Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the media product?

Problems we faced during the filming process

•  Finding locations was difficult. We needed a bedroom that was feminine enough to really portray a stereotypical female’s bedroom. This then meant that we had to get permission from someone with that kind of room, to film in their room and had to arrange a time when they were available.

The bedroom we used

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•      As well as using someones bedroom, we also had to find somewhere to borrow props and costumes from. Ou male actor was able to easily provide his basic suit, but our female character needed to have a range of dresses, some heels and other feminine accessories, even things such as her floral phone case.                                                        

•      As well as finding times that we could use location, we also had problems arranging times in which all members of the crew could film together. 

•     This meant that we couldn't always film at a time that had appropriate lighting. We need the opening to be taking place in the evening, but most filming actually took place during the day. To solve this, we had to make sure all curtains were shut in the rooms and rooms without curtains/blinds we covered with any sheets we could quickly find.
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•     Another problem came from filming on separate days. this is that we needed everything to look the same as it did the first time. Luckily we managed to keep the dresses, for as long as we needed them, but we did forget about suing the same floral phone case, which did affect continuity. But this wasn't very noticeable, so the film wasn't affected badly, but this will make us think next time we record anything to make sure everything's the same the whole way through

•      Another problem we faced was filming the restaurant scene. As we were not able to actually hire out a restaurant, we had to make a restaurant set, ourselves. We used one of our kitchens, with some floral wallpaper, that was the type that would likely be seen in a restaurant and set up a little table to look like a fancy restaurant table. We added a table cloth, candles, breadstick, various cutlery and menus in order to achieve this.

How the kitchen originally looked...

Us setting up the restaurant look

The finished restaurant set

•       We did plan, in our story board, to have a shot at the end of our opening, of one twin waiting in one for the restaurant's toilet cubicles. We did actually get this footage, but the toilet filmed it in was so small that it was hard to get the shot. To it our actor in frame we turned the camera landscape, without think about how the footage would then be sideways. We then decided to not include this scene, as it wasn't really necessary and filming again would be too difficult for something that wasn't needed 

                                   

                   

     The editing software we used was iMovie. We used this instead of Final Cut Express as we were more familiar with it, fro our preliminary task and Se7en remake and also because our film company is low budget, so, as this software comes free on an iMac, we thought it would be something out company would be more likely to use , rather than paying for other software. It did everything that we needed to, so we felt there was no need to use anything else. 

      Our film, being a rom-com, only uses basic transitions and minimal effects, so iMovie was ideal. It even enabled us to edit the colour of some footage; changing our overall mise-en-scene. We used it to make things darker, because of the lighting issue discussed earlier.

      A bit of editing we did need which was not possible in iMovie, was creating twin from our one actor. But this was easily done on some free software on a basic windows laptop that one of our group had, so that was easy to work around.

 

 

       The internet has played a huge part in the whole process of creating our media product. We used it for:

•       Google- to gather all of our research information in order to plan the best we could and create the best product that we could.
•     Google Images- again, this helped a lot with planning, in that we were able to get visual ideas of certain things.
•   YouTube- this site enabled us to actually watch other film openings and we could then analyse them and find ways in which to make ours similar and as successful.
•     Blogger- in order to log all of our work efficiently, we used this site to upload all posts needed. We can add text, images and video to our blogs, so that we have very detailed and useful evidence of what went in to creating our product.