Thursday, 29 June 2017

Unit 5 Production Managment Evaluation

Unit 5 Production Management Evaluation

Legal

Our work keeps to the breaches of legal in the following area called permission to film (Privacy). During the Pre-production we had to gather cast that we needed to film with.  The actors we chose were Faris Rahman (as Jack), Matthew Morre (as Tony), Daniel Jones Squirrell (as Freddy), Usama Mohammad (masked man) and Rayhan Ahmed. For some of our actors they were our crew member such as Daniel Jones Squirrell, Usama Mohammad and including me, this was because we had come up with the original idea for our film.

In the regulation of Privacy it told us that we should always ask permission to the person that we would like to participate, if the child should under the age of 18 we should ask the parent consent to film with their child. In the regulation royalties it says that we should pay the people who had participated in our film and credit them in the credits.

I feel that we all had stuck to the regulation of privacy as during the pre-production I had made sure we had called the actors parent as we wanted to get their consent in term of filming with their child at night. The reason why we had to do this is because we concerned with the amount of night scene we had to produce since nightmare scenes from Freddy’s perspective of seeing his friend’s die right in front of him. This was done during the time of 1:40 where Rayhan (as Tony) dies! We had clarified to their parent that they will not die actually; they will be acting to die. With some parent we were aware that their child was fasting and we reassure them that we will keep them safe. However we did not stick to the code of royalties as we did not pay the actors however we did credit their names in the film at 5:55 in the short film

Regulatory

On way this film called A Mind of His Own sticks to requirement of 15 from the BBFC. In our film he violence is strong however we did not make it look gory. This suitable for a fifteen year old to watch as there is no strong sex involved with the violence and they should bot feel unsettled.

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/sites/default/files/attachments/BBFC%20Classification%20Guidelines%202014_6.pdf
click this picture for more information page 20


However I feel that this film may not be acceptable for a 15 due to the fact that due to the fact that there is a lot of imitable behavior. In our film our film it show lots of people dying in different way and this can be easily copied by children.

Financial

In production we used most of the resources that we had already such as the equipment and most of the props. I feel that we had spent well on the red mask we need to use in our film; however we did not spent money on the blue mask as we felt it was unnecessary to use in our film. Though I thought that the mirror that was bought was a bit unexpected, I knew that a mirror was being bought but it really look cheap and very dusty. This item was used in our film during the time of 4:50 where Tony end up getting hit by the mirror. I also feel that we should have spent some money in getting new item such as getting a new camera such as black magic as they have got better q
uality than Cannon 1200D.

Unit 5 Production Management Evaluation continued

Time management

I feel we did had to waste a lot of time when it came filming on the days we were meant to film, this was due to the fact that some people came extremely late or due to unavailability. This therefore made us lose a lot of time when filming because we had days where we could not film at all. However when everyone came together to film we were all very proactive and determined to finish filming quickly especially for the one that was the night scenes. As you can see during the time of the 1:30 to 2:00 in our short film the lighting seems to have got darker rapidly. We did not follow our plan when filming as we just ended up filming during the days that the actors or crew members were available.

Leadership

I feel that I should have shown more leadership skill as I did not participate much into when I needed to, especially when there was time I could have helped out. There was a time where we had so much time when filming due to the fact of difference views and opinions of certain shot. This made one of our cast members who happened to be not even part of the crew team, ending up leading the group for one day (that was embarrassing!). I should have started have telling people what to do for the next rather than wasting time in letting people disagree with each other. However I ended up taking the leadership of editing since I knew how to edit quicker than the others in the crew team.

Communication

The communication during the production was lacking and this cause a lot of problem whilst filming on the day. On some of the day when some actors were meant to turn up on time they did not, this was because one of our crew members ended up telling people wrong information during the day of the filming. I can admit that at some of point I should have clarified with the director the locations where we were filming on the day therefore I would not have been late on some day. Next time I will check with people rather than making an assumption of the place we were going to film. 

