Evaluating the Production Process

Throughout this experience and through research, planning, filming and post-production, I feel that as a group we have conformed to the codes and conventions of typical psychological and action thrillers but at the same time have sub-verted some of the conventions that are presented to us. The decisions we made, we made based on the idea of what meaning and understanding it would create for the audience. Within this blog post I will show and present my groups development and my personal development and understanding of the media project. 

Each section helped us as a group to make decisions on what we thought was best for our opening title sequence. The first stage of our project was research. This was something that I think we lacked a lot of. Overall, we analysed around 7 opening sequences from other psychological and action thrillers; a the time we thought this was a lot but after we moved on from the research stage we realised that we needed to of analysed no less than 20 opening sequences.  I believe this is one of the reasons we struggled to make decisions because we did not really understand how to conform with the conventions and technical codes of our thriller and how other thrillers had displayed their knowledge throughout their thrillers. I feel that as a group we limited ourselves a lot and could have done a lot more, I realise now that it should have been one person's job to keep analysing and keeping the group up to date with what they were discovering while the rest of the group was carrying the project forward. I personally think that we were set back due to this and we could not move on with the project because we did not have good enough knowledge and understanding of what we were doing.

The foundation to our project in order to make it either conform or challenge the codes and conventions of a thriller is seen in the link between the research and the planning stages of the project. This is one of the most important parts of the project as it is analysing the knowledge that the group has and showing that we could apply it using our own ideas. We had to show that we understood what our research had told us in order for us to create a project such as the type of thriller; sub genre; hybrid; storyboard; shot list and script we could use to move forward in order to create our opening with meaning for the audience. I do not think that any of us (my group) really understood the complexity of what we would have been doing. Although I know that this comes from not putting enough effort into the research stages. This therefore gave us a bad start to the planning process. I feel that we also lacked a lot of depth in the planning stage of our project. I feel that the communication within my group was awful at this point. I think that we left too much and waited too much for the lessons; we rarely met up independently outside of lessons and I regret this very much, I think that if we had done this then we would have had more understanding of what each others opinions were and the projet would have moved forward faster and smoother than it did. I do not feel as if we planned the tension in our opening enough. Although within planning I have spoken about tension and how we have tried to create it; I still feel as if it want as effective as it could have been. A clear example of this is when the female antagonist takes the glasses out of the cupboard and after she has poured the Jack Daniel's  she places it back on to the counter, I feel as if we could have added foley sound in here and made it seem a lot more dramatic. In most thrillers, they add foley sound when characters light cigarettes; they add an extra spark and turn up the volume of either the match of the lighter to build tension for the audience and build the significance of that object. This is something I feel as of we should of done and I am disappointed aout as we did not do it.

I also feel that our storyboard, shot list and scripts were slightly rushed and not planned enough in detail. We assigned each member of the group with each job and when the jobs were done we bought them back, showed the group and that was the decision made. No one gave their opinion or tried to challenge or question something that another member of the group had done even if they felt their idea was stronger. If we had planned them in more depth and used each others opinions then I feel that we would have had a better change of sticking with the decisions that we had made. In the end we did not follow the storyboard, original shot list or script that was devised in the planning stage.

As I have said above, we did not follow the storyboard at all during the filming stage. We had many problems with this, at our first shoot, we forgot the storyboard, but we tried to remember it and get copied from our mobile phones but when we tried toput together the shots and set up the shots, it proved more difficult than we originally thought it would, the shots we had planned were not working and we knew our only option was to change then and try and few shots so that when we got to the uploading and editing stage, we could see which shots worked best. Our original shoot of the first scene was interrupted as we were told that we could not film within the train station as it was breaching procedure and we had to get into contact with the train firm. We knew that we did not have this amount of time, so we had to re-plan. We created a rough storyboard, went back the train station but filmed the two characters acknowledgement of each other from outside. Another problem occurred. We were told again that we were not able to film outside of the train station either. Once we had got back to school and spoken to our teacher about the problems, we thought up a few newer and simpler ideas that would hopefully create the same effect. This time the filming was fine although again it had no structure to it and we were just making up the narrative and filming while based at the camera. This was one of the biggest problems we made. I believe that we should have gone back and created another storyboard to make our narrative stronger because I do not feel that it created the meaning that we wanted it to originally.

Moving from the filming stages into the post production stage of our project; I feel that I was much more involved with the project and focused a lot more than I did at other stages of the project  I feel that I have a good understanding of our final product and what representations we were attempting to put across the the audience and other medias. I had no experience with the programme that we were told to use. I had never used or heard of it before and had to watch various youtube tutorials just to get a basic understanding of how to use it and understand video and audio levels. However Luke (a member of my group) was very experienced with the understanding of how different programmes worked. However I wanted to get to know the programme as I know that this will help me with future projects. In the end, I was the only member of the group editing towards the final days of the project. I feel that this was an advantage for me personally because I really had to dig deep into the programme and understand it for myself without any help. Editing sound in adobe audition was one of the programmes that I learned to use by myself. I learnt how to fade in and fade out sound in order to create an eerie feel for the audience. Without these techniques I feel that our opening sequence would not have looked correct if these had not been applied.

