Our questionaire

At the start of our project we did a thriller questionnaire on the conventions that people prepared.
1)Are you male or female?
We asked more males than females but only by one so it didn't bias our results

2)Which age group includes you:
13-14
15-16
17-18
Our main audience age group is 15-16

3)Which specific genre of thriller would you have said was your favourite?
Criminal
Psychological
Sci-fi
Supernatural
The main answer we got was psychological

Out of the ones named which would you say was your favourite thriller?
Dark Knight
Shutter Island
4.3.2.1.
Terminator
Reservoir Dogs
Number 23
Dark Knight was the most popular answer however we had widespread results


5)What are your favourite thriller themes?
Mind Games
Extreme Violence
A Different World
Mind games are more widely associated with the genre

6)Do you prefer a male character or a female character for the lead?
Male (14) we asked why and had some interesting responses

7)What location would you prefer to see a thriller set?
Abandoned house or warehouse
Outdoors i.e. graveyard, old park, old fairground
A parallel universe
The setting that was most voted for was something that is abandoned because this best shows isolation

8)Which of these examples do you feel is best at creating an atmosphere? What do you focus on most during the film?
People
Music
Dialogue
Setting
Music is important at creating an atmosphere to the audience

9)Which costume do you think the character should wear to make the film see more realistic?
Smart clothing
Casual clothing
Costume (parallel world)
Casual clothing would bring our characters into the 21st century

10)What time of day is more real for a thriller?
Daytime
Night
Twilight
Night is more scary and criminals come out at night so it makes sense that this when we should set our film at night

Props List

Here is a list of props that we needed for our thriller opening:

Props List
Hooded (Over)Coat
2x Masks
2x Cardboard Boxes to cover "padlocks"
DVD Player
Table
TV
A free door
(Several) Keys

Would you Adam & Eve it? It's our Preliminary Task!

After various filming and technical setbacks, the ImaginaryBeard Productions team are proud to say: Our Preliminary Task is now complete. Just press play below! :)



The whole point of doing this preliminary task, was to show that our team understands various key concepts relating to film production. These key concepts included a correct and well-produced "action-match" (@0:11), the "shot reverse shot" procedure throughout, and "crossing the 180 degree line" (@1:24). Also we varied our camera angles between long shots and over-the-shoulder shots.

We found ourselves in a position to learn from our mistakes, as we did an extra "pre-preliminary" task - due to the amount of errors we had in our orginial task. We made the content longer, varied the shots we used and polished up our edits to make them more professionally seamless.

We hope you enjoy... but know it's time to get our teeth stuck into the main event... our thriller opening!

Media: 24th January 2011

In today's lesson I had a great deal of fun arguing with our beloved Mac.
There was a purpose... I hadn't gone mad, don't worry!

I totally completed the editing process, and tried various times to get the final preliminary task file to save correctly. After several attempts, it worked... and you can see it on the next post after this...

We did get some luck however. We thought that because Final Cut crashed at the end of Wednesday's lesson, we'd lose a substantial amount of work we did that lesson. Thankfully however, the project did save, and we could finish it today!

Meanwhile Katy & Nick were doing several different things. They both had another look at what style our titles should be in and also they watched a few thriller openings, to increase their own research on what thriller film openings (are they conventional? etc.) Details of their research will be put up here soon.

After all this, Nick was set to work on abit of blog work. He ended up trying to "artistically manipulate" our group blog photo. In other words, all he achieved in this area today, was to make Katy's head massive. :)

Filming

So the time has come for this all important message! our filming has been finished and we are about the start the longest and hardest part of our entire project... editing!!!!
So today was our last day filming as we had issues filming on Monday due to the school being set on fire and the camera not having and battery... so we finished today instead of Monday.
Today in filming we did the middle part of our intro, which is the main part of the introduction. so it was the most difficult part to film. Now that we have finished filming and have hopefully got more than enough footage than we need so we can start editing it together and well we hope we will get it finished in for the deadline and not need to redo any parts or film anything extra...so we are well on our way now through this project and i hope u enjoy our preliminary tasks and will follow us as we work onwards through this project and will be waiting with baited breath for the release of our thriller opening!!!

Our Pre-Preliminary Task...

Before our current (and proper) preliminary task, we already had 1 go at it. This attempt (while extremely humorous to our group while filming) was full of errors that we could learn from, to make our proper preliminary task even better.

Here it is...



Now, as you can see - that's pretty short. 20 seconds was actually way to short, as we were meant to aim for over a minute. Also, a couple of errors in the editing process meant we lost some of the original footage, and had to work with what we had left, hence the short and substandard result.

We learnt various things from this pre-preliminary task:
1. Film a longer conversation (even before we lost half of the above practice film, it was too short)
2. Increase shot variation.
3. Save in iMovie more to avoid footage loss!
4. Avoid sound or continuity errors.
5. Don't use MJ impersonators. Which of course is the main reason why I'm posting this. ;)

Now we know where we went wrong... our PROPER preliminary task will not have these errors. :)

This Week in Media... (17th/18th/19th January)

Hellloooo everybody. Leigh here, updating you lovely bloggers about what's been going on in our Media lessons this week!

