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.