R&P Schedule

So once we knew what work we had left to do it was up to us to arrange our work in an expected work flow, I took it upon myself to create an Excel document of our expected workflow labelling it with dates, a summary of what needed to be done, who was doing what and what job.
As you can see we all have something to do and where this workflow ends is where we shall start filming our Short.

R&P Schedule

Film Pitch: "Behind Closed doors"

The Film pitch! 
This is where we pitch our film short idea to Mr Hood and hope he likes it enough and believes it will work so he can commission it! Once it's been commissioned we can start out costume research, risk assessments, scripts, hiring of the actors etc. and get this show on the road!
I unfortunately was not present to pitch this, but my Team members however did a brilliant job without me. Below is the film pitch for "Behind closed Doors"


 

Evaluation
While this pitch is lengthy I feel like my team covered everything and answered the questions well that were posed. It was presented in even speaking parts between my members and was presented in complex detail.
Mr Hood interjected and gave feed back which we have developed on, for example he said we should probably have a more in-depth story line where the husband was out so late because he perhaps was buying an engagement ring instead of just out late cheating on his girlfriend, this would give a slight twist to the story as to whom he was buying the ring for. I feel this is a good improvement to the plot as it ticks another box for our short film sticking to the short film conventions

DSLR Practice Documentary

Now that we were given the basic jist of the camera's Mr Hood thought it would be a good idea to film a short "Litter Documentary" for proper practice with them and practice with the new Final Cut Pro which I will talk about in my next post.
We were given a week to shoot our footage, on school or off school to get to grips with the camera's. All that sir asked was there be certain elements in it, like: 

- Interview

- B-Roll

- Talking Heads

- Establishing Shot

- Soundtrack

- Voice Over

Then here is the class evaluation of our work:


The main problem we discovered while filming was that myself and my group had trouble with focusing the Cameras. Many of the shots we thought were fine actually were slightly out of focus, normally highlighting objects in the picture not needed. One main error that was pointed out by our peers was the interview with Mrs Kearsey. We hadn't noticed whilst filming, but it was something behind her that was in focus, while she was slightly blurred out, because the camera screens are so small it was hard to notice this WHILE filming and correct this error, so in future when we go to film our short we will get an exterior monitoring kit in which to view our recording.

Another thing our peers noticed was the music wasn't fitting, bur as we were going for a slightly mocking documentary the music fitted our satirical comment on how serious documentaries like to be, some peers enjoyed this technique but others found it unnecessary and out of place. This was mixed opinions so I feel not everyone got the message of that it was slightly mocking.

FCP X training

We not only have new cameras for this year but also new editing software called Final Cut Pro X; to get to grips with this software before our actual editing takes place for our short we were given the task to film and edit a litter documentary. This was a helpful task to us as final cut pro is very different to the one we were used to using.

So this is the new Final cut, as you can see it looks a lot fancier than last time and if you look on the bottom right hand pane there is a selection of transitions, effects and other cool things you can put in your work. Another cool feature of Final cut pro X is you can now edit your sound in there and change the volume levels of diagetic or non diagetic sounds.  

This pane is in the top left hand side of Final cut pro X and just like the other version this is where all your uploaded clips go, whats different about this one if you can order your clips into folders, so in the instance of our documentary you can drop a load of clips into a folder and call it 'B roll'.  This is handy because it makes it easier to find your clips.  

Another new thing added to final cut pro is this ability to add 'B-roll/cut away' footage over running footage which keeps the audio but changes to different clips. 

You can also edit audio and change the volumes of it without having to go into soundtrack pro to change and manipulate audio.

DSLR Training

So now that we've pitched our short film ideas the next step is to get to grips with the camera's we will be using, last year we used big Sony HD Cameras THIS year we've splashed out and now have Cannon DSLR 600D Camera's these camera's are more complex than last year, so it requires extra research. The advantage of these camera's is it allows us to produce a cinematic film quite like the blockbuster films but without the blockbuster budget. 

These camera's are a lot more hands on and allows you to do a lot more things manually which gives you the power to influence your shot. Things we had to learn about these camera's were things like: 

• The Aperture, ISO and Shutter speed, all of which will change the look of your picture or film shot. 
• The lenses we could use while filming
• Auto focus and manual focusing

These were a few things we had to research. luckily we had video tutorials to explain the complexity of the use of these cameras.

Lens types
There are a few lens types; a kit lense, a zoom lense, a prime lense and an extreme wide angle lense.
All these lenses give a different shot and we must know what all of them do, fortunately out research was easy on this as there was a readily available video informing of their uses.
The video is posted below watch it for information on the DSLR lenses we can use for video.


If you watched the video it talks about aperture and ISO a lot so the next step would be to explain Aperture, ISO and Shutter speed. All components we need to know and be able to manipulate for a perfect picture.

Aperture

Aperture is our depth of field on the camera, the lower you set it the more washed out and short your depth of field on the picture will be, as displayed above an F-Stop of 2.8 lets in a lot more light and gives a shallow depth of field. The higher you bring your F-Stop the greater the depth of field is and less light enters the lense for a deep depth of field and a better picture.

ISO and Shutter Speed

The pictures kind of sum up the handiness of ISO but to explain properly ISO control's how much light enters the camera, the more light that enter's the "noisier" a picture will appear the less light that enters a picture the higher quality the picture will look, it's important to find the right balance so the image isn't too dark and isn't of a poor quality either.

ISO indicates your digital camera’s sensitivity to light. The higher the number, the less light is needed to take a photo that is correctly exposed.

In bright light (like the middle of a sunny day), you’ll normally use ISO 50 or ISO 100. These lowest settings can be used because there is lots of light around. However, in lower light, your camera needs some help. 

There are two ways of doing this: 

Decrease shutter speed: With a slow shutter speed the camera has more time to take in the amount of light it needs. This could however make your images turn out blurry because of how slow the shutter is. 

Another way is to Increase your ISO: Rather than decrease the shutter speed, you can increase the ISO. As I said above, this will increase the sensitivity of the camera which means you can get the same shot with less light entering the camera. Thus the shutter speed can be kept low enough to avoid blurry images. 

Auto Focusing and Manual focusing

This video explains Auto focus and manual focus and shows you the differences in both.
The video below this one is souly about auto focus and it explains in a little more detail how to get a good picture on auto focus and what you should do if you choose to use it.