Internal monologue Blaines blog

Blaine is somewhat a Shakespeare of today's society, with his very elaborate and extensive range of vocabulary backed up by his some what baffling knowledge we both agreed that he would write the internal monologue script. we both discussed what we wanted the monologue to give to the audience and Blaine then went away and wrote some potential lines for each scene.

Like Blaine said within his post we didn't know how it would sound until we were there watching the film and listening to the monologue but because we had planned everything to a fine detail, the final product sounded great. To view Blaine's somewhat detailed post that shows his vast capability and wisdom with words follow the link below:
Internal monologue Blog post

All footage and sound captured and uploaded

OK, so we have finally captured and created everything that we needed to construct our final short film. The editing has been an ongoing process that both myself and Blaine have been very excited and motivated about, whilst watching and editing all the footage making little cuts here having a spark of genius there, it is really exciting to watch our hard work and effort come together as the final product is slowly taking shape.
Yesterday Blaine and I went on a long bike ride into the wilderness with some newly purchased sound recording equipment purchased by the school (A boom). we wanted to re-capture some of the ambient sound made by the birds within the graveyard. This was due to the fact that on the day of filming, maintenance was taking place and this intercepted the sound quality that we wanted and the over all feel and atmosphere we wanted to create of segregation. We decided to film the birds again and it was very good quality and we are happy that we decided to re-capture the sound.
We also used the boom to capture the voice over of the main antagonist, we wanted his voice to be very clear and dominant within the film so we recorded this sound separately to the film and within a quite location to enable the voice over to be raised specifiably to the decibel level that we desire without any ambient sounds also being increased.

We have been editing some of the scenes as we have gone along the course and now we have a large quantity of the film to the standard that we desire. We will try to finish editing the footage today and then we can also add the voiceover and re-captured ambient sounds to have our final short film finished and to a high standard that we want, before we recieve feedback from potential consumers.

Writing the reviews

When writing the reviews for our magazine article we had to both keep the the stereotypical style of writing that is used within empire magazine which is discussed on my post film review analysis along with the demographics of the target audience that 'Empire' magazine is aimed at.

We also had to write the reviews with the audience feedback in mind which we acquired through our questionnaire. We analyzed the information and the results can be seen upon Blaine's post Quantitative feedback.

To view the review that I wrote in the style that empire magazine uses follow the link below:

My review for our film PENUMBRA

Blaine has done a post exhibiting the reviews that he wrote and the construction process along the way.

To view the two reviews that Blaine created and the process of writing them follow the link below:

Writing reviews

Qualitative feedback poster and Review

Feedback is a vital part in ensuring you have created a product that the consumer desires and that your product full fills this niche. In order to be sure that we have succeeded this, we acquired feedback through a mixed age range from our target audience to give us a great range of answers to our questions.

We interviewed six different people and they gave a range of answers both positive feedback and some constructive changes that could be made.

I have posted three out of the six videos below:

Magazine and poster feedback 1 from Tom palmer on Vimeo.

Magazine and Poster feedback 3 from Tom palmer on Vimeo.

Magazine and Poster feedback 5 from Tom palmer on Vimeo.

The questions we asked we both about the content of the subsidiary products but we also asked questions about the what would be the best place to exhibit both of them. Obviously our magazine review page was already going to be exhibited within empire magazine, but we had an empire magazine there which enabled us to ask questions involving the layout and tone of the review to find out if we had done our job and both written in the style that empire use as well as making our page look like an empire feature.

The feedback was very good and we acquired a lot of potential information we could use when exhibiting our products an which places were best to do so.

We also asked questions involving what their expectations were after looking at the poster and we then asked similar questions after they had watched the film to find out if they thought the poster gave the right connotations or wether they thought they had been misled.

Over all the feedback session was great and both myself and Blaine learned a lot from the feedback and could adjust the products with their constructive criticism comments if we felt it necessary.

Credits

Credits have to be perfect in order to leave the audience thinking that they have just watched a profesinal film. If directors, actors, extras and many other people are not credited within films correctly or forgoten to refence everyone and their envolvement this would give very unprofeshinal feel to the film and would be an insult to anyone that was kind enough to help us in the creation of it.

