Recee Shots (Graveyard)

Went out and took these together on Wednesday, the 15th. Planning in the folder is pretty much done now too.
Matt and Ewan. x

Recee

Gonna take some photos of a few potential houses for the bedroom and street scenes tomorrow.
Got some graveyard shots, so they're gonna get printed out tomoro and put on the blog when I upload them.
Ewan x

Woooo.

Thanks to the snow, our deadlines moved forward a little.
Good times.

PITCH

Audience Feedback:

1) A few people commented on the storyline saying it was a little confusing, but others could follow it okay. Personally i think its supposed to be a little bit confusing.

2) Most people liked the general idea, thought it was original.

3) A few people are confused by the idea of the car, and think maybe having the car actually hitting her would be a little too hard to realise on camera.

4)Most people liked the title a lot.

Homework - Marking of previous students work

- Firstly read all the Levels of the mark scheme to get an idea of each one.

- (Level 1 - 1-15, 2 - 16-30, 3 - 31-45, 4 - 36-60

- Then watch all 4 videos

- Mark each one out of 60 and explain why.

I would give this peice something like 30 out of 60.
I really liked the way the news reader sets the scene, and the location looks great, but when it moves to the forest the sound is horrible as I dont think they used a boom pole, and the use of music and camera makes what could have been a fast an exciting scene got made a little bit boring, I think.

Again I think this peice would get possibly 30, 35.
I like the titles and music at the beginning. It makes for an atmospheric introduction, but when it properly starts theres no real music or sound. Which I think was intended to amp up the tension, but instead made things look a bit unrealistic. Like when the guy gets killed he makes no noise? Also the way it was edited seems a bit strange and jumpy, which left me feeling a little confused. And at some points the camera was slightly shaky.

I would give this video about 45 out of 60. The acting is pretty good, which is something I've thought can let down the credibility of other videos. The makeup on the Zombies is great, and everything about them is entirely believeable, including the way they moved. The death scenes were filmed in such a way, that we didnt have to say everything but still got the general idea of what was happening and still managed to unsettle me. The camerawork was fine, but my only problem is there wasnt a huge variation of camera movements or angles.

I would give this around 50, or maybe full marks.
I really liked the sound, and while the titles werent that interesting they werent boring either. The unusual editing and camerawork made it interesting to watch and they used more than one camera movement.

Ewan Moore. Textual Analyisis Homework. The Ring

I will argue the toss with you that The Ring is a ghost film. Try me.

Film: the Ring   Director: Gore Verbinski   Year: 2002  Cert.: 15


Threat: The threat is the freaky small child that comes out of the television. The Camera shots/angles always go quite skewed or strange whenever she appears, with lots of different shots coming thick at fast to create a feeling of panic, coupled with long shots to create unease. The lighting goes dark whenever she comes out of the television. Everythings goes black apart from the TV with generates static, and presents the girl as threating and creepy. The music is classic tense horror fair, and little sound comes from the girl herself. The setting is a young girls house, which isnt important as its just sort of, the opening kill. But the house is made to be creepier than it could have been because of all the above.

Vunerability: The young teenage girl is made to appear vunerable in the opening. The camera uses high angle shots to make her seem weak and vunerable, and over the shoulder tracking shots to give the impression she is being followed. The lighting on her is also dark mostly, which gives a feeling of isolation, and even though she is with a friend her numbers up and she cant be helped.

Characterisation: In the opening scene, there isnt a whole lot of characterisation. The monster of the peices only motivation is revenge, which we dont find out till later, and the teenager doesnt get much chance to go from anything other than happy face to "wtf" face to scared face to dead face.

Genre: This is classic horror, almost bordering on cliche. Actually, it is cliche. Young girl home alone (apart from a useless friend)? check. Mysterious urban myth that cant be true but is? check. Creepy telephone ringing? check. Unbearable moments of tension and false panic? Big check.

Ewans Evaluation

1. Use of The Camera

The camera was used with skill during filiming, no shots were shaky, and we managed to frame every shot decently enough. We used a variety of shot types, though no real close ups, and we remembered to white balance and focus each and every shot.

2. Use Of Editing.

Following the rules of continuity, all the shots flow together to look like one smooth sequence. It all flows better than I thought it would. (I couldnt be there during editing) but when watching it back, it was done brilliantly, and the use of sound really helped add the feeling of tension.

