Candidate Information

Candidate Name: William Saunders
Candidate Number: 6825
Centre Number: 14405
Preliminary Task: Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.
Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

Evaluation Question Seven

Evaluation Question Six

https://willsaunders12.wixsite.com/asmedia

Evaluation Question Five

How did you attract/address your audience? 

One way our audience may have been attracted to our opening sequence was by our blogs and social media platforms. Our blogs were being constantly updated through every step of the process from our preliminary task through to our final opening sequence. Some of our audience may have seen our preliminary task posted on YouTube then directed onto one of our blogs - this could be classed as a 'follower', as they would now be able to see all of our up and coming posts. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter which we shared our final product onto would've addressed a very broad audience as anyone who follows us or happened to look at any of the hashtags may have come across our film opening. If someone else then decided to share and this process repeated our footage would be creating a viral market. Our opening sequence on YouTube currently has '163 views' and 2 'Thumbs Up'.

We also both addressed and attracted a large part of our audience, through word of mouth in school and with all our families as well as when we sent out our 'Target Audience Questionnaire' to a large amount of people. This process would have excited people and kept them interested in our product as they would want to see how we transformed their answers into our opening sequence. We were very pleased with the response we received from this questionnaire.

Evaluation Question Four

Evaluation Question Three

Evaluation Question Two

Evaluation Question One

Opening Sequence 'This Life Ain't Fair'

After months of production including research, planning, shooting then editing... this is our finished production of our opening sequence: 'This Life Ain't Fair'.

Editing Process

Editing Process from Will Saunders

Logo Design

Logo design from Will Saunders

Rough Cut Feedback

During this lesson we watched everyone's rough cuts of their opening sequence. A rough cut is designed to show the storyline of the sequence so all the clips should be ready and in order and with sound. Editing should have started. The following sheets are feedback given from the rest of the class, to highlight areas which we have done well and what we need to improve on.  

 

The common areas which we needed to improve on were improving the titles to make sure they didn't cover the actors faces, and do add the title of the film in somewhere appropriate. Also we needed to make our sound effects and transitions a lot more professional as well as start on colour grading.

 

Our group found this lesson very helpful as it identified key areas in which we needed to correct to improve our opening sequences. We put these into a checklist format and went through each one making sure we had completed it so we did not forget anything.

Institutional Research - Logos

Our team really liked the idea of a moving picture for our institutional logo as we thought they are unique and would set our opening sequence apart from the others. So we looked and some institutions that use these types of logo for some inspiration:

 



 Walt Disney











Metro Goldwyn Mayer

 



20th Century Fox





Then as a team we started to brainstorm some ideas of our own company name: Where we finally came to a conclusion of  'Cracked up productions'

We also started to draw up some designs for our moving picture institutional logo: You can click here to see how we edited both our final products into our opening sequence; and by clicking the 'Production' link and looking at 'Logo Design'.

 

Diary Entry - Shooting Day Three

Day Three:

Today is scheduled to be our last day of shooting as the bulk of our opening sequence has been shot however we just need to film the ending (1 year earlier) scene in the alleyway; the tracking shots of the actors running down the road and the motorbike noises. Our location for today was an alley-way conveniently around the same area as our previous location so we did not have to travel far. We were using purely natural light as it was still daytime and we will be making this footage black and white anyway. As it was during the day, it was relatively quiet due schools being off and most people being at home, therefore we managed to shoot smoothly without many interferences.

 

Diary Entry - Shooting Day Two

Day Two:

Today we were back recording in the studio with our DSLR fully charged and our lighting kit already set up, to finish the off the main part of our opening sequence as yesterday we only managed to complete the first scene.

Unfortunately we were informed that two of our lead actors could not make due to school and work commitments which means that we had re-write our script putting in all three of us (Myself, Santi and Oscar) into an acting role. Although this threw us off course we managed to still stick to our original plan, and with Oscar re-writing the script we were then good to go to start from scratch.

Once we began shooting everything ran pretty smoothly apart from one scene where the comedy of the script was a challenge for the actors to compose themselves. However we were able to shoot everything we needed going into tomorrow's last day of shooting, as we had allocated plenty of time for the day, therefore our camera very nearly ran out of battery whilst shooting our last scene of the day.

 

 

Diary Entry - Shooting Day One

Day One:

On our first day of shooting, we had our location and all the production team arrived on time (Santi, Oscar and myself). However the actors were running late which delayed us, so we tried to shoot any scenes or footage which did not need the actors to make good use of our time. When the actors did arrive, we also had to give them time to learn there lines so they felt comfortable in front of the camera. After a while we managed to start shooting. And everything went according to plan as we managed to record the first scene of our opening sequence.

We had originally borrowed one of the schools cameras, however after nearly an hour of trying to figure out how to connect our audio speaker to the camera by watching countless YouTube videos we had to make the decision to use our own Nikon DSLR camera as you can see in the picture above as we were wasting valuable time.

Learning how to use Green Screen Effect

Firstly I added the footage and audio that we recorded in front of a green screen in our studio. Then I clicked onto the footage and added an 'Ultra Key Effect'. Once this is applied you can select the colour of the green screen and it will be erased.

After you've done this, you are then able to select any picture and add it into your footage.

As it is out of proportion to the rest of your footage you have to click onto 'Motion' and resize it.

Edited Preliminary Task

This is our original Preliminary Task, it was our first experience in A level of using a camera to shoot a short scene of our choice. It was also our first chance of edited using Adobe Premiere Pro so we were still getting used to how to make it look professional. As this was my first ever time editing a piece of footing you can see it's quite simple looking.

Here, after having more experience of editing I was able to add in music and dramatic sound effects, I was also able to play around with colour grading by making it black and white.

Target Audience Research

For our target audience research task we decided to make an 8 question survey to gather some responses on people's favourite genre of film, type of music, director/s, actor/s and most importantly what they liked or disliked about particular films of our chosen genre and what they liked most about a recent or favourite film. We will be using these results in the next few weeks and the duration of constructing our opening sequence to to achieve a high quality and captivating opening sequence that will entertain and relate to our target audience. Demographic Profiling - My opening sequence will be mainly aimed at males in generation Z and Y. Also for people who may live in a rough or deprived area where crime is also high as the plot line will be relatable to them and inspirational. As the characters have come from unemployment the target social groups will be group D and E. Psychographic Profiling - We will aim at the strugglers and succeeders as our movie shows characters who's one goal is to succeed for rewards and fame but have come from being criminals and 'losers'.  These were the results we received:

Knowing their age and gender will help us find out each of their different interests so we can match our opening sequence accordingly.

  The films we listed were all under the Action-Drama genre which is the same genre as our opening sequences. The reason for this is so we can see what captivates audiences in these genres so we can try and replicate some of these things in our film opening.

As we have previously done research on different film directors, we asked people which director they preferred. Now we will be able to look at the results of our favoured director - Steven Spielberg, and how they achieve what they do, for example, their style and camera movements. 

Our opening sequence is based upon a music group so we must play music that our audience can relate to. To do this we what genres our audience listened to and preferred the most and this turned out to be Grime, which is what our opening sequence contains.

You can also see our results viewed in a spreadsheet by copying and pasting this link into your browsers search:  

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bDwvOFh5ZKA1kf2mtO8R5w7D-AgmBVe7zLatA9hT0MQ/edit?usp=sharing

Institutional Research