I decided to create a mock up of some credits that we could potenially use. I say potentially use but the thought never crossed my mind that we would use them because I was trying to create them to look fancy and play around with the effects on sony vegas which is the editing software I have at home.

Half way through I decided I would use them as a DO NOT video in the creation of credits.

I made them look good so they could be used in the creation of other certian products with different requirments. But i also include some mistakes and left out some actors names.

Although I did leave out some names, consumers of the product would be unaware of this (unless it was a very well known main actor) but it is not the consumer that it would seem unprofeshinal to but the actors or technitions ...etc that were forgoten and worked hard aswell as giving their time to create the film.

Below is the video of the credits that we will not be using, because they do not fit the conventions of a steryotypical short film or feature length films credits as well as the mistakes they have within them and absence of actors.

Penumbra credits from Tom palmer on Vimeo.

After creating this video I created a list of everyone that featured within the film that we need to credit as well as a special thanks to Joel for letting us use his soundtrack. These will be the people that are credited within our film:

Starring:
Toby Barrett
George Frost
Eloise Fitt


Supported by:
Martin Palmer
Anne Palmer
Lewis Surridge
Jonny Brown
Victoria Moore
Jamie Reeves
Alex Smith
Conor Murry
Libby O'leary
Daniel knights
Martin Cambell
Jordan Bezants
Lydia Earl
Ben Goulder
Jessica Mills

With special thanks to:
Joel Neilsen
James Wigger

Short presesntation documenting our progress

This is a small presentation made even smaller by the fact that our teacher was using a new HD camera and didnt know how much space there was on the SD card but it is still very helpfull in the fact that it documents some of our progress.

It was kindly uploaded by Richard our technition and to view the video click play below:

PRESENTATION 3 FEB 2011 from fLIX.TV on Vimeo.

Production photos

During production, I have been taking some photos to create a portfolio of the production process and these are just a small minority of the pictures taken which are a preview of how myself and Blaine work on set and how we go from ideas to film.

This is a make shift dolly that I spontaneously thought of one evening, I combined the wheels of this small trolly with some toy car track to make the ride smooth and the shot smooth when we wanted a pan shot of the protagonist in the final scene.

In the end the dolly didn't work on the track because it kept coming off, but we tried it without the track and it worked well. As it was raining i had brought many umbrellas and we were shooting under one of them because we really needed to capture the last scene. We got some very good shots but we are going to have to re-shoot because the lighting changed very quickly which made many shots impossible to film.

This is just an action shot of Blaine filming the classroom scene, it shows SLR camera that we are using. (Got you Blaine) (It also makes it look like your wearing nail varnish)

This is Blaine explaining the scene to the actors and extras in the classroom, he is explaining the shots we are using and then we had a run-through of the script.

This is a picture to give a sense of the scene, but it also act as a continuity image because whilst filming they had to leave and enter the room many times to acquire many different shots and in order to have great continuity I had to record we everyone was sitting.

Finally this is just a picture of the shot list that Blaine create after we had a brainstorm of ideas for each scene. This was an efficient way to record the shots that we had captured and needed to film but whilst we were getting these shot both myself and Blaine were coming up with new shots which we thought would look good at the time and we got many extra shots on each scene that we were filming.

If you want to view Blaine's post on-set organization it shows all of the different shot lists that we used and how we organized each day of filming.

On set organization Blaine's blog

Throughout the production process on set organization has been key in making sure that every thing runs smoothly to a certain extent that is manageable. Because we cannot control the weather some dates which we planned to shoot or even tried, have had to be prospered or re-shot due to the weather, but umbrellas where always on had because myself and Blaine had a contingency plan for if such circumstances occurred.

Blaine has made sure that all technical equipment was working and charged before each day of shooting as well as the shot lists that we defiantly wanted to get but could then be added to on the day if we thought a specific shot would look good and our creativity took over.

To view Blaine's post on our on set organization follow the link below:

On set organization

Penumbra, Short review construction

After Blaine analyzed the results to the questionnaire that we created. I have a great understanding of the content that is needed within our review as well as the layout that people mostly desire. Blaine originally created a potential layout for our magazine but since then we have been discussing the layout and I have researched a lot into the language used within the Empire magazine which can be found within my post Film review analysis as well as the typical layout that is used including unique elements and their demographics.

