Question 1 - in what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

https://bubbl.us/?h=201ec2/412055/21UerrAGyqDAw&r=561431599

Question 2 - how does your media product represent different social groups?

Question 3 - what kinds of media institutions would distribute my media product and why?

Question 4 - who would be the main target audience for our thriller?

Question 5 - how did you attract/address your specific target audience?

http://www.gliffy.com/go/publish/5709873

Question 6 – what have you learnt about different technologies in the process of constructing your product?

Question 7 - looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your thriller?

During production of our preliminary task we were all very amateur with the equipment as well as the programming. We had shaky and out of focus camera shots and also awful audio due to us not being able to use our camera to the best effect. But what I feel we had most progression in after our preliminary task was our editing skills. In our preliminary task we were set the task of making a continuous film with no jump cuts in the action sequence. We managed to do this but in a very rigid manor. this was because we could not use the editing software to its most useful extent. Over the period between doing our prelim and starting our thriller piece we changed and learnt how to use final cut instead of iMovie and found that even though it was more complex it was easier to use and edit our piece. This meant our piece was more free-flowing with a lot less errors and editing overall was a lot more finished and looked more like a piece of media than a mess of a first attempt. we also worked a lot on camera work, we learned to take more care when preparing shots, thinking more deeply into the different kind of shots we could use as well as shooting the sequence several times so that we would hopefully not have to return and re-shoot if our original did not fit in. We basically learnt from our preliminary to take more care and focus more time into our piece to give it a more professional finish whilst still managing our time efficiently. 

Our final Thriller piece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpLQrp525h0

Progress report

Filming and Editing of our final thriller is almost complete. Unfortunately Gemma was not in Thursday nor Friday so we were not able to complete our Thriller fully but are aiming to finish it asap. We have edited all the filming we have so far but it has been difficult to find time to go out filming for the final pieces we need. As soon as we have the final pieces of filming we will be able to edit and complete  our project. My evaluation progress is coming along nicely. I have completed three of seven questions and plan to post them when I return to school on Monday so that they can be marked and I can adjust as guided. I have now completed all coursework for another one of my lessons so will now be able to focus majority of my time onto completing the other four evaluation questions and editing those I have already done. I think that I will have finished my evaluation comfortably by the end of term.

Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Question 7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the main task?

Progress

Today in class I focused on question 6 and have finally finished editing it.

Hopefully all of the questions will be answered by the end of the week.

Preliminary task review

When we originally set out for our preliminary task we were in a large group of six. We stayed in this group for filming but broke off into a smaller group with Gemma for editing. We had never used iMovie before and admittedly struggled at first with it, but after a tutorial we got used to it and realised it is a very simple program to use. We spent a while editing the preliminary project but unfortunately when opened towards the end of the time given to complete the task we found that a lot of our editing had been undone and only the project itself was left without editing. We did not have time to add sounds or a lot of other features we had originally put in and so we felt it was incomplete.

When set the task we told we were to set it in real time so there was continuous motion of film with no breaks of time. I think we did this well and kept the film flowing smoothly with a few little jumps but nothing majorly recognisable. Light differences was a key issue with out prelim because we filmed two different times using the same room, but the second time was much brighter than the first. We tried to fix the light variation but even though less visible the difference in light was still rather noticeable. The lack of sound also took away a lot of the tension and suspense we desired to be in our prelim.

Although our preliminary task was a bit of a failure we learnt a lot from the mistakes we made and this will be shown in our future work.

Progress

We managed to get some filming done in yesterdays lesson (thank god I can drive!) We have now got majority of our filming done now, we just need to get a few more shots including the girl handing out flyers. This might be a bit more difficult for us as my friend (who is playing the girl) seems to be busy all the time at the moment. We could change who plays the girl, but we have already done some of the filming, now its a question whether we want to re-film the whole scene or the just wait... This waiting game is not fun! The deadlines getting closer and I'm getting more stressed.

We plan to do some more filming one night after school this week, but with the fog thats around at the moment and how early the nights pull in.. It doesn't seem very likely (unless we want the shots to be completely different- crossing between day and night).

Preliminary task review

Progress

Charlie and I planned to do the last of our filming over the weekend but the fog was too thick!! This means it will delay our editing, lets hope we can get everything done in time now!
We plan to reschedule for during the week, probably tomorrow, lets hope that the fog is gone soon!

Progress...

Tuesday night we went to Great Barton to begin filming of the final section of our thriller opening. In total we shot around 40 minutes of footage and have only used around a second and a half of it. This is rather worrying seen as we have a lot more footage to shoot and we don't know how much of it we will use in the end. This may have been that we were not 100% prepared for filming on tuesday night.
Gemma and I plan to do the other majority of our filming some time next week and we hope that we will be prepared to get more footage that we will actually use for our final project.
When we uploaded our footage, we decided that we were going to use final cut for our editing. At first it seemed like a very confusing program compared to the simple Imovie and struggled at first with the software, but after Miss Hill's help, it has become much easier and simpler to use.
Overall our first go at filming and editing of our final thriller project has been a bit of a catastrophe, but we have learnt from it and will be more prepared when filming next time and now know how to use final cut, hopefully only going up from here on.

Progress report

Last night Charlie and I done some of our filming! we managed to get majority of the footage for the last part of our opening, now all we need to get is the start. We somehow managed to get 19 minutes worth of footage and only used 2 seconds of it.. This is not good!

We only needed this much footage but it seemed like such a waste of filming time! We are now a bit worried about getting the rest of the footage.. Seriously, how much footage are we going to go through before getting our final piece all done and together?!

Looking through the footage we realised the lighting wasn't how we wanted it to be, trying to edit it using final cut really confused us but we have finally got the shot looking how we want it to!

The Prestige

Created with Padlet

Our final thriller plan.

Up until this point we were still not 100% sure of what we wanted in our thriller. We finally agreed on the narrative and other components of our thriller and decided to do a video blog on what our final idea now is. It was difficult to decide on what we want but now we've got it pegged we can begin filming without worrying about what is going to happen as well as all the aspects of Mise-en-scene.