Production

Our final piece

Production log

This is a log which I am keeping over the series of AS coursework resubmission sessions which I am attending.

1^st session

There were not a lot of people at our first session in which we are using time to resubmit our AS coursework, therefore we decided that we should form a group out of the small number of people which attended the session. This group consisted out of me, Hannah, Harriet and Holly we decided that seeing as our grades for our AS coursework were pretty low that we may as well all start again by creating an entirely new film and written work which surrounds it.

2^nd session

During this session we were all mind mapping and coming up with ideas for our production, we wanted to keep the film as simple as possible in order to make it look quite effective and professional. Consequently we decided that we should try and avoid having dialogue or actors faces within the shot, this would make our filming process a lot easier and hopefully make our short film look more professional because we will not be relying on the characters acting abilities to tell the story instead the camera shots, angles and transitions will be telling a story.

3^rd session

We spent this media session building up our story and planning out our opening sequence in order to make sure that all of our group have a strong idea of what is going on within our opening sequence and where the film would be going. As a group we all began to build up the story and discussed shots and camera angles which we thought would be appropriate to the story. We also began to distribute roles within the group to distinguish who is going to be completing certain parts of the research and planning section.

4^th session

Now that we all had an idea of what we were meant to be getting on with we then decided that it would be easier for us to complete our work on a blog, therefore we decided to create a blog on the popular website Blogger. Creating a blog meant that our work will be more organised and show a much more creative way of presenting our work, the first thing which we all did on our blogs was create 4 different sections for research, planning, production and evaluation, subsequently making our work in a much more organised format.

5^th session

Now that all of our roles have been assigned we thought it would be a good idea if our whole group sat down and wrote the script together. Once we got the script all written I then began working on the storyboard. I am finding the story board pretty difficult, I am taking my time on it because drawing isn’t really my strength. Therefore I decided to begin drafting the questionnaire which is part of the research and planning section. During this session also Holly began working on researching into institutions which are similar to our product. Meanwhile Harriet worked on applying Todorov’s theory to our work and Hannah wrote the treatment for our film.

6^th session

In order to figure out how our opening sequence will be received by our audience and whether or not we should alter some of the things within the story. To make the questionnaire and results look slightly more creative looking I have decided that I think that it would be a good idea to present them by use of Excel and PowerPoint. I am going to present the results in a pie chart and then put both the questionnaire and the results onto a PowerPoint presentation, and then upload it to slide share where I can then embed the URL into my blog. I think this will give extra creativity marks.

7^th session

During this session I put all of our results from the questionnaire together, this meant that I could now calculate the percentages of people which answered each question then input it into a spread sheet; once I had done this I then put the results into pie charts. I managed to get all of this done and put onto a PowerPoint presentation in one session. During this time Hannah completed the sound research and Harriet completed lighting research.

8^th session

Now that I have finished the questionnaire and the results I have decided to go back to completing the storyboard. I managed to also get this done within this session, although I do wish I had completed the storyboard in colour in order to make things slightly clearer for us to understand once we get to the filming process. Our group also discussed when is good for us all to film, it seems that we all have pretty busy schedules therefore it is difficult for us all to find time to film. Our filming shouldn’t take very long because we are all going to take part within the film and hopefully our planning work will also make the filming process run smoothly.

9^th session

We have missed out on a couple of sessions due to half term, therefore our group made sure that we all finished the tasks which we were set to do from the research and planning section. We then got a majority of filming done in this session; we went to Hannah’s house initially where we made sure that we got all of shots which had to be filmed in an inside environment done. We were quite pressed for time but hopefully our shots haven’t reflected this anxiety. We then drove to Twyford to capture the other shots; I tried to make sure that we got quite a lot of rushes so that we had a lot to work with but being quite short on time made this difficult.

We haven’t been that organised with our work which is very frustrating, I don’t think that our group have so far worked very well together because we all have quite a lot going on at the moment therefore re-submitting our coursework wasn’t really the main priority which is a shame. I do think that we all work well under pressure therefore we will manage to get the work done just in time.

I am currently working on the evaluation of our opening sequence; I am trying to make it as detailed as possible in order to obtain high marks there because I have lost marks in the past on my evaluating skills. We have decided to divide the seven questions which make up the evaluation out between the group, with a majority of our group doing 2 of the questions each.

Preliminary task