Preliminary Task- Beer Fear Parody & Outtakes

Beer Fear:

Outtakes:

Comments:

Emily Strickland:

I have learned a lot from the preliminary task including editing skills, how to use iMovie, inserting music behind the footage, adding extra sound effects for emphasis, the many different camera angles, and more. I also realised that my organisational skills could be improved for the future, unfortunately this affected our task as I change costume randomly during the footage, I have learned to take down the costume list instead of relying on my unreliable memory so this doesn't happen again. I now understand how difficult it is to use numerous shots and takes for one scene and still make it look flowing and unnoticeable (that it wasn't just one take). All of this will benefit me for our opening of a thriller task. 

Molly Baker:

I also have learnt a lot of the preliminary task. I found it was harder to match lip sync to music than I first thought. We experimented with lots of different shots and angles. One of my favourite is when we're all walking down the corridor and it is a high angle shot which zooms out as we are walking towards it. One thing to improve on is our organisation skills as Emily completely forgot what she was wearing for the first day of filming. Also for the second day of filming I forgot to bring in the sunglasses therefore they completely disappear off my head a I walk through the doors. Luckily I do have some experience of media studies as I did it at GCSE and I had to explain to the others in my group that you cannot just do things in one take. Also although they were confused on how the shots in the first 20 seconds were going to fit together, I made them trust me and when editing and everything came together they understood exactly what I was doing. I feel I am more confident in working with a group of people who haven't done media before as now they have an idea of how much teamwork one of these projects are. 

Eddie Hurren:

Due to the assignment of our preliminary task and the subsequent creation of our short film, i have learnt many techniques on the subject of: editing, camera work and planning that will certainly aid the creation and development of our Thriller film.  More specifically, i learnt the value of filming multiple 'takes' which can later be merged together in order to create an effective scene.  In this case, Molly was seen putting one hand on the door knob, then we see her opening the door from another angle because of the way we repositioned our camera.  I also learnt how to use iMovie, having had previous experience in Adobe Premier Elements and Autodesk Smoke; it didn't take too long to get used to video cutting tools (with help from Molly). Along with video cutting and looping, i learnt how to add title effects and methods used to overlay music and intertwine sound effects across the entirety of our clip.  This task provides a good platform for the development into our Thriller and the eventual use of Final Cut.  Furthermore, it can be used to reflect on what went well and what did not.  I have learnt that next time we should view the footage back a couple of times to make sure it's exactly what we aimed to film.  We should also film each scene at least twice just incase we do not realise a continuity error, or we for example: break the 180 degree rule whilst filming.  Finally, i think we should compose our own music which would make editing and lip syncing a great deal easier because we could time the music to footage.  This also increases the ease of distribution across the web due to the lack of copyright transgressions.  Also, because of my access to garage band at home, an electronic drum kit, piano, bass and guitar i may compose music myself for our thriller film.

Alexander Payne:

Whilst carrying out the set preliminary task, I learnt several things about the process that is carried out when planning a film, and the different types of editing techniques and how they are carried out. Before we could start filming our preliminary task we had to think up an idea that met the certain criteria set for us, after that we made a rough idea of a storyboard that we could follow whilst carrying out the filming. When we started filming I soon discovered that we had not planned the storyboard in enough depth to be able to film efficiently  and effectively as we were constantly trying to work out camera angles that would maintain continuity throughout out the film. The filming for our preliminary task was carried out over two separate days, on two separate weeks, this lead to a major flaw in the continuity of our film with Emily changing clothes half way through the film. Thanks to this I now know that we must try and record much of the film as possible in a short time frame, and if it does take more than one day that outfits, makeup etc must be recorded so that they will be maintained on the next filming day. The second thing I learnt whilst filming was that many different shots can be used with lots of different camera angles whilst still maintaining continuity. Filming with lots of different shots makes effective use of the surroundings and can do several different things for the viewer, such as establishing the location, providing detail etc.

When it came to editing I had to use several techniques that I had used before, but then also other techniques that I was new two. For the editing we used iMove 09 (which is the latest version of iMove that the school has installed on the Macs). The first technique I had to use that I had used before was the inserting of text for the opening credits, and end credits. The second technique that I had used before was cutting down clips to make sure that they are the correct length. The first technique which I hadn't used before was when we were attempting to sync our lips to the music of Lucy Spraggen's Beer Fear, this was a challenge to do because of the 40 different clips and camera angles we had filmed. In the end the lip syncing did work relatively well, but there are parts of the film where the timing is slightly out and no matter what we tried it  wasn't possible to retime these parts without different parts becoming out of time. Overall this new technique that I learnt did work quite effectively.