Final Cut for Video

Short Film Second Draft

Here is a complete version of my short film, with everything filmed.
Upon re-watching my first draft and discussing with my teacher we felt that my film needed more structure as the storyline was not clear and wasn't easily understood by the audience.

To do this, I used a short film convention of adding in dialogue through the use of text on-screen. I felt this looks effective and give the film a more silent film style while also helping to add structure to the film. Furthermore, it allowed me to enhance the stereotype of someone from Hull as I have purposely misspelled the text in so that the audience or forced to read in a hullsensian accent, I felt this also added a little humour and more audience interaction to my film.

First Edit

This is first draft for my short film. The blank gaps are for the parts of the film that I am yet to film.

I have the main bulk of the 'journey' finished, with Alfie biking around.
I still have the opening sequence of Alfie getting ready, and the final sequence of Alfie getting changed into the suit and getting into the car.

Furthermore I have the research and planning for my ancillary texts and also the production to get done.

I aim to have all of my film shot, and ancillary texts researched, planned and production started by February half term.

Ancillary Text: Film Poster FINAL

Ancillary Text: Film poster Second Draft

Here is my second draft for the film poster ancillary text. I feel that this is an improvement in that it features no use of unorinal images. Furthermore, the split down the middle is further enhanced with the random placing of the 'bad side' on the right, and the neat placement of the 'good side', this gives a little more information to the audience about the characters and may further entice them to ask questions about why this difference is, in seemingly the same person?

Ancillary Text: Film Poster First Draft UNORIGINAL IMAGE

Here is a mock up for my first draft of my film poster for my Ancillary text. The images of Alfie are the only ones I've taken, with the backgrounds of both sides being un-original images. 

Ancillary Text Final: Film magazine review

This was actually the first draft that I changed the colour scheme for, and I felt that it looked far more effective relative to a simple white background. Furthermore, black fits better with the darker connotations of my film. I also changed the font to 'american typewriter' which meant that there was more continuity from my main text and ancillary text, as this was the font that I used for the dialogue of my silent film.
I added the yellow box behind the title of my film, as yellow has connotations of hazards, as it is the main colour in hazard signs/symbols and therefore it will stand out to my audience far more.

Film Magazine Review Fourth Draft

I added a rating as this was a convention I found amongst both film and music magazines. Furthermore, I added a photo of the actor on set in place of a shot from the film, as I was unable to do so as the images from the film looked poor quality and pixelated. I also made all of the text the same size and a little smaller, adding more text to give it a fuller look.

Ancillary Text: Double Page Spread Third Draft

I felt that adding the images on the right ensure a little more continuity between my ancillary products as this is the same style on my film poster.
Furthermore, I columnised my text and I felt this made my product look a lot more professional.

Ancillary Text: Double Page Spread Second Draft

With this draft, I have introduced some element of continuity across the pages, with the text from the interview on both sides.

The colour scheme still looks a little boring, and from feedback on this draft it was received that the speech bubble was a good idea and is effective in enhancing the message I want to put across however doesn't fit with conventions and doesn't look very professional.

Furthermore I need to put the text in columns and therefore this will abide further by conventions.

Double Page Spread First Draft

Here is my first draft for my double page spread.

What I liked about this was the colour scheme, and overall 'urban look'. The photo itself shows Alfie as his darker character, with an industrial looking background. This is then complimented with the two fonts in graffiti styles, giving the more informal and urban look to the piece.

I also stuck to the classic colour scheme of black, white and red in so to give the text at least a little formality. 

What I feel need to be improved is that there is no continuity across the two pages, making it look a little boring and as two separate pieces. The only continuity is in the fonts, however I feel more is needed. Furthermore, there are more conventions that need to be featured in the double page spread, for example: having the text in columns is a very key feature for double page spreads and I feel that this may be a lot easier if I construct another using publisher.

Feedback Q1: Real media products

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media  products?

 

Feedback Question 2: Combination of Main Product and Ancillary Texts

Feedback 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Upon showing my first drafts to people and also my teacher Becky, it was evident that narrative structure was the key element that needed to be worked upon. With my first draft not including any of the dialogue, it was not clear what the film was trying to say or even what was actually happening in the film. Therefore, my main advice was to strengthen the structure in so to give a clearer meaning to the story and to ensure my film had structure.

