Thursday 20 March 2014

Things to be improved.

After the classes feedback we discovered a few issues with our title sequence. We found the main comment that appeared on all of the feedback sheets was the fonts and the colour of the fonts. This is something that can easily be changed and can be fixed pretty easily. We also discovered that a few people were confused by what the narrative was, this can be fixed by changing the order of the clips.
The thing I personally disliked about the sequence was the trasitions. I don't think they worked very well and made the narrative confusing and hard to follow.

Wednesday 19 March 2014

Journal: Feedback

In today's lesson we all watched each others title sequences, this was a really great experience as it gave us all the chance to see how creative everyone else was and to see what their interpretation of the task was. There are some really amazing pieces of work that the class has produced and after watching theirs and comparing it to ours, I think we have noticed a few problems with ours that we can hopefully fix by the deadline.
These are the feedback sheets we got from the class:





Fonts

When doing a title sequence the fonts are always an important part since thats how people read the credits. During one of the lessons Nicole went onto Dafont.com to look for some fonts that would be appropriate for our title sequence, since there were a few that she liked, she wrote up a survey and handed it out to everyone in the class, asking them their favourite of the 4 fonts and which colour they think would look best.




The results were:


Fonts:

Always Forever (3/10)
Jenna Sue (4/10)
Jennifer Lynne (2/10)
Sweetie Pie (1/10)

Colours:

White (5/10)
Purple (2/10)
Dusty Blue (1/10)
Red (2/10)

Monday 17 March 2014

Personal analysis: My mad fat diary.

My Mad Fat Diary is TV series based on the book 'My fat mad teenage diary' by Rae Earl. It was turned into a TV series in January 2013 & has already made a comeback for series 2. The show follows the story of 16 year old girl called Rae Earl, who has just left a psychiatric hospital, where she has been for four months. When Rae leaves the hospital she begins to reconnect with her bestfriend Chloe and her new group of friends, however she doesn't tell them about where she has been for the past four months and sneaks off once a week to meet her therapist. Her therapist tells her to keep a diary which is what is read as a voice over.


My Mad Fat Diary – title sequence from Mr & Mrs on Vimeo.

The reason I have decided to analyse the title sequence for this show is because the main character in my mad fst diary (Rae) is very similar to the main character in our film. They are both highly influenced by music and both follow bands and they both have a tight group of friends. I also thought it would be interesting to see the difference between a film title sequence and a TV show title sequence.
The first thing we see in the sequence is a note with 'This Diary belongs to Rae Earl Private!' written on it, there are also some doodles of pizza and a girl on there. These are already clues to what the main character is like, these both show us she likes food and that she doesn't think very highly of herself as the drawing that is possibly of her, isn't drawn very neatly and didn't take much time. This also suggests that she doesn't care much for her appearance. Black scribbles then cover the outside of the note, this could suggest that her mental state isn't very well because she is using black and scribbling could connote that her thoughts are all 'scribbled'.
The next thing we see is a note with 'Mum' & a witchs face scribbled on it. This suggests that she doesn't get on with her mum particularly well. The receipt with chocolate repeated in the back tells us that she is not the healthiest girl ever and is quite large.
The next shot is of a pair of sunglasses which could imply that the area it is set in is sunny or that it is set in the summer when its hot. There is also a doodle of a naked lady which could imply that Rae is going through puberty and doesn't have anyone to share things about that with other than her diary.
We then see a doodle of her therapist Kester. The drawing is quite large which suggests that she thinks very highly of him and enjoys spending the time she can talking to him.
The title then appears and then a shot of spilt ink with 'based on my fat, mad, teenage diary by rae earl' written on it.
The next scene is a note saying 'lets do this' this suggests that she is trying to get used to trying new things and wants to live more. There is also a tape in the corner, this shows how much music means to her, the fact that the name 'Finn' is also written at the bottom suggests he is going to play a big part in Rae's life.
There is then a few doodles of birds which could suggest she feels more free than she ever has before With song lyrics/poetry written on some paper. This again shows how musically influenced she is.
The music then fades out and a shot of Rae appears.

Sunday 16 March 2014

Music.

