Friday, 8 May 2015

Introduction

My name is Alvina Khan and I am an AS media student at Sir John Cass Sixth Form College. The reason i chose this specific subject is because i find the film industry fascinating and interesting. In addition, I wouldn't mind working in that industry even though it is not my first choice. I personally have experience with computer software due to previous GCSE subjects which i think helps me with AS media.


My group is formed by me and my peer Fabiha and there was also another group member who was Imran but he left for personal reasons, therefore it is only me and her. The coursework task is to make a two minute film opening without telling too much of the story, so we have to be careful enough and try not to reveal the rest of the story line. The film opening must inlcude its own logo, production company name and titles. The font should be unique and the film opening has to be a spefic genre (e.g. romance) or it could also be a mix of genres that should work well together (e.g. thriller and horror). Because there are only two people in my group, me and Fabiha decided to split each role and complete different tasks which will be decided and given later on to each of us.

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Evaluation question 7

ALVINA'S EVALUATIONS




I recorded my voice and did a voice over on Quicktime and exported it to Final Cut Pro to then make this video for my seventh evaluation.

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Planning Titles

We used Motion to create our titles because we thought it would be the best programme as it has a variety of fonts and behaviors we can choose from. We started going through different fonts to begin with  and  it took quite sometime choosing the desired font because there are over 100. We were looking for a quite classic yet modern enough font to suit our target audience and characters in the film. Because our genre is romance and our characters are teenagers we went for something more on the romantic/classic side. From our research we saw that romantic films targeted to an older audience has more of a classy looks whereas a teenage romance has more of a diary like font. We chose to incorporate both types in our titles. As behavior (the motion of the text) we used scale in and scale out due to how it was the most simple yet sophisticated type of motion. 

The font we chose is called "Apple Chansery" and it was the most suitable one for our film opening. The colour we chose is white due to how in our opening scenes there is a lot of green involved. The grass is almost like a plain green background and we thought it would be a great idea to place our title there because the contrast is visible. It says 'A Bad Romance Production' because we followed examples of real films and noticed that the name of the production company is always showed at the beginning.



The second thing that our titles say is 'in association with Sir John Cass media'. This is because as we did our research we saw that there are different things that each film says. Usually they say 'in association with and another company name. We placed the text at the bottom right of the shot because we hought we should place it somewhere as in the precious scene we placed it at the bottom left. The colour is still white.



Me and Fabiha chose the name of the film while making the titles. We looked at different names that are really famous such as Titanic and noticed that most of the time the title of the film tells a bit of the plot. That is why we chose to name our film 'Irregular' since our characters are not regular characters and when they get together they will not be just a regular couple.



We made the font really big and placed it in the middle of the screen so that it grabs the attention of the audience. The colour is still white because after trying out different colours this is the one that stood out the most. The title moves from the top of the screen to the middle so that is a special effect.



Saturday, 4 April 2015

Production of Titles

We made our titles on Motion which was a new technology to us. It took us a a whole day to make these as we had not idea how to use the programme. That is why before making the final titels and exporting them on final cut we actually made samples just like we did with the sound.
This time we uploaded them Youtube too, so it is easier to share and look back at.



This writing says "A bad Romace Production" which is going to be the first line that will appear in the beginng of the film opening. The font we chose is called "Apple Chansery" and the size is 26. We thought it was suitable font for our genre because it is nt too classic and old fashioned and perfect for the audience we are targteing which is teenagers. The behaviour we chose is called ""scale in" and "scale out"  which is a soft, slow motion. I think it is perfect for our genre because since it is romance everything should be on the softer side and the editing of titles.

CHANGES:
The colour is the only thing that i do not think will work once we export it onto our film opening because the purple migh not look good on the green background. The titles will go on the first few scenes which are settings and the scenes are mostly green ebacuse our establishing setting is a park. I think we will have to change the colour into white.




This writing says "In association with Sir John Cass Media" and will be the second line to appear in our film opening towards the beginning. Everything inlcuding font, size and behaviour is the same as  the line before.

CHANGES:
The only change we are going to make is again, change the colour as we think that the pink will look odd on the green background. We are going to change it to white. This is because not only it looks good and has a good, visible contrast with the green background but also because the white connotes innonce and tranquillity, which represent the female character in our film opening.