Therefore, upon adding this dialogue into my film, the meaning was more easily understood by both the peers and my teacher as the dialogue added comedy value to the film. I feel that adding this element of comedy ensure audience enjoyment and had a little more interest in my film, as I could judge from their reactions to certain scenes/dialogue. Furthermore, it adds to the meaning of my film as the overall objective was to in fact poke fun at the wide and negative stereotypes given to the people of Hull from the way they talk, dress and even their day to day activities like feeding the pigeons and eating fish and chips.

From my third to final draft there was only the difference of a few edits, such as jump-cuts and a few extra bits of dialogue that was advised in my feedback to ensure the audience were constantly kept interested and to ensure that they were never going too long without any dialogue at all as this caused them to lose interest and for the film to get a little tedious - especially with such a repetitive song!

These are some conversations I had with my peers about my final film.

Feedback 1: First Video by s0014528 on GoAnimate


In part 1, my peer Lauren is questioned on the purpose of the film - to which she replies with 'I think the purpose is a production based on the stereotypes of society, the age and behaviour of people in this day and age'. This was the true test of how clear the message from my film was as my classmates would fall into my target audience and therefore if they understand the message then my film must be clear enough.

Furthermore, Lauren's answer shows Stuart Hall's representation theory in action. She believes that people from Hull may disagree that my film is an accurate representation of what people from Hull are stereotypically like and therefore may decode my film in an oppositional manner. However, she believes that people that are not from Hull may decode my film with a preferred or negotiated reading, meaning that they agree with the representation of the stereotypes via my character.

Feedback 1: Continued (Part 2) by s0014528 on GoAnimate




Feedback video 2 by s0014528 on GoAnimate


What I can take from these conversations are that it is clear that some of my footage is a little too shaky and can have a negative effect on the overall professionalism of the piece. However, shaky cinematography and disorientation of the audience was one of my original objectives to try to make the audience see what my character is feeling as he drinks more and is trying to ride his bike.

In Feedback Video 2, Sophie describes the main character as less 'chavvy' then some people from Hull. This could be an example of Stanley Cohen's theory of 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics', as Sophie describes young working class people, who are likely to be deviant and commit crimes such as those my character in the film would be likely to do, as 'Chavvy'. Chav is a popular term used amongst  tabloid newspapers to describe young deviants, and therefore those in Hull who seemingly fit the stereotype are branded with this reputation.

Feedback 4: Use of media technologies

Question: How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

First, I felt I needed to look through the history of my form,  to the beginning of the short and silent film era, which was in fact the beginning of film all together. For this, I was able to use Web 2.0 in so to interact and actively search via YouTube for the films, as they were only very short (from around 2-10 minutes usually) therefore I could watch some of the first short and silent films ever made such as 'a trip to the moon' from 1902.

Furthermore, I was able to obtain modern example of the form via using the library resources, I took oscar-winning silent film 'the artist' out from the library. However, I needed to re-watch the last sequence in which the conventions of the film are broken as the main character speaks in his french accent in so to give the plot twist that he's actually french and thus why he didn't want to star in 'talkies'. To do this, I was able to again utilise Web 2.0 and YouTube to simply search for the last sequence and re-watch it.

Another element of Web 2.0 I was able to utilise was the use of search engines such as Google, which when researching for my ancillary texts became elementary as I was able to research and find thousands of different example of old-style and modern style film posters simply by searching on Google Images.

In terms of construction of my media products, technology was imperative.

I was most reliant on my macbook pro, as this is where I had my final cut pro and adobe photoshop which is where I created my all of my media texts.

In terms of production of my film, I had previous experience of using the Final Cut pro from other videos that I have constructed. The programme allowed me to create a professional looking film and made potentially complex editing relatively simple via it's wide range of effects and easy to use interface.

I was able to upload my raw footage straight onto the event library, from which I could select and play the clips making it easy to determine which clips to use, as the majority of shots were filmed numerous times and therefore the number of clips I had was far greater than the number I would use in my film.

The interface of Final Cut Pro allowed for different layers of media, which meant that I could for example overlap sound effects and songs, as well as overlapping footage for the split shot of the getting out of bed and on the toilet shot.

For this I was able to utilise the crop tool which allowed me to cut the clips in so to only see half of each of the clips. I also used the transform tool which meant that it did not matter that the shots where from varied lengths away from my character, I was able to make the legs/feet look like they were the same size by transforming the image. 

An effect that I used on all of the clips used in my film was the 50s TV effect, which is what gives them their black and white colour. This was useful as I could simply drag and drop the effete onto the clips in order to make them black and white instead of having to manually change the colour levels of all of the clips.

