The Tester: Evaluation Edit

Our absolute final edit of our film opening for 'The Tester'. Feedback from a screening with nine viewers has been taken into account such as adding more credits, sound effects and general fine tuning.

Evaluation Task 7: Comparing Preliminary and Coursework Produtions

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


I have learnt much from filming my preliminary task which I have then applied to my film opening for my AS Coursework.

In my preliminary I learnt how to apply techniques such as shot reverse shot and how it improves conversation between two people in the scene making it look more natural.

The Tester: Door match on action shot 1

The Tester: Door match on action shot 2

Preliminary match on action - Shot 1

Preliminary match on action - Shot 2

Secondly, we used more match on action shots than in my preliminary production, and not on just one with an opening door, we also used it when the gun is retrieved from the bathroom cabinet. 

The Tester: Cabinet match on action - Shot 1 

The Tester: Cabinet match on action - Shot 2

Shot Reverse Shot 1

Shot Reverse Shot 3

Shot Reverse Shot 2

 Thirdly, and finally, we observed the 180 degree rule, where we stayed on one side of the 360 degrees, before switching over to the other so the characters are in reverse, hence creating variety in the opening, and not revisiting shots too often. This is shown in these screen shots, Preliminary is below, and above the shot reverse shots also demonstrate the 180 degree rule.

Diagram showing the 180 degree rule. In the two examples above, you can see in each we filmed in the right half, observing the 180 degree rule.

One of the many things I did in my AS coursework which was lacking in my preliminary production was more shots and more variety. Close ups and extreme close ups, an establishing long shot, and a point of view shot are just some of the shots we used in our opening that improved the variety and made it more interesting to watch overall.

In addition, we paid attention to much finer details, the lighting and sound particularly, evident mostly in the ‘interrogation scene’ where we used chiaroscuro lighting to get across the dark mood in the scene. Appropriate music was also used to build tension, and to punctuate the feeling of the scene. Editing was also done much more in depth, with J and L cuts, and fade ins and outs on the soundtrack and scenes themselves.

Preliminary Production from Max Lake on Vimeo.

  

The Tester (Evaluation Edit) from Max Lake on Vimeo.

Evaluation Task 6: Technology

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

Filming Equipment

SD Card

 Adam's Camera was good in that it has high definition capability up to 1080p, sadly however, we could not utilize this due to limited space on the SD card and, more importantly, severely limited battery life (using 4 AA batteries) of less than 10 minutes; possibly due to a fault with the camera.

Adam's Camera

Other drawbacks in regards to recording were a slight static noise when recording, evident in the actual film. Luckily for us, it doesn’t affect the scene which we used the camera for.

The camera used an SD card for storage and this was a good substitute for the tape which the School camera used. The SD card allowed us to simply insert it into the computer’s SD card slot and drag and drop files into Pinnacle. The only disadvantage would be finding relevant files, as all of the names were very similar and hard to differentiate.

School Camera

From this we have learnt to test equipment before hand so we do not commit to filming if the technology won’t work or doesn’t meet our requirements.

Our Schools Camera on the other hand was much more reliable and proficient. An incredibly generous battery life of more than 200 minutes (on rechargeable batteries) meant plenty of time for filming, and much less fumbling around with an almost unusable camera.

Tape

Consequently, we were able to film the bulk of the film in one day. The camera ended up producing much better quality images than the other camera, visually and audibly. The fact that we could recharge batteries even while filming (as we had spares), and also import our filming straight into Pinnacle Studio for editing made this camera the far superior choice in every way. We have learnt that many options for filming and editing etc have to be explored in order to make the film as good as it can be.

Panasonic HDC Camera

Touch-screen Viewer

Unlike Adam's camera, the School camera used tapes which capture the footage, which is better in some ways and worse in others. Using a tape meant the computer could record the footage off the camera onto its hard drive and hence all of the files we needed were right there for us in Pinnacle, allowing us to make a rough edit easily.

 We also used another camera for the interrogation scene, the Panasonic HDC allows for full 1080p recordings and is very user friendly. The camera shutter opens and closes automatically and uses a touch screen menu system which minimizes the need for physical buttons on the exterior. 

The battery life was even more generous at over 300 minutes, and it has a built in SD card slot - much more reliable than a tape which can deteriorate over time. The SD card additionally allowed more storage for files, which can be upgraded depending on how much storage you need. The SD card we used was 8GB which proved to be plenty; we simply deleted old files when it was getting full as we already had them saved on our computer.

