Our Finished Film

... remember to watch it in all its HD glory! ;)

Dates

We have decided that since the half term is coming up we will make best use of it and film during then. Unfortunately Phoebe is in the school play which means that she has rehearsals on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; she is also away at her grandparents house on the first weekend and it is her birthday on the Saturday of the last weekend. According to this we only have the Friday and Sunday to film and we all voted for the Friday - Sunday is my lazy day!

Filming - 22.02.13

On Saturday 22nd February, Carolina, Phoebe and I went round to Phoebe's house so that we could finally film our opening sequence shots. We were ready with our Lights, Camera, Tripod and enthusiasm ... well as much enthusiasm as you can have at 10 in the morning!

We bought all the props we needed and the first thing we did was make phoebes room look just how we wanted and place all the props around the room which we needed, e.g. all the things we would pan over, like the Vogue magazines and the 50 Shades books. We really underestimated how much time it would take us and all the little details we needed to make sure were perfect. My mum was extremely helpful since I had to keep ringing her to find stuff that I had at home which we didn't think we would need and our friend Melisa also decided she would help us out by being our assistant for a day which was also really helpful! Altogether it took us 2 hours just to set up the scene for the shots.

Carolina and Phoebe clearing away

Half way through the clearing process

Phoebe and I trying to get the curtains level

Dressing table and chest done!

Phoebe setting up

Making the bed

Other dressing table done

Once we got filming we realised that it was actually incredibly helpful that we had written a good script and drawn a good storyboard because it saved us a lot of time and hassle since we didn't need to figure out what our shots were going to be.

Another thing that was quite difficult was trying to fit the MASSIVE lights and the MASSIVE tripod into TINY spaces, especially in the bathroom! But somehow we managed to get around it by holding the camera by hand and just trying to be really steady and keeping the lights in doorways and such to try and brighten up the rooms.

On the Saturday, Carolina had to leave by 1 o'clock since she had a doctors appointment which meant that we could only keep Ollie, the cutest dog in the world, around for so long. Because of this we decided to film the shots that included the dog first ... little did we realise how hard it actually is working with animals! We managed to film the dog scenes after a lot of trouble trying to get Ollie to cooperate and making sure Phoebe didn't die in her killer heels.

Once Carolina left, Melisa, Phoebe and I tried to get the rest of our filming done. We followed the storyboard "to a T" and filmed all of the scenes; it took us until 6pm but we are happy that it is all done because the best bit is the editing!

TRAGEDY

The worst has happened!! I'm not even exaggerating!!

In our lesson today we decided to look at the footage we had filmed and it turns out that our memory card is corrupted!!!! That means that all of our footage has been lost.

We tried so many different ways of opening the footage and trying to import it but it just wouldn't work. Most of it just came up as a green screen and the rest didn't work at all. Even Sir tried helping us since he could see we were panicking but we had no luck! :'(

Thankfully Sir said that he would give us a weeks extension on the filming deadline since we wouldn't have any other time to film other than the weekend.

Filming (AGAIN) - 02.02.13

Consdering that the last time we filmed we had issues with the lighting not being bright enough, especially later in the day, we decided it would be wiser to split our filming over both the Saturday and the Sunday. Carolina couldn't make it on the Saturday so Pheebs and I had to tackle it ourselves.

We were lucky because our camera was AMAZING this time and our footage looked really good!

Since we already knew excatly how we needed to set up it didnt take us very long at all which we were really pleased about. We got striaight into filming and were feeling positive since we were getting a second chance to make our film better than it had been the first time we filmed it.

That was until we were faced with another problem! The shower wasn't working! A crucial part of our film had decided to play up right when we needed to use it, espically since the thing was working just a few minutes ago. After trying to figure out what was wrong and failing we decided that we will just leave it to hopefully recover and then give it another try later.

Instead we filmed the scenes from after Naomi leaves the bathroom. These went really successfully and we even managed to do the idea of having the camera inside the wardrobe and seeing Naomi open the doors from the inside (a personal dream of mine). When Phoebe's mum came home and tried the shower it meracously worked and we were able to film the shower shots as well!

By 2pm we had finished filming all of the scenes that we could and were say down enjoying a nice pizza and coke!

I think this day of filming went much smoother and quicker than the last time; firstly because it was just Phoebe and I so we got less distracted and we were more determined to finish, secondly because we already knew exactly how we needed to film everything since we had done it once before and knew what worked and what didn't. Hopefully day two will go as well as day one.

Filming (AGAIN) - 03.03.13

So we started filming early again today so that we could finish quickly as we'll and we had left almost everything in the same place as it was before so we didn't have to spend time setting up.

When Carolina came with Ollie we started filming straight away with the shots with the dog. Once we had done those we refilmed some if the panning shots that we had done yesterday because we added more into them, e.g. more pictures of Naomi with boys.

The filming went quite successfully and we finished under 3 hours, (our best time yet!), and went home hoping that our memory card would be fine this time!!

Editing - 04.03.13

Great news, our memory card is fine! Since we are now a week behind everyone else, we started editing straight away. It was quite nice seeing everything we had filmed but we realised that some of the shots didn't actually look as good as we thought it had on the small screen; also we had around an hours worth of footage which we would have to narrow down to 2 minutes!!