Another effect that I used for the shot where there are seemingly 4 versions of the character transforming back into one was the kaleidoscope effect. I was able to edit the dimensions of the kaleidoscope so that there were only 4 of the character and it was a little clearer what was going on, as when I had originally placed the effect on there was around 16 versions of the character and it was hard to make out what was actually happening. 

In the production of my film poster, I was able to again utilise my ability of interacting with web 2.0 to use 'dafont.com' to find fonts that suited the styles I was looking for. 

For example, under the 'distorted' section I found the font 'Beer goggles' which I felt was an effective font to use as my character gets drunk in my film and this shaky cinematography can be linked to the shaky font on my film poster. 

Construction of film poster effects on bad character can be seen in a previous post about using the pinch and bloat tools and decreasing vibrance layers and editing colour levels of Alfie's eyes in order to make him look terrible. - http://jacobkaya2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/production-process-for-film-poster.html

When creating my double page spread for my AS Coursework, I had used Microsoft Publisher. However, as this programme wasn't available to me on my macbook, I used Adobe Photoshop to create my double page spread also. The advantages of this where that I was able to edit the layers straight in the programme whereas if I had used Publisher it would be likely that I would have done all of my editing of photos in Photoshop and then copied them into publisher to arrange the layout. 

At first, in my first and second drafts I was struggling with the text arrangements as it was not clear how I could  columnise my text, in order to obey conventions of magazine reviews. However, I used a YouTube video tutorial to find out how to easily create columns of text and after this help, I was able to effectively columnise my text which I think creates a substantial difference in quality from my second to third draft. 

I have also used various technologies for the presentation of my processes, media theory and in my evaluation also. A key tool that I have used has been Prezi.

"Prezi designs and creates presentation software that is enabling millions of people to be great presenters"               - Prezi.com

Prezi is a website that allows you to design and create presentations in a dynamic format, making them more interactive, more interesting and therefore more effective for presenting information. With an easy to use interface, I have been able to create dynamic presentations to show my processes, theory and evaluation. 

I have also used GoAnimate.com to present my audience feedback in a conversation format as a video animation. This too I feel makes my feedback more effective to me relative to simply text answers on pieces of paper. I wrote some questions down for my peers before they watched my film, and asked them to answer them on the piece of paper in order to obtain qualitative data that  I needed to help my production process. I then used the answers to form the conversations on GoAnimate.com 

Production Process for Film Poster

I began by literally splitting my image down the middle, choosing the point straight between the eyes.

How it looked with just one side. 

I then inserted the board for my character hold. For this I simply used the rounded rectangle tool in white. I then selected the fingers that would be coming over the sign, and cut and re-pasted them as a separate layer. This allowed me to have Alfies body as the bottom layer, with the sign as the middle layer and Alfie's fingers on the top layer, to create the illusion of him holding the sign. 

To reduce the sharpness of the cuts around the fingers I simply used the eraser and lightly erased the edges of his fingers in so to blur them around the edges and take a little of the sharpness away. 

Here is what the hand look like after using the eraser.

I realised that I would need to erase the branding of Alfie's plain black jacket in so to became him look even more poor, it would be a little ironic for a bum to be wearing a branded jacket. To do this I used the clone stamp tool, and selected the black and shaded parts of the jacket and simply stamped over the brand name. Here is halfway through the process.

And here is the jacket with the brand name completely erased. 

I then chose to use the liquify filter to make Alfie look even worse (haha!). 

I wanted to focus on his eyes and using the bloat tool I enlarged the bags under his eyes to make them look more prominent, looking like he has serious lag of sleep. 

Here is the untouched eye.

Here is after I had finished. I also used the 'pucker' tool to reduce the size of his pupils and take the shine out of his eyes. This makes him look either on the influence of drugs and a lot more evil, and takes the innocence of big shiny blue eyes out. 

I then wanted to create  a slight illusion of a black eye, my character would then look like he'd been in a few scraps, a classic stereotypical activity of the poor. I did this by using hue/saturation and colour balance effects over that certain part of his eye giving them the purpley tint. 

I think selected the whites of his eyes and made them red and bloodshot, connoting either drug use or again serious lack of sleep.

To even further the damage to Alfie's appearance, I reduced the 'vibrance' levels of the image and this is what gives him this ghostly like look. 

Initial Ideas: Film Magazine Review

Film Poster Shoot - Bad Guy

Initial Ideas - Film Poster

Here is a draw up of one of my initial ideas, explained in the prezi below.