One problem we found was that HD filming takes up a lot of space, especially when considering that we needed to transport the files to and from school. Not just this, but uploading them to a video sharing site such as Vimeo, where there is a 500MB per week limit for those with a free account. (Vimeo Pro allows you to have much less restriction regarding uploading)

To get around this problem, we had to convert the footage into an AVI format for editing, making the files much smaller and as an unfortunate consequence; it made the HD footage standard definition (480i) however the same audio fidelity was maintained.

School Tripod

Adam's Tripod

Adam's Tripod allowed for easy access to the relevant controls when changing height and angles, it’s strurdy metal legs gave it increased durablity and rubber grips on the feet ensured no damage to the locations or equipment.

The School Tripod also met our requirements when it came to filming, like the other tripod it allowed us to film without any inherent problems. The only inherent problems with it would be that it is more fragile due to its plastic legs, and it was impossible to pan due to its stiffness.

We were able to take advantage of multiple battery packs at one time, allowing us to have backup charge for the School camera if we needed it. This showed us that rechargeable cameras are much more reliable than those which use disposable batteries.

Battery Pack

Web Technologies

Vimeo allowed us to upload and share our edits of our opening so we could critique and analyse it, as well as embed it into our blog. We found it was quick and easy to upload a video and queue multiple videos to upload at one time. The only problem we found was that the quality was slightly degraded when the video had been uploaded.

We used Art of the Title to look for inspiration in our title and credit ideas, we looked at films such as Se7en and analysed the way they used titles in font choice, size, placement and animation effects. http://www.artofthetitle.com/

Dropbox has, in a way, been a cornerstone of our media production; it allows easy transfer of files between our home computers, school and mobile devices. With 2 Gigabytes of storage we have had plenty of room to upload any word documents as well as our soundtrack, actual film and any other files we may have needed. https://www.dropbox.com/

Blogger has been used to document our progress and keep track of where we were up to in the entirety of the project. We have found it to be generally easy to use in regards to editing text and adding links, with the odd hiccup when it came to adding pictures next to specific parts of text. Furthermore, drafts can be saved to avoid publishing unfinished work, and we could all read each other’s blogs to check for new posts and research carried out.

Finally, Slideshare allowed us to share and embed any PowerPoints produced and gave us a more unique and interesting way to share our ideas. 

Media Programs

Adobe Photoshop CS2 was used to edit our logo for our production company “Enigma Productions” we made use of the fonts in the program and the tools such as burn and clone to remove anything that we did not want to be in the final image. Burn on the other hand was used to darken our storyboard, therefore making them more visible in our animatic.

Pinnacle Studio 15HD was used to edit our film opening and we found it to be a good editing program for beginner to intermediate editors such as ourselves. This is due to the easy to use layout and ease of navigation as well as tutorials that come with the program. There were however some problems with the program. When editing at school, we found it to be very unreliable as it tended to crash around every five minutes when any clip was edited frame by frame. Another problem early on was that the program would not save our project when prompted, which caused some frustration. These faults were caused by access problems due to the schools safety settings being incompatible with the software installation.

The colour correction tool added to the sense of continuity, as it minimised sudden chages in brightness of our shots.

Fortunately, we already had a copy installed on Kieran’s computer, so we managed to edit from home, and this was a much better experience, with no crashes experienced whatsoever throughout editing the entire film. We found such editing processes as J cuts and L cuts a breeze with being able to isolate the audio and video on separate editing tracks, which also made it simple to add music and sound effects, and then fade them in and out of the soundtrack when appropriate. We also changed the speed of some clips to make them more believable e.g. when Adam cuts Kieran with the knife, and reversed the clip where the car runs over Adam, then reversed and sped it up slightly. Overlay titles were also added and fade in and fade out effects used on them.

The title editor made adding credits as overlays and changing their size and colour simple.

When exporting the actual file we found some problems with syncing, this was due to lower quality exporting options and so this was fixed easily and quickly. The multitude of editing options is good if you have experience and know the advantages and disadvantages of each, but for beginners this could be daunting and time consuming due to the many different devices they may want to play it on, and subsequent technical issues.

The clock icons show where we changed the speed of the clip for fight scenes etc.

 We spliced bits of dialogue into other scenes when needed by locking the video track
and then manipulating the sound.

We probably learnt the most from the editing process overall, it is imperative that a backup of either software or a different editing program entirely is needed to edit a film to a deadline, and also feedback throughout the course of editing to identify any mistakes and then enough time is allowed for rectification of them.

Evaluation Tasks 4 and 5: Audience, Feedback, Cross Promotion and Relevance

Who would be the audience for your media product? How did you attract/address your audience? Explain the ways in which your Film Opening links to other, similar, films in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.