We decided to watch all the footage and get rid of everything we didn't need so that we could start editing the clips we actually were going to use. We edited the clips in the order which they would appear and managed to get around one and a half minutes worth of footage and this took us around the whole lesson to do.

Editing our clips

Editing - 06.03.12

Since we had already edited quite a lot of our footage last lesson we only had a bit more to do today. We had a double lesson so we were able to finish within the first hour.

In the second hour we started editing the sound. We had to removed all of the diegetic sound from our clips since it was mainly white noise and it made the quality of our film seem poorer. We did however keep the sound of the shower since I had a plan to have the sound of the shower running from the very start of the film, through all the production companies and then into the first shot of the shower head. After this we inserted the music that Carolina had made in a previous lesson which was all we could fit into that hour.

This is our film without the music:

Editing - 08.03.13

After watching our film again in today's lesson we realised that the music had a few jumps in it which needed to fix so we sent Carolina into her little corner to do her thing. I'm surprised the music hasn't driven her again considering the number of times she must have listen to it!

In the mean time Phoebe and I just tried to fix any little shot that weren't quite working, e.g. rearranging some of the panning shots and shortening some clips that felt a little too long.

Editing - 11.03.13

Unfortunately today is the only time we will have Phoebe here for the rest of the week because she is going on a geography tip to Dorset! That means that Carolina and I will finish off the majority of the rest of the film over the next few lessons and Phoebe and do her part when she comes back.

We thought that we would pause everything we were doing individually and work as a group to come up with some titles. We knew that we wanted them to be pink and girly from our opening sequence research and we also knew that they had to appear over actions which we had taken into account when we were filming our shots.

It took us a really long time finding titles which we really liked, the main reason was because we didn't really know how to use final cut pro so we were discovering how to do things as we went along. We went through literally a million different fonts and styles, okay maybe not a literally a million but a lot, until we found one that we really liked.

We already knew where we wanted our first title to go and what it would be because we had planned it earlier in our storyboard so adding the titles was quite simple after this so Carolina went back to editing the music and Phoebe started working on the production company logos.

Editing - 13.03.13

This double lesson Phoebe wasn't here so Carolina worked on finishing off the music and I tried to finish off the rest of the titles but I was having a tough time trying to elongate the amount of time that the titles last on the screen because when I tried just dragging them out they would still disappear at the same place.

After asking a lot of people in my class who couldn't figure out what was going on and even asking Google I was unsuccessful. Sir and I decided to just click around and go into every option to see whether we could find anything useful we clicked on the "change duration" option and although I had been on this before I have never known what to do after selecting the option; luckily sir tried typing in the numbers and something happened. We figures out that we had to type in the number of seconds and frames we wanted the titles to last for and the duration would change! I then went back and changed the duration of all of the titles so that they stopped disappearing too early.

I managed to finish all of the titles right at the end of the lesson.

Editing - 14.03.13

Since I had finished the titles last lesson I showed them to Carolina and my teacher and they had a few tweaks for me to make. When I finished this Carolina had also finished editing the music so we were able to add it too the footage.

We saved the music onto the machine I was working on and then inserted it into the film. We placed it so that the music would start when Naomi pushes the play button on her stereo which would make the music seem diagetic. We also added a fade out effect at the end so that as Naomi is leaving the house the music gets quieter and since we were fading out the music we also faded out the footage by adding an effect at the very end.

This is the film so far:

Editing - 18.03.13

Phoebe was back today so we showed her what we had done so far and she really liked it. We decided to get cracking with the production logos but since Phoebe had only done one and we wanted to work quickly, we decided to do the other two as a group.

This was the one Phoebe had originally done so I saved it as an image and inserted it into the film

Glasshouse Production

Phoebe had originally had a vision for what this next logo would look like so we followed her instructions and this was the third logo.

Fast Pace Cinema

For the last company we wanted to go for something which related to TV and Film and since the name of the company was "Preach It Distributions" we decided to have colour bars as the background to create the link to film rather than our first idea of psychedelic colours since they started giving us a headache! We also wanted to have the peace gesture as the main logo and luckily Zac in our class helped us out a lot by removing the background of the image for us on Photoshop so we could have both the colour bars and the gesture.

Preach It Distributions

Editing - 20.03.13

When we watched our film again this lesson we realised that there was a lot of silence in our opening before the music starts and the audience could very easily get bored and be in a bad mind set for the rest of the film. We decided that it would be really great if we used our other music option, "Clear", in this space.

Sir also suggested that we add in more diagetic sounds to the film to give it more dimension, e.g. things such as the squeaks of the mirror and the closing of the door. Since we didn't actually have these sounds we had to try and recreate them and add them in.

To make the squeaking sounds Phoebe wrote on a window with a board marker while Carolina recorded the sound on her phone; and for the door Sir opened and closed the equipment cupboard door while we recorded it.

Carolina then emailed the sound clips to me so that I could insert them into the film. We fiddled around with the placement of the clips until it was just right ... and viola, our film was complete! :D