Meeting requirement

Our idea meets to the brief that we were provided. In the brief it gives some rules that we should stick to, here are some of the rules: ‘No copyright video and/or audio may be used, your submission must have duration between 5 and 10 minutes. From the Screen Festival website they said that we had not use real alcohol.  We stuck to these rules for our idea; we made sure that we clearly had no copyright music and video on our film. During the pitch that we did, we had shown to the viewer the audio we would be using for our idea; we proved to them that we were not using copyright music. Our only problem was that we did not stick to using all the music that we had said we were going to use. We had to look for new music as some were as effective and it did not establish any creepy vibe. We also stuck to the rules of making our film between 5 to 10 minutes as our film finished between those times. We did not use alcohol as most of our actors were under age and that a few of them were fasting.

Achieving agreed outcome

Our final film meets to our original idea when we pitched our short film idea. In our film we clearly establish the genre we are going for is a horror genre. In our pitch I quoted to the viewers that ‘the genre we chose for our short film is going to be horror’. ‘The reason why we are going for this genre is because there is a lot of blood and death.’ We illustrate this type of genre in our film during the time of 6:05 where Freddy becomes possessed and turns into the masked man by grinning into the mirror. However I was disappointed with the fact that during our pitch we said to the viewers that we would have six characters but we ended

up having 5 characters, due to unavailability. We were given advice from the audience that we should cut down the amount of characters that were involved in our film, even though we explained to the audience that we were ambitious of introducing all 6 characters and showing their deaths within ten minutes. To avoid this problem happening again we will make sure that we have substitute actors to provide us with help when needed. Also in our pitch we said our opening sequence will looks like a party and in our film it does not look like a party. Next time we will do it in a location where it looks like a party and decorate the place.

Working to agreed timescales

We managed to edit our film on time whereas for the filming deadline we did not finished on this was because a lot of events happened during the week we were filming.  This therefore made us use some of our editing session time for filming. We eventually ended up finishing filming at the last and made the improvements, due to the fact that our communication between each other had improved.

Recommendation for future task

For the future I will make sure that I am the director for the project so therefore I can gain some experience in terms of leadership. I will make sure that the communication is a lot better as it the only way to get people understand what is going on. I will avoid making mistakes of going to the wrong location to film and also make sure that I clarify the place I need to go in the first place.

Unit 4 Technical Evaluation

Technical and Aesthetic qualities

Inline image 1

In our short film I believe in our film it uses varieties of editing techniques. This is illustrated throughout our film where it uses linear editing as the story goes in chronological order. The story begins with the conversation scene where everyone including Freddy talk about his parent's death. At 0:24 Colt makes the scene awkward by interrupt the conversation by playing loud music of metal. In this scene Freddy get barged by the masked man. I enjoyed watching this scene as I felt it went with the flow as it uses continuity editing.
The next scene is the alleyway way where colt ends up dying. I felt this scene was significant as it would shock the audience. After this scene Freddy wakes up and call.
Inline image 2

Freddy again have a nightmare of his friends dying and he finds out who the masked man was in the end which was Freddy. In the scene of the nightmare I like the fact that we used used blurry effect to make it seem like Freddy is seeing it form his perspective. We used this effect to make the scene feel surreal. I like the way that the film withhold information from the audience as it will keep them engaged and make them question who the masked man is.

However I did not like the abruptly stopped that was used during the opening sequence. I feel it could have been a happy music the reason is because it would have made the audience think that it is a jolly film when it is not. This sound effect was used during the time of 1:09 where the music randomly changes.

Realisation of proposal

Our final film meets to our original idea when we pitched our short film idea. During the pitch video it shows that I am talking to the viewers who participated watching us pitch. In our film we clearly establish the genre we are going for is a horror genre. In our pitch I quoted to the viewers that ‘the genre we chose for our short film is going to be horror’. ‘The reason why we are going for this genre is because there is a lot of blood and death.’
We illustrate this type of genre in our film during the time of 6:05 where Freddy becomes possessed and turns into the masked man by grinning into the mirror.

However I was disappointed with the fact that during our pitch we said to the viewers that we would have six characters but we ended up having 5 characters, due to unavailability. We were given advice from the audience that we should cut down the amount of characters that were involved in our film, even though we explained to the audience that we were ambitious of introducing all 6 characters and showing their deaths within ten minutes. To avoid this problem happening again we will make sure that we have substitute actors to provide us with help when needed. Also in our pitch we said our opening sequence will looks like a party and in our film it does not look like a party. Next time we will do it in a location where it looks like a party and decorate the place.