Finally, the title of the film which is "Irregular" will come on the screen at last after all the other titles. The font is still the same apart the size. The size is pretty big, 40,  because we had to make it stand out as this is the main title of our film. The motion we chose is called 2slide down" and it has a sliding motion downwards. We will place the title right in the middle of the screen.

CHANGES:
Again, the only change made will be the colour of it from purple to white because it will have a better contrast against the background.

Friday, 20 March 2015

Production of Sound

For our soundtrack we first researched about different types of songs in romantic film. We found that as our film. As we researched we came across Radio Active by imagine Dragons and instantly though that this would be a perfect guide for our own soundtrack. Therefore, we tried to almost replicate this by following the climate part when the beat kicks in but also added our twist to it, to make it our own. 
As part of our coursework we had to make our own soundtrack that went along with our movie. Me and Fabiha found this rather challenging because we were unaware of what instrument to use as neither of us could play any! However, we had an idea of what we wanted before starting to physically make the music. As we were jumping back and forth to the boys and girl we wanted to keep the music as neutral as possible and fade in and out in different genders. we wanted the boys music to be loud and low pitch emphasising his masculinity whereas, we wanted the girls music to be more quiet and high pitch. We thought that for the boy it would be best if we use drums and bass and for the girl strings and piano.
In order to produce our soundtrack we had a music teacher come into our lesson and teach us how to make music on the programme Logic Pro. We used this programme to make our soundtrack. After the lesson we gained much more knowledge and realised that there was more to it than just using one or two instruments.

NO VOICE OVER: me and Fabiha decided that it would be better to only keep the soundtrack and not do any voice overs because the music we made was a lot more powerful.

Me and Fabiha  wanted to split it up by focusing on the sound to represent each character. Fabiha focused on the boy whereas I focused on the girl.

This is what Fabiha personally wrote about the boy and talked about the decisions we made and what sounds we chose for the male character:
For the boy i wanted the music to be loud and strong so i thought of using drums. This type of instruments was specifically chosen to symbolise his masculinity and his personality of this hegemonic character. As well as having this deep and loud music i wanted to make it more creative by adding a synthesizer effect to it, this made the music more intense which fitted with the portrayal of the boys character.

This is when the boy is first introduced and this is when the beat kicks in, as well as the synthesiser, making the music more intense, giving a hint of what his personality and character is like. Everything, including harmony is quite deep and almost intimidating which conveys a certain message to the audience. It shows toughness. 


The box on the left side is a tool which helps us change the pitch, volume and pace of the music and the keyboard is used to compose the songs. The different letters represent a different note, which is an easy way to play and test out each instrument.


What I did is I focused on the sound that rapresents the female character. Me and Fabiha both decided that it would be a really good idea if the music that rapresents the girl is faster in pace than the boy's music. Also, it should be more high pitched and contain less drums, which rapresent toughness, but more violins, which rapresent innocence and class. There were a variety of high pitched instruments such as different types of violins, or again drums but a different type, like ultrabeat drum synth.

Here we can see that violins are the main instrument that is used the most. That is because it represents class  due to how violins are usually found in classic music, therefore portray her. However there are are other instrment we added such as strings annd drums along the violins because it felt empty and incomplete without back up instruments. This created a nice harmony throughout the whole soundtrack and sounded almost professional. We can see a box with many buttons with volume levels and soeed levels. This helps us determine the speed and volume and we are in complete control of the sound.

Here is the rest of the girl's soundtrack. At the end we combined the two tracks (boy and girl together). This created the perfect soundtrack that suits our genre at the same time suits the characters. 

FEEDBACK:
We asked our teachers for feedbacl and if anything was wrong with this and she said it was perfectly fine. I think it's because we spent a lot of time researching an looking through other songs thats perfected our music making skills. 

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

Planning Initial sound

Me and Fabiha used Logic Pro to create the soundtrack for our film opening because we thought it was the best programme to use. We also were thinking about using Garage Band but we were not too familiar with it. We actually got our music teacher to help us with the making of the track as he is a professional. As i said, we were inspired byt the song Radioactive by Imagine Dragons because we think that the type of music used suits our film opening. 