Most of our time this week, has been concentrated on getting our Preliminary Task done and dusted. We jointly took this decision, due to the ongoing issues with the school's Mac server (which is probably in a thousand pieces in a repair centre in Brazil or something due to the time its taking to fix) which mean we can't access the footage of our main film opening which we have uploaded so far. Fingers crossed it'll be back next week...

Good progress has been made over the 3 lessons we've had this week, with editing split between mainly Katy and Nick on Monday, and myself on Tuesday and Wednesday. We've shown various skills required in the preliminary task, included how to cross the 180 degree line correctly, shot reverse shot and action match. We reached a stage where it was totally finished in Wednesday's lesson, but due to a dreaded "Mac crash" we had to revert to the work completed during Tuesday's lesson. I'll probably put some extra time in during the next few days to avoid spending any more lesson time on it, as we were technically finished!

We were also intending to finishing filming on Monday, but couldn't. Why? Because the battery had less than 10 minutes left on it... and we (or should I say Katy) brought the wrong charger. Our excuse... we had a fire at school during Monday's lesson, and therefore we totally forgot to check the adapter was the right one!

The master plan is to finish filming tomorrow, and continue work on the main piece next Monday! Time will tell if we stick to that plan! ;)

Till next time blog fans...

Tuesday/Wednesday's lesson (11/2th)

The problem with the server, that had all preliminary task footage on it and as it was recorded on a hard drive camera had been deleted, meant we were filming our preliminary task...we have learnt from our lighting and time mistakes before and hopefully we should never have to btoher our actors again.
Wednesday was spent editing our task and I am sure it shall be posted on our blog in no time :-)

Filming

Ok so also on Monday we filmed further footage. With two weeks left to complete filming, the keys having not been done over Christmas and the one that was done for that day was done wrong, we improvised finding some old keys we could use...a close escape. With the props problem out of the way and we headed off to the shelter. We had everyone in costume, everyone in place, the scene was set and the lighting was creating a rather nasty glare on the camera. We originally had in the story board that the table would be alight instead of the door. We changed this due to the fact that halogen bulbs are difficult to remove and usuing both would mean you could see further into the room than we wanted. After figuring out how to change the lighting on camera to fit with the plot line and changing a few light bulbs we finally had the lighting we wanted.

We hit a few bumps that filming session but luckily nothing that wasn't efficiently solved. After filming half of the challenge it was time to call it a day and so we are back on Monday 17th for what could be the last filming session...

Editing

So the server has officially crashed!!! Complete with all our footage...However all hope is not yet lost as we can re-import it again.
So whilst we are working on the computer's hard drive along with the rest of the school we were shown how to use Final Cut Express (like iMovie but ten times better and much more advanced). We spent a lesson looking at effects, transitions, timeline rules, sound and other editing software. We found some footage to play with and had a go. We made the decision to use this programme instead of iMovie because although it is more complex we felt that it allowed us more options to do exactly what we wanted and create the vision that is "The Puppeteer's Playhouse"!

The team behind the beards

So i have decided i am going to post a little about the team behind the imaginary beards, and those who are helping us with this important project. so here are the roles we took on at the start of this.
Katy Mathews;
Director
Recruiter for actors
Hair and Make up specialist
Costume Design
Prop design

Leigh Last;
Head of editing
audio design
Continuity consultant
Prop design
Head Technical support

Nick Anderson;
Light effect designer

Special effects designer
Title designer
Storyboard artist
Lead camera operator
Costume design
Prop design


These roles are but guide lines that we have set so that the work load is shared as equally as possible. We are all sharing responsibilities and are taking part in all aspects.

i hope this allows for those who follow our progress to get slight more insight into the team behind the beards and i shall also be posting photography of our actors and ourselves in the near future

Editting

So... editing has started on both our preliminary task and our Thriller opening. With both started off successfully we then hit a few issues... We have encountered various issues with editing thus far due to varies technical and footage issues. We originally thought our preliminary task was done with a short sequence of Cat Nash and Jordan Lunn having a wonderful conversation...with a shoe thrown through the middle... we then came up short after the editing process with only 15 seconds of usable footage and have been forced to rethink and redo this task. With another issue arising shortly after...the lighting had changed between two scenes !! and it has come down to our abilities with editing lighting that we may be able to solve this issue, but alas we were cut short by the holidays and have been forced to wait until we return to school to fix this issue.

now the most important one.. Our thriller opening...we have edited together "The Puppeteers" speech and upon returning from the holidays we plan to edit together the start to our opening with the footage gained from a full day of filming during the holidays. With this footage i hope we will have made a strong start to this project and im hoping that there will be less issues with the editing process of this project than our preliminary task.

The storyboard

This is the story board for our thriller intro... basically this is a shot shot by shot view of our thriller introduction. We use this as the basis for filming so that we know what shots we need and in what order, the storyboard shows the key shots we have in our introduction. Obviously our introduction will not be 100% accurate to this storyboard as we may be unable to obtain some of the ideal shots that we want, but this gives us a basis for what we are looking for in each shot and allows us to focus on what shots we need and in what order, The storyboard is also very useful when it comes to editing the footage as it shows us the order in which we want our story to play out, without it im sure our group would argue continuously over which shot went where and we would never get it finished.