're not sure whether our music is copyrighted or not, and we don't have a way of finding out. We're also going to think a bit more carefully about our titles, as at the BFI on Friday many of the speakers stressed the importance of sound and titles, two things that are usually neglected when people make their AS films. Hopefully all these changes will ensure we get the highest grades we can and make the best film opening we can.

Our day of filming

This is all our flip footage from our day of filming.

Second Draft

This is our second draft. We've now added all of the footage that will be in the final draft, as before we hadn't added that bit. Now all we need to do is cut it down, re-film some bits and make it good. Easy...

Misfits

Misfits is a comedy/drama show on E4, and is one of my favorite TV programs. It's about five teenagers doing their community service after committing various offenses, who then get struck by lightening and develop superpowers. Although the synopsis sounds awful, the show is incredibly well written, and one of its main strengths is that the protagonists are so flawed, yet are somehow more lovable for it. It also portrays young offenders as people who can show compassion and are just people, something that I think strikes a chord with the youth today after we get such bad press.

The first episode of the second series started the other night, and part of the advertising was done on Twitter, with all the main character in the show given their own fake accounts. During the episode, the characters discussed parts of the plot with their followers, and the day after their followers were allowed to ask them questions. This was a really fascinating way of getting the viewers more involved with the show, and was targeted perfectly at its core audience, as E4 as a channel is generally aimed at teenagers to twentysomethings, people who are also likely to be on Twitter.

First Draft

This is the first draft for our movie beginning. We have quite a few things to improve on, for example we need to sort out sound, and we haven't even included all the bus scenes yet, so we'll need to trim the current section down. We also need to decide on the titles and just fine tune a few other things, but as it's early days we'll definitely get all of this done.

Alarm Clock Shots

This is a couple of shots that we did when practicing for throwing the alarm clock. We had Alice and Valentina under the window on the drive trying to catch the items we threw in a blanket, and we experimented with a couple of different objects of varying sizes and weights before using the clock for the final thing.