Evaluations 4 & 5 from Max Lake

Evaluation Task 3: Media Distribution

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

British Film Institute (BFI)

The production company funds the production and this can be done directly by them, through another subsidiary company or its parent company, a partner, a private investor, or through and organisation such as the British Film Council. The British Film Institute offer the ‘Film Fund’, ’Innovation Fund’, ‘Prints and Advertising Fund’ and ‘Film Export Funds’. They would be one of the best options for acquiring funding of our production, as they focus on independent film makers and because the UK Film council no longer exists.

The Sundance Film Festival would be
ideal to get our film
some over seas exposure.

Now doesn't exist.

The latter two relate to the distribution of films, involving the export of them to international film festivals, widening the potential audience and therefore making the production more likely to be a success financially.

‘Institutionally’, our film is similar to Red Road , which was low budget and released in very few cinemas. However, it would be expected for a film produced by Miramax to be a success, but this is mainly only the case with big-budget titles. It differs to expectations of the success of a film produced by Miramax, as the production company it was produced by, Tartan, have never grossed over £1 million.

We chose to use Miramax’s production logo in our film. Our reason for this choice is the fact that they are known for their distribution, of independent and foreign films. As we didn’t choose to use the logo for a much larger company, we fall into the latter category and it too was also once independent. However, it has had a change of ownership twice since its creation and is now a subsidiary of Colony Capital who bought it from Disney in 2010. The success with recent films such as Harry Brown that it has had could potentially attract an audience, especially seeing as it starred the well-known actor Michael Caine.

It has also recently been announced that they are to manage the productions of Samuel Goldwyn Films, another independently owned company, showing that although they themselves are no longer independent, they have an awareness of what independent companies and films require.

The fact that Miramax has also had success with the label Dimension Films and created successful and well-known film franchises such as Scary Movie, would give our production a level of credibility, as this shows that they have had success in the past. However, such franchises obviously aren’t relevant to our film.

Netflix can now be used on an array of devices.

The distribution of our film would benefit greatly from the partnerships Miramax has with the likes of Netflix, whose service has gone through 'media convergence' (when one device can perform a multitude of functions), where a subscription now allows for streaming of an almost endless number of films through devices such as Ipads, Iphones and Ipods, and also hardware from other companies such as Sony's TVs, Walkman phones and the Playstation 3, Facebook and Studio Canal. It would also be practical, as they have a sales office in London that could be used for contact with their headquarters in California.

Pulp Fiction is a shining example
 of what Miramax is capable of.

As well as links with major companies, it also has links with poplar directors. The most significant of which is probably Quentin Tarantino, as his film Pulp Fiction is regarded as one of the best thrillers of all time by many. They also released Volumes I and II of Kill Bill.

A common convention for films is for the main actors and individuals to appear in the relatively short opening titles and for everybody else to appear alongside them in the closing titles. However, in many of Hitchcock’s films and others of the same time, they could be very lengthy, two minutes and fifty-nine seconds in the case of vertigo (Vertigo's opening credit sequence). The main roles mentioned with the main actors are usually that of the director, director of photography, producers, editor, screen writer and composer of the score and the person responsible for casting choices, with the name of the production company often repeated. If the film is based in any way on a book or existing franchise, this is acknowledged as well. These roles often appear with the most major first and more minor roles later, although all of those mentioned in the opening titles are often nearly equally important.

We have reflected this by including what could be viewed as the ‘essential’ credits such as the main actors (which were all three of us, as we were the only ones) and the director. The inclusion of some titles was unnecessary, for example we didn’t directly base our production on an existing piece of work so there was no need for such credit to be given. If all of the roles were included it may have looked quite amateurish, as there are only a potential three names to choose from: mine, Max's, or Kieran's. To solve this problem, we used the names of already established professionals in our titles, an example of which was Guy Ritchie as the director. 

Evaluation Task 2: Representing Social Groups

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Kieran: Drug Dealer 1
Kieran shares many of the characteristics of the stereotypical film ‘thug’, an example of which is Paul Sorvino’s character in Goodfellas. Whilst the storyline in our production differs greatly to that of Goodfellas, their characters physically look the similar in terms of their large build and both also have deep, slightly intimidating voices.



Max: Drug Dealer 2
Max looks quite similar to Stephen Baldwin’s character in The Usual Suspects, with them both being of a fairly tall height and having facial hair. Their overall manner is also similar, with them sharing an empty look in their eyes, suggesting a lack of compassion. This could be expected of a career criminal. We were aiming to portray Max as