Fitness for purpose audience


 

Our audience we chose for was for the ages of 15-35. The reason why we chose this is because a lot of people watch horror around these ages. From our audience feedback video we learnt that the majority of people liked the way the ‘masked man had appeared out of nowhere’ during the nightmare scene. The gender we went for was male audience; the reason why we did this is because most male audience would feel appealed watching the death scenes and also lots of blood.

In our audience feedback video you can see that a lot of the male audience, there was also a person called Faris Rahman said that he liked the way the masked man stabbed the Matthew (actor in our film).  For interest the audience would feel interested in the dream scenes. The reason why we thought this would be interesting this would be best idea is because the audience will actually find out it that the deaths were for real. In the audience feedback we heard from a girl called Jannah who said that she like ‘the filter that was around the edge in the dream scene because it gave us different visual to look at’. The location we targeted for was the British because that is where our film was based at. Ethnicity it would be all as we use all ethnicity.

However I feel that we could have brought in a female character within our film so that we could have expanded wider range of audience to watched it. This grab more of the audience attention. I feel that the girl character role would be to try and have a fight with the masked man therefore it would made the film more serious.

Fitness for Purpose Client



Our idea meets to the brief that we were provided. In the brief it gives some rules that we should stick to, here are some of the rules: ‘No copyright video and/or audio may be used, your submission must have duration between 5 and 10 minutes. From the Screen Festival website they said that we had not use real alcohol. We stuck to these rules for our idea; we made sure that we clearly had no copyright music and video on our film. During the pitch, we had shown to the viewer the audio we would be using for our idea; we proved to them that we were not using copyright music. Our only problem was that we did not stick to using all the music that we had said we were going to use. We had to look for new music as some were as effective and it did not establish any creepy vibe. We also stuck to the rules of making our film between 5 to 10 minutes as our film finished between those times. We did not use alcohol as most of our actors were under age and that a few of them were fasting.

I feel that we did not play much around the editing, I feel that we could have added different type of editing such as motivated cut, flashback. This should have been done when Freddy finds out that he is the masked man. A flashback effect should have been used to add more tension around the surrounding of Freddy, the fact that Freddy find out the he is the killer is the most significant to put in the effect.



Thursday, 22 June 2017

Production log 4

During the beginning of the week we continued our editing process on our short film. On Monday morning we showed a draft copy of our film to our assessor and in the hope that we were near finalising our film. We got a couple of suggestions on how we could enhance the film and we were advised to finish filming as soon as possible. We took notes to remind us what we needed to change: At 2:10 into footage, our assessor suggested that we  fix the pace of our editing as it was a bit too fast. We agreed with the assessor as it made us realise that the audience will not be able to keep up with what was going on in the scene. We were also told to change some transition as it was thought that we should have chosen a better transition for the dream scenes. We had to amend the transitions for the scenes, instead of having the ripple transition we decided on a flash to make it look dramatic. We were also told to add some more sound effect to create tension within within the dream scene and to also make this uniform throughout the dream scene. Finally the assessor told us delete of some shots at the beginning as it was creating a slow start, we were also told to add credits.

In the previous blog post we needed to decide on a location so we could film some filling/ extra shots.  We checked our diaries and we confirmed 19/06/17 8:30 PM alleyway Goodmayes. However we did not start filming till 9 PM as our actor was  delayed our filming. We managed to finish filming in the alleyway eventually.

When we met the next day we came across some editing issues. In some of our clips there was a change of lighting within the shot( due to the actor arriving at dusk!). We could tell from looking at the sky how much darker some of the shots had become. We researched on how we could change the lighting of the sky within our clips via Youtube. It was quite simple  to solve and the result was fair

The other challenges, due to time limit and actor availability were that we were unable to reshoot any footage that we were not 100% with., Our assessor said to follow the changes he had asked us for and that our clips were fine. We continued editing from this point onwards and once we had finished filming we exported it to YouTube.

During this week I felt that it went well and that we had worked well together. I feel that in this unit I had gained a lot of experience as I was the main person involved in editing and camera work, a role which I preferred as opposed to being in front of the camera.  I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement everything and it was a productive experience.