3. Selection of content.

In fairness the sequence we chose didnt involve any need for makeup, just one average looking teenager. Nor did we need any props. As for location, we talked about a few houses, but settled on an elderly relatives to give it an older creepy feel.

4. Self Assessment.

To be perfectly honest, I was Ill during a lot of the planning and away during editing for family reasons so I didnt have much of a hand in planning. I did draft an early storyboard for a sequence we didnt use, and during filimg, set up the camera and framed a few shots. I dont really think Id change much about the finished film, other than find somewhere without yellow walls. That killed the tension about. When it comes to our actually film aswell, I plan to be there for all of it.

Matt's Preliminary Assesment Evaluation!

I think we took full use of the cameras ability, we wanted to make our recreation look as proffesional as possible, one way in which we did this was by using a tripod for each scene and camera level, this ensured there was no amature camera shaking, as it is impossible to keep a straight hand if holding the camera to take a shot. When making our peice, we spent lots of time making sure our shot was framed appropriately, making sure that each shot was as close to the original as possible, another way we did this was by making our storyboard as detailed as possible. When decided which 30-40 seconds to recreate, we decided to use a clip that showed a variety of shot types, this way we could show our full ability in our peice.
     I beleive that our editing definitely showed our use of continuity, as we took this into concideration strongly when creating our peice, making sure that we remembered both the 30 degree and the 180 degree rule. In the editing process we spent alot of time peicing our shots together precisely so our peice went together as smooth as possible.
    The character in our clip used no major props or make up, yet we still had decisions to make when decided what our actor was going to look like, we decided to go for a casual teenage boy look. When decided a house for our peice, we chose the perfect place to shoot, an old fashioned seventies style house, which I beleive gave more of a haunted ghostly effect than either mine or Ewans house, which would be much more modern and not have the same effect. When choosing our actor, we chose very appropriatly as our actor had past experience in acting, and we beleived this would be very rewarding for our peice.
     Looking back on our peice, I beleive that maybe we could of chose a more advanced clip, as maybe we were to conscious of picking something that was easy to film, If I was to ever do this again, I beleive I would choose something that could maybe show my ability more.
     

Film

This is our finished 40 seconds. We believe that we edited this as well as we could and are very impressed with what we have done

Makeup Test Shots

This was our attempt at makeup. (Some would say ill fated). We used Ewans 5 year old sister Ellie as our subject, because this best suited the kind of ghost girl vibe we were going for. We started by randomly throwing flour on her face, which we realized didn't really work at all, since it kept falling off, but eventually we managed to get enough on to look good. After this, we smeared tomato ketchup round her mouth, to give a blooded creepy image, which again we learnt didn't work that well. One thing we both agreed worked, was the use of eyeliner, to give that classic creepy eyes look. After the main makeup was on, We popped her head under the shower and soaked her hair, for a straggly drowned look. Obviously what we didn't realize is that putting her under the shower would wash off all the makeup we'd just spent time putting on, so after some crying, we reapplied the makeup with a new found confidence, and the result is above. Ta daa.

Day 23

This is our "Visual Composition" piece. In this piece we also made a story before hand for the first time. After editing our piece our mac crashed, which meant that we had to quickly re edit it, which meant that our piece is not edited to perfection

assessment Exercise Original

This is the original piece we have chose to do our 30-40 second clip on.

Continuity Shoot

Right, this was a practice shooting session, to get the hang of continuity. One major problem is we forgot to white balance and some shots are unfocused. But we did get a few things right, such as Matt leaving and some spot on sounds. Live and learn.

Cowboy Film.

This is our practice session shooting a mock gunfight. Wasnt a great success due to several technical issues, but we saved it thanks to some nifty sound effects.

Looking back on this piece we now realize that we had no continuity and that although edited, our film doesn't make much sense due to this fact. We prefer to look at this in a positive way and learn from this process and to make sure we focus on continuity more in our next piece.

Day 1

We have decided to choose Ghost as our sub-genre, as this will make ours better than everyone else's. Our group consists of Ewan Moore and Matthew Newton.  Also we plan to watch either "Orphanage" or "Sixth Sense" for inspiration on Monday 27th September.