MALE CHARACTER SOUND:
The music for our male character was more complex to make as we wanted to use synthesizers; we thought this would make our soundtrack more interesting and catchy and would almost match Radioactive. We used this as a guide for our soundtrack. The reason why we were so attracted to this song was because of the way the beat kicks in after the guitar strings, we thought that this would link with our film opening as we start quiet then go loud during the boys scenes. We actually used guitar later on to finish off the track and just to add a variety of instuments. The synthesizer helped the music sound more electric, which made that our music sound dark but interesting. The Big Beat Remix Kit, Techno Syncx B and the everlasting were played at their loudest during the boys scene and the strings were [played very quietly that you could barely hear it. The strings however, gave dimension this part and it made it easier to fade in a d out and still make it sound neutral. The boys music was also at a low pitch contrasting with the girl making it sound more masculine.


This is a quick sample of the sound that will give an idea of how the boy's music is going to sound like. It includes synthesizers to match Radioactive. I used Powtoon because i thought it would be a suitable website to use as i can insert text and images in the video. We planned to make this kind of music instead of classic music because we are trying to attract a younger audience and  this type of soundtrack will appeal to them more. We could've chosen to use violins and piano throughout the whole film opening but chose not to becase a younger audience might find that rather boring. Classic music would attract a much older audience which is not who we are targeting.


FEMALE CHARACTER SOUND:
We decided earlier on that we would have the same neutral track playing throughout the whole film opening but add certain instruents that would show the contrast between the boy and the girl. As our music was very neutral we had to show the difference in terms of sound when both characters were being shown. For the girls part of our soundtrack we wanted it to sound it to sound high pitch and more jolly than the boys. For the girl we used strings and violins as well as some other bass music. We thought violins were particulalrly effective because they show high class as classic music always has violins in it. The reason we used those two specific instruments was due to the high pitch tone it gave us. The highest note on the violin was used in our soundtrack in the girls section because it sounded enlightening and it suited with her image of being this upper class innocent girl. Moreover, the violin gave more dimension to the song, if we didn't use this, the violin would have sounded flat therefore we converged them together creating a light, soft and catchy tune. That is why we had to use strings along with it and it worked really well. However this is just our initial saple: we will be adding drums to make it even more masculin.


This is a quick sample of the sound that will give an idea of how the girl's music is going to sound like. It includes violins and strings. I used Powtoon because i thought it would be a suitable website to use as i can also insert text in the video and images.







It is clear that both sounds are similar to each other because the melody is the same. We tried to incorporate different instrument and music types all in one track to emphasise the contrast between the actress and actor.

Sunday, 15 March 2015

FIRST DRAFT "IRREGULAR"



After the first draft we realised how many mistakes we made and how many things are missing. Here we still did not make titles, logo and sound. We had some missing clips such as the extablishing shots of settings. We also had some scenes missing for the boy and the number of clips of the actress did not match the number of scenes of the actor. We need to include a lot more clips for the actor to balance it out. We also need to add black fading transitions in the beginning and in the end to make it look like a real film opening.

Thursday, 12 March 2015

Production of Logo

 LOGO PRODUCTION

Before actually deciding the name and logo for our film opening we did some research on the internet to get an idea of how production logos look and name look. We specifically looked at production companies that distributed a lot of romantic films such as Lionsgate or 20th Century Fox. Because our genre is romance we both thought that some sort of romantic element should be include in our logo just to give the audience a hint of our genre, evem though we do know that the logo does not necessarily have to rapresent the genre of the film.

INITIAL IDEAS
Me and Fabiha decided to sketch at least two designs for the production name and logo on paper just to get a rough idea of what name and what kind of logo would suit our film opening and genre best. Both of us thought to name our production "Bad Romance" which is suitable for the romantic genre and isn't too long. The name was inspired by the topic, which is romance and we added the word "Bad" to complete the production name. We will choose the correct font later on, on some kind of software to complete the final look of the name of the production.

Here are the sketches for our initial ideas:

on the left there are Fabiha's sketches which include a more sophisticated font,which does suit the romantic genre. Fabiha's sketches include a romantic font that says the production name and both of her sketches include hearts due to how we researched some production logos for romantic films and they had hearts in them. in Her first logo she incorporated two light blue clouds with a hear at the back almost like it is the sun peeking through both clouds. The idea of the following logo is quite romantic as it could be linked to sunsets and that is a really common part of romantic films since there usually are scenes with a sunset. Her second sketch includes a heart again but this time it is broken. It has wings on each side of the broken heart to represent Cupid, as he has wings himself.