Thursday, 15 June 2017

Production Log 3

At the beginning of the week we continued our editing process. We amended the scene where Colt (aka Matthew) ended up dying in his house as the lighting effect was over exposed and needed attention. In this scene colt was ambushed by a creepy masked man who goes out and kill Freddy's friend. Colt eventually end up dying on the stairs after being viciously stabbed several times by the killer.


During the week I contributed by continuing to edit the scenes that needed tidying. On our original shoot in Hainault Forest it was agreed that the time spent on filming was not sufficient and it was decided that we would revisit the scene and expand our footage to increase our options when editing.

The challenges we faced this week were plentiful, they included the fact that the facilities i.e (W.C) onsite were unavailable and a couple of the people from the general public made our filming difficult, unfortunately they were under the influence of alcohol and started to verbally abuse one of the production crew who had not provoked them in any way. We decided it would be appropriate to postpone our filming for a couple of hours. We returned in due course to continue filming in peace!



On our return from filming we scanned the footage and discovered that the sound quality/ dialogue was below parr and this was disappointing. After speaking to the assessor we were told to copy and paste the audio of the clip to enhance the volume and quality. We were also advised to increase the pace of each scene to avoid losing the audience attention.

Changes made this week were mainly in the editing department, it was decided to erase any irrelevant clips from the film to limit any confusion/ debating on which clips to save.  During editing we have discovered some new techniques, these include: some great sound effects which we were certain that it would benefit our film. We attempted to create some of our own editing sound effect such as struggling to breath, being hit by a guitar, getting hit by a glass mirror and snap neck effect. However we did not create all of the sound effect that needed to be voice reordered, only manged to do the struggling to breath effect. The guitar effects, we copied and pasted from of the one audio clip's of when Tony get hit by a guitar which we could heard clearly. This made it easier for us to edit. Finally the mirror effect and snap effect were found from the Internet (YouTube).

Next week it will be time to show a draft copy of our film to our assessor and hopefully we will be close to the end of our editing. After checking our diaries we will meet to film on location which is yet to be confirmed (alleyway) 19/06/17 PM.


Sunday, 11 June 2017

Production Log 2

This week we successfully began editing our short film and edited all the clip that we had remaining to film last week. The scene we had filmed last week were: the conversation scene where Freddy, Jack, Colt and Tony are talking to each other in the lounge. Another scene we had film was the wake ups scene where Freddy wakes up from a nightmare, some parts of Jack death scene (no actors die in real life) and we completed edited Tony's death scene.

I contributed in most of the editing this week with some help with the visual idea of the short film scene. Outside of editing we all contributed towards filming a scene where Colt dies viciously by the hands of the killer and we also collect sound effect for the film. 


We re-shooted the scene where Freddy ends up fainting by the door on Thursday.
I could not attend to filming that day due to the fact I went for a meeting. We added some transition to where it was appropriate to use in the scene. The reason why we did this is so that we could draw the audience['s attention to show that the next scene is the nightmare scene, where Tony dies. We also made fake blood to enable us make the audience feel shocked when seeing it from a point of view shot in our film. This shot is used in the scene where Freddy see the masked man costumes.

 


During this week our main challenge we faced were the visual effects for the nightmare scene, below is a picture where we tried to make it look blurry. The reason why we did this is because we wanted it to look obvious that it is a dream scene. Whilst we were filming I arrived late to the location which had caused a delay with filming but other than that everything went according to plan.

nightmare scene

conversation scene

We also collect some instrumental music and copyright music for our scene, these were conversation scene and the nightmare scenes. The genre we chose were rock and horror musics (3 horror music to show variety of intensity for the death). The rock music was for the conversation scene where Colt interrupt Jack, Tony and Freddy by playing some loud music that can be heard from his headphones. We did this to add some sense of humor and also to add some awkwardness to the atmosphere in the film. The horror musics was for the nightmare scenes only, to indicate that the killer is nearby.


During this week we did not change much of our plan. We originally thought of doing the alleyway scene at Romford, however the director found us another location to film so we decided to film the alleyway next to his house.

Another thing we had changed within our filming was the amount of shots we wanted to used for our alleyway scene, we decided to add more
shots so that we had a variety of shots to select from.

Next week we aim to finish filming / editing our short film.


Overall I feel that we are ahead of meeting our deadline.