In our title sequence there is no talking so music is a key feature. During one of our double lessons while Esther was editing the footage we had Nicole and I went onto a computer each and started to look for some music that we thought would be good to use. We first tried youtube for uncopyrighted music but didn't have much luck. We then went onto soundcloud & freeplaymusic.com to look for something that would be appropriate for our sequence, this time we managed to find quite a few that we both liked. After a little while of searching we both came together and listened to what each other had found. We then discovered that we both really liked an artist we had found on freeplaymusic called 'Lisa Jaeggi'. After spending a while listening to all of her songs we discussed which one we liked best and we found we both really loved her song 'Better The Devil You Know' and we all agreed that it fitted our sequence perfectly.
We are sure that this song is uncopyrighted however we thought it would be nice to email Lisa Jaeggi herself to see if it was perfectly okay to use her song, unfortunately we haven't had a reply back from her but we have done our research and can find no reason to not use it.
The email we sent read:
'Hi,
      We are Welling school pupils and for our A Level Media coursework we are making a title sequence for a film that we have created. We were instructed to use a piece of either uncopyrighted music or music we have had permission to use by the writer. We found your song 'The Devil You Know' on the website https://www.freeplaymusic.com/ and were wondering if you could grant us permission to use your song, which fits in really well with our sequence.

Many Thanks,

Chloe Ridley
Nicole Simmons 
Esther Sole'

Filming journal 3: In school

Th next time we did some filming we were in school. I personally found doing it in school was alot harder than outside of school. When we filmed at Danson Park we could use all the time we needed to get everything done, however in school we were working on a tight schedule due to different timetables & different lesson times. What also made it difficult was that the people we needed to act in the sequence were sometimes unavailable and couldn't do it due to having their own work to do. If the people we needed were absent or had other commitments that day we were unable to film the things we needed. Unfortunately this happened more than once. During the times this did happen we would get together as a group and discuss what we would do next and when everyone was available to film next. Luckily we managed to sort out dates & times between us and the people acting in our sequence & managed to film everything we needed,
Although there were quite a few downsides to filming in school, there were some up. For example, there were always extra people around if we ever needed any and if we needed any extra support/advice there were always the people in our class we could talk to anytime and there were always the teachers we could ask any of our questions to and get advice from.
Overall I found the experience of filming inside of school to be a little more difficult than originally anticipated, however I feel we managed to successfully overcome these issues as a group.

Danson Park re-shoot

While editing the footage we shot at Danson Park we found that some of the shots were not as good as we had originally thought. This meant we had to re-shoot & get it all done as quickly as possible, It was quite hard to decide a date to film as we all had other commitments for the coming weekend, so we were unable to do it then, this meant we had to do it on an afternoon after school. We decided on the coming Friday.
On Friday after our Media lesson Nicole & I got permission to leave school early to go to her house to get the costume & props that we needed, we then met Esther at Danson park at 3.30 where she was ready for us to begin filming. Luckily it didn't take very long for us to know exactly what we wanted & exactly how it should look. Overall it took around 1 hour 30 minutes to shoot everything we needed.
I feel this was a very successful shoot & we are all very pleased with the way the footage we filmed has turned out.

Friday 14 March 2014

Filming Journal

We began to film our title sequence on Wednesday 19th February. We chose this day because it was the beginning of half term and if some of the shots were't so great we could easily just go back out later on in the week and re-shoot them, luckily there was no need for this as we managed to get all the shots we needed that day.
For our first time filming I feel it was very successful. We had all the costume, props and camera equipment we needed, and managed to get all the shots we could do in a matter of hours, we also had a lot of fun and got to know each other a bit better.
As a group we decided to meet at 11.30 in Danson Park, which is where a lot of our sequence takes place. We decided that Danson Park would be a good place to film because its a big open space but it is still quite central so if we needed to get anything it would be easy enough for one of us to go home/go to a shop and get whatever we needed, luckily we were all prepared for the day ahead and didn't need to waste any time running around getting things we may have needed.
To film our sequence we used Esthers camera, we came together as a group and decided to use Esthers camera because it is the best quality camera and we would always have access to it if we needed to film  anything again. We also used a tripod to make sure none of the shots were shaky and that we made sure the camera quality was at its finest, unfortunately it was a fairly windy day so some of the shots were a little bit shaky, which meant we had to go back to Danson Park at another date and re-shoot some of them to make sure they were the best we could do and the best shots we could get. Luckily we managed this and also got some extra shots we had been advised to do, so in the end it turned out to be a good thing that some of the shots were shaky otherwise we wouldn't have had the shots at the best quality.
We all worked together as a team to get the shots we needed. Nicole plays the main character in the film so she was acting, she also provided the costume. Esther provided the camera & tripod and I bought the storyboard and other papers that we needed.
Overall I think it was a successful day filming, even though we had to do some of the shots again it was still really good to get an idea of how we well we would work together when we are filming and how long everything would take and how well the shots would turn out. However, if we were to re-do this in the future I think would be a better idea to make sure that we checked how windy it would be to make sure it wont interfeir with the quality of the film.