These two are my sketcehs. They both have thename Bad Roamance at the top of the actual symbol of the logo. However in the first sketch we can see that the writing is ll capital so that it stands out more (even though that font could be changed along the process). I included a heart just like Fabiha did because we both agreed that we should put a heart somewhere in the production logo. Then we see the filming stip and machine rollers to rapresent the filming industr and those are grey to show that they are old class. The secoond sketch is pretty much the same as the old one just a few things have been changed. The fint seems to be more bold and it is underlined by a line that end wth a heart on top. That is how i still included the heart but differently. Then again we see the filming tripes and rollers everywhere to again, represent the films. 
 We decided we will develop design 3. My design (in the third picture). That is because the shape of the logo and size and the way it is laid out make it look the best.  Now we will have to make it into a real production logo using any software.


DESIGNING LOGO ON SOFTWARE
In order to make the logo for our production company I used a specific software, Microsoft Word. Firstly, I could not decide whether to use Adobe Fireworks or Words because i have experience with both softwares. However, i finally chose to use Word due to how it is a simpler way to create logos and names of productions. It had simple tools that could make shapes, lines and fonts to start with but i had to edit and put effects to make it look professional. For example i added the fade, glowy and 3D effect to actually create a decent logo. Here are each of the steps explained really through out the making of the logo.

This is how i started making of the logo. 

This is the first step and i just clicked on 'insert' and 'shape' and selected the heart shape as i wanted the heart to be the focus point of the logo.  I wanted the heart to be red as the colour represents love and heart are usually red anyways.

Here I double clicked the heart and a little window appeared that showed different settings that included effects. Here i could change colour, add effects and different textures which is quite cool because it almost seems like i am using Photoshop.

I decided that i should make the edge if the heart glowy due to how it give a better effect and it looks better. I changed the shade of red just to make it more pleasant and less bright as it was too bright for my liking. I added a 3D effect to make it look more complex. 

Here i am trying to make the recording rolls by selecting the circle as shape and changing the colour from black to grey. 

Here are the rolls once done. I added another circle which is smaller and white. I then added grey lines to complete it.

Here i selected the pen tool because i can draw lines with curves. I drew the curves myself and made it to a shape of an S to to make it look like a filming strip and it is again, grey because the rolls are grey and they should match.

Here i added lines throughout the filming strip because then or will make it look like a realistic one almost. I then added the final touches with special effects by double clicking such 3d effects or glowy effects like the heart so it would match. 

This is the final logo but we still have to choose the official font of the title 'Bad Romance' therefore it is not totally complete yet. The writing that will go on the logo will be made on PowerPoint.

Here is the final production logo with writing on it. The writing says the name of the production company (Bad Romance) and 'productions'. The font chose is called Chalk-duster and I chose it because I think the dusty chalky effect looks good with the logo overall. The colour of the writing is also red which matches the red heart in the logo and the theme of romance in general. I left the white background because i think it looks better than any other colour background.


Friday, 6 March 2015

Refilming scenes


As Fabiha filmed all scenes for the girl and I filmed all the scenes for the boy we eavh had o refilm some bits to make the scenes as accurate as possible in terms of angles, framing, types of shots and mise en scene. Here are the adjustments we made.

After Fabiha's first attempt at of filming the girls scene she was really unhappy with the work due the tripod and also timing therefore, She decided to re shoot the whole section again. as she got the opportunity to do this she wanted to change a few things around to polish tings up a bit.
In order to improve from her first shoot, she wanted to really focus on the props. she wanted her actress to look more feminine because she realized that she cannot really show her class status in the very beginning of the film as that would give away the whole film. she wanted to emphasize their social class through the setting rather than their character.
As you can see she has changed the bedsheets. In the first image the bedsheets were more red and had more print on them; when she first shot this she thought that it would be good the red could symbolize her passion and ferocious character. However, she then thought that this would give too much away as i am only filming the first two minutes and i didn't  want to give everything away. So in order to tackle this problem she changed the bedsheets she wanted pink to emphasize her girliness also used something much more simple and elegant. she thought it would be more safe for her to conform to the stereotype. Moreover, to really emphasis her femininity she thought a high angle shot would be vital to use instead of a long angle mid shot. In addition, when she looked back at my filming she realized that there wasn't much light  in the footage this reduced her from looking all naturally angelic. As she wanted her to be as natural as possible she knew that she could not use artificial lighting therefore she tried to use as much lighting as she could gather, she filmed this later on in the day when there was more light coming in the room giving us the illusion that she is much more sweet and innocent and the environment is more welcoming in her room.




Before putting my project on Final Cut Pro I was looking through the boys scenes and was not happy with my work therefore decided to film the boys scene again.  After getting feedback from my teacher she told us that we need to focus on the boy by using more extreme close ups and really emphasising his mis en scene. We then re-filmed and made sure that we focused on extreme close ups also the mis en scene making sure that his gender and class were explicitly being portrayed in a negative light. Moreover, we filmed the establishing shots of the boys area and the girls area and planned on moving back and forth in both areas emphasising the contrast. We can clearly see how the faming in the first picture down below is not straight. It is slightly titled and it is well noticible. It is not accuurate neither it is a good shot that is why we decided to delete this scene and film a ifferent scenes. We tried refilming this specific scene but because we was ssitng on the stairs i cold not use the tripod to record a steady shot due to how low he was. The tripod was not low enough. The second picture shows the new clip. The framing is really accurate as the tripod was straight and on the level. It is not tilted like the one before and the lighting is also much clearer and better.








Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Diary entry

I will be keeping a diary to explain in depth each of the things we did and keep track of what and how we are filming. I will be doing one diary for both characters and this links to the calendar because they include part of the information such as dates and tasks for that date.

15th February 2015- every scene that contains the female character was recorded today at Fabiha's fiend's house in Chadwell Heath. Altough our ideal location was Tredegar Bow we had to change it due to the unavailability of the house and we specifically need a bedroom. That is why we had to ask a friend or family member if we could film at their house. Unfortunately i was not there to film with Fabiha because i was ill. However, she told me what was done. All the needed scenes for the girl were done including a range of shots. I actually texted her and reminded her to make sure to follow the tory board and film additional scenes in case. Fabiha told me that the tripod had some issues which reulted in a few shaky shots. However the problem was solved when some sort of cloth was put under the stick of the tripod. It took from 2 to 4 hours maximum to record every single scene with the right props and range of shots. On the same day she refilmed some shots for example the opening shot of the girl sitting on her bed reading a book because the lighting and props were not good enough. She waited an hour for the sun to come back and improve lighting and she changed the bed sheets to improve mise en scene and the total look of the room.

17th february 2015- Started transfering all the clips of the girl onto Final Cut Pro and editing scene by scene with a lot of cuts. Had to even delete some scenes as they were unecessary or crop a lot of the scenes.

19th February 2015- Finished editing all the editing on final cut pro for the girl's scenes almost a rough draft. Boy's scenes left to film and edit.

27th February 2015- filmed scenes for the male charcter at Stepney Blocks. Had to get permission o leave the college by our teacher because we are not allowed to leave without permission. Asked our actor, Umed to wear a bomber jacket because that rapresents bad boys and it is a hoodraty type dressup. Also asked him to wear Raulph Lauren Trainers. Once in the blcok and filming started there were no problems whatsoever with tripod and camera. However camera kept saying that there is no memory so some of the old scenes had to be deleted. After filming and while going through scenes, a few mistakes were noticed such as the framing of the shots. That is why another date was chosen to film again.

3rd March 2015- Refilmed some, if not all the scenes for the boy. We left college at 11.15am and came back at 1.05pm. The boy's clothes were mostly different because he did not have the bomber jacket on anymore, but a black jacket with a black hoodie. That is why we had to change every scene that had his whole body in it. We also filmed a lot of close up shots of his props to emphasise how he is such as the Raulph Lauren Trainers or the fake cigarette. This definetely made a big difference to our final opening due to the level of accuracy and how we paid attention to the little details.

5th March 2015- Transferred all the boy's clips to final cut pro. Me and Fabiha edited together to then complete all the editing but that is only for the characters.

10th March 2015- We all went out to film settings and location of both characters. First we went to Stepney Green Park to film the girl's settings. Then after less than an hour we went to film for the boy's location, in Stepney area. Took an hour to film the park and the blocks,

13th March 2015- Me and Fabiha started editing but while transfering the clips of the locations onto final cut pro we noticed a lot of mistakes in the panning of the some scenes. I decided i would film those scenes again because they will be laced in the beginning of the film opening, therefore are quite importnt and have to be perfect.

15th March 2015- I went out and refilmed the girl's location. Shots are much more steady and panning is more clear. I  transfered onto final cut and edited everything in less than one hour.



Monday, 16 February 2015

Female character calendar

Here is the calendar that includes the dates we filmed the scenes with the girl. It also contains information about the locations and what exactly we did.


Sunday, 15 February 2015

Male Character calendar

This is the timetable with dates included for the male character. It includes all the information about what we did in order to film his part of the opening. The blocks we went to were right next to college, in Stepney. 

Also, on the 3rd March 2015 we re filmed some, if not all the scenes for the boy. W left college at 11.15am and came back at 1.05pm. The boy's clothes were mostly different because he did not have the bomber jacket on anymore, but a black jacket with a black hoodie. That is why we had to change every scene that had his whole body in it. We also filmed a lot of close up shots of his props to emphasise how he is such as the Raulph Lauren Trainers or the fake cigarette.

Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Setting|/location planning


Settings/Location
Our actors are teenagers still attending college. However because it’s the film opening we need to build the characters profile up in the opening, so we decided to show their daily lives, what they do in the morning. So in the beginning the characters are shown in their house/location to show the contrast between the boy and girl. Poor and wealth. Me and Fabiha had many location ideas because we were just planning and imagining if they would be suitable for our characters. However we ended up chosing a different one at the end.

INITIAL LOCATION:

For the female character, we first decided that Tredegar, Bow would be the perfect location due to how clean and posh the area looks. It contains houses that look similar to the ones in Chelsea, therefore really push and white with nice flowers and plants outside each door and a really nice park which will complete the overall setting  of the girl. Tredegar rapresents a location a typical middle/ high class family would decided to live in and our female character in fact comes from a middl/ high class family background. An additional reason we thought Tredegar, Bow would be a perfect location is because it is 20 minutes away from our Sixth Form which is uote close therefore we do not waste too much time on the journey.

FINAL LOCATION:


After a few meetings with my peer, we decided the actual locations. We thought it would be better if we filmed somewhere closer and this park is literally 5 minutes away from our college. It contains same elements as Tredegar Park does such as the flowers, plants benches, trees etc... For the girl's location we decided we would choose a clean, quiet area. This is because it will further convey the message that the girl's lifestyle is a lot more different than the boy's. We chose a speficic park, Stepney Green Park. Me and Fabiha personally chose this park due to how clean it is and due to the sorroundings and elements the park has. It has clean grass, trees, benches, walking paths and flowers which will show the audience how well kept the area is, which further demonstrates how posh it is. In addition, the buildings around the park are also well kept and quite modern.  


The female character's house is in Chadwell Heath due to some restrictions. We could not film in a house in Tredegar because we needed to get into the house in order to films some scenes such the girl's bedroom. If we were to do that in someone else's house that we do not even know it would most likely not happen because someone unknown would not really let us in their house and film. That is why Fabiha used her friends house to film. That was the only place available at the time, therefore we filmed there. The hpuse is not the one in the picture but it is similar and middle class people live there. We could've rented a hpuse or apartment but due to our low budget we had to get someone to let us film in their house.


The actor's location is quite the opposite compared to the actress's. He lives in a rather poor area, in the East London estate. We filmed in Stepney.  His specific location was chosen carefully because of the charasteristics found in the area. It included dustbins, littering all over the grass/streets, clothing drying on banlconies, rusty doors/gates etc... It contains dustbins everywhere which is almost a sign of poverty and there will be shots of litter on grass to further demonstrate dirtiness and messiness. The blocks just complete the settings due to how they are classified as a poor and trashy type of housing. I think that the colour of the building is really suitable for our character and his personality because it is a dark brown colour which links with the boy's dark personality. We might add a shot of a park around hat area and we will try find a park that shows blocks at the back so tht it goes better woth the paralleledit and we can shpw a greater contrast between the male and female character.