With images from the actual film, the film release date and a clearly defined rating of the film all ranking in the top answers of our questionnaire, these elements will defiantly be included. Results also showed, two other popular selections were comparisons to other films and an unbiased perspective, which myself and Blaine may include.

These elements both within the content of our review and concerning the layout have been created below in the ongoing construction of our review:

This is my initial drawing of the layout used within Empire magazine with the elements that they use upon most of their review pages. For example the black lines to give the sense of a boarder upon the top and the bottom, this is also achieved with the dots that they use to break up each review and use them as a border around each review and images. Empire also use yellow lines/boxes at the start of each small review with the vital film information next to it that the reader desires.

It is easy to re-create the black boxes as they are black, but all the other elements that are included within the page have to be researched. I have done lots of research into the Fonts that they use, the text size, the colouring of the dark green titles and the colouring of the dark yellow boxes. I searched multiple websites, read multiple back pages of different empire magazines but there is no reference to the colours and fonts that they use. This was initial very annoying but I played around upon Microsoft Publisher and tried to re-create the colours that are used and tried to find the nearest font.

Here is a picture of the stereotypical Empire magazine layout of a review review page used for smaller multiple reviews which I based my drawing on above:

After researching and then trying to mimic the nearest possible colours and fonts I began to construct our review page which would be a new feature promoting short films and a competition to enter.

Above is a picture showing the creation of our film review page and I was trying to re-create the elements that are used. I created the black line/box which is used as a visual border on the page and defines the layout.

Empire is sponsored by Jameson and they are their main sponsor which usually cover new features that are introduced to the magazine. Because myself and Blaine are creating this review page based on a new feature introduction I thought it would be very professional to include their sponsors logo and gives the review a sense of continuity alongside the other visual elements that are included.

After finding the Sponsors logo and recreating the visual boarder, I started to design the page layout from an existing page but changing the elements and the content. I am trying to re-create the colour scheme that is used with a very dark green/blue as the titles and sub-titles with the lines acting as boarders and the dark yellow with the review information boxes.

Above is a picture of the ongoing construction of the review page and both myself and Blaine are currently writing reviews in order for me to then try and fit everything on the page in a neat and orderly fashion and overall making our review look exactly like it is a new feature within the Empire magazine because this is where our review is featured. It is very hard to find out the actual font and text size that empire use as well as the colour schemes but i am trying to re-create them as much as possible.

When to final review is finished and the layout is perfect I will post a link below which you can follow to view our final product of the subsidiary task, creating a review:

Short flashback/dream sequence edit

Throughout our short film the protagonist selflessly takes pain away from others but is then acquires it himself. This is done through the process of him touching someone in pain both emotionally and physically. Myself and Blaine wanted to create a short sequence that could progressively play each time he touched someone in need and took the pain away. We wanted the sequence to be very symbolic and we both were inspired by many of David Lynch films with his weird and wacky symbolic signifiers that are both visual interesting but important to the narrative. We wanted to re-create a very visually stunning piece but very realistic and intriguing creating the effect upon the audience that we desired also adding to the narrative and the symbolism it possesses.

After we filmed the footage i was really excited to get home and play around with the software effects trying to make a sequence that could be useable or at least act as a point which we could both add to in the future editing process.

I wanted to add a sound effect of the protagonist entering and exiting this trance state which is shown within his thoughts through the use of this footage. I tried to recored this on my iphone which was fit for purpose at the time because there was no other sound recording equipment available but now our school has purchased a boom so it will be easier, clearer and better quality once we have recorded the sound on that.

Below is a video of my voice just trying to re-create this existing of a dream like state.

Creating sound effects from Tom palmer on Vimeo.

When i was editing the footage i was playing around with the effects that were available, changing the huge and saturation, changing the colour scheme whilst adding key frames to the footage and overall i think for a first attempt the footage looked awesome and the sound added works well. But for our final product a lot more tweaking will take place with better sound and a lot smoother transition between live footage and this footage adding to the whole effect it has on the audience and will make them ask questions into what the footage is symbolizing.

To view the clip of the short dream sequence/flashback watch the video below:

Short flashback/dream sequence from Tom palmer on Vimeo.