Furthermore; I feel that looking back at research; this had a huge impact on the way our final project panned out and is replicated for the audience. I also feel as if we tried to include too many things for example too many characters so I felel as if our final project looked camped. From each stage of the project; I feel that I have learned a lot and taken a lot of knowledge from the process. I strongly believe that I have grown as an individual in terms of the understanding of media and I believe that this will help me in my exam and in my project next year.

Evaluation

'CHANCE' final cut

Our final cut of 'CHANCE'

Chelsea Wilson, Priyanka Chawla, Aman Dhillon and Luke Mayes.

Survey - 'CHANCE'

I have created a survey for the audience of our thriller tp fill out to give us some feedback on the meaning we have created, whether people enjoyed it, whether they would want to see more and whether our opening sequence actually suited our target audience.

BEFORE you complete the survey; please watch out two minute opening, the link for our opening  is presented below;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqjgHebiQbA

Below is the link to the survey; 

https://chanceasmedia.typeform.com/to/uKwbAN

Final sounds

Throughout our project, when looking for sound and deciding on what sounds to use, we had to ensure that they were copyright free and that legally allowed to use them. However not only did they have to be legal; they also had to suit our opening title sequence in order for the narrative to flow and create meaning for the audience. As a group we have looked at many different copyright websites, many of which had good sounds and soundtracks on that we could use, but one website gave us audio that matched our narrative in order for the continuity to flow correctly.

The image above is from a website called www.freeplaymusic.com . This website allowed us to find music that fit the narrative of our opening sequence and was copyright free in order for us to use. the exact names of the audios we found are as followers;

- Digital Info

- Army Angels

- So Focused

Whilst I was editing, these three tracks has to be edited. Some had to be stretched out so that they reached to the point that I wanted, I also had to edit most of the tracks in adobe audition, I used effects such as a 'fade in' and a 'fade out'. This program has given me the opportunity to edit the clips of audio to match the opening sequence. This has allowed the continuity of our project to flow and create meaning for the audience. We also chose the audios to purposely create tension for the audience.

Final Editing

During today's editing session, I put all of the clips in the final order and decided if anything needed extra cutting or if we had cut too much off originally, if so placing the original clip back into the sequence and re-cutting it. One clip we had, where Luke's character (the motocycle character) was taking his jacket off and we had to but it slightly and delete the middle bit to make the pace a bit faster and he was taking too long to remove the jacket, it turned out to look 'jumpy' so i removed the last part. I kept it simple by keeping the first part of the clip and the continuity of the sequence was not interrupted. Furthermore, the sequence was back running smoothly.




I then moved on and focused on the volume of some of the sounds that we were looking at. I mainly focused on volume controls, I needed to work out independently how to turn down the volume of the ambient sound in some places and turn up the volume on the non diegetic sound in some places. Within the premer program, there was a volume controls mixer, which helped me change the volumes of all types of sound at different parts of the sequence. This was good as it meant most of our clip could be non diegetic sound as we wanted but also we could make the ambient sounds obvious to show that we have understood the importance of different types of sounds and what effects they have on the title sequence and the full opening sequence. We wanted test how the volume of sound effected the tension and furthermore the meaning it was representing to the audience.

Post production

After filming, you upload the footage you have and begin to edit, by edit, I mean cutting, re-arranging, adding sound, etc. I have learnt all of this through the media course, my skills have improved massively considering I had never used the premiere program before. I had no idea how fitting footage together worked and I had no idea how to cut either.

When you get to post production, you often come across mistakes that you have made when filming and often realise that there is some footage that cannot be used. The most common example of this is accidentally utting a characters head off when filming. For example the top of the shot is there forehead so the whole character is not in view. This is excepted if it were to be an extreme close up where you only see their emotions of their face but if you are filming a mid or long shot and you are showing the character but cutting the top of their head off because of bad camera work, then this is obviously seen as a problem.

Here is one of the problems that I found when looking through all of the footage that other members of my team had filmed. Mistakes like this are common but are so important that it makes shots like this shot end up wasted as they cannot be used. Half of the character is cut off (the side of him) it is important when filming that people are aware that if you are going to film a character then you need to make them the priority, another priority in this shot if the motorcycle, the bottom of the motocycle is cut off and it is not in the middle of the shot, this is so important. This means that the meaning created to the audience is not correct, a shot like this would not create tension for the audience. The mise-en scene is ruined in this shot as there is no clear definition as to why the character is wearing hat costume, what does the costume contribute to his character, why the motorbike is there and what meaning that creates. These mistakes are easily made but easily avoided also. As a group we went through all of the mistakes within the major shots that has problems. We realised what we were doing wrong and what we could do to help each other with future filming.

One of the problems we faced especially were with out pan shots for our sequence. We felt as if a pan shot would build tension for our audience. Although it was not too long, it was still longer than other shots, showing a pan would present to the audience that the specific character in view is important. We tried so hard to get the pan shots completely perfect however it was extremely difficult. Most of the pan shots began very well but as it was difficult to keep the continuity of the same shot, it was often the case that it went well but towards the end, whoever was filming, moved the camera slightly faster than they had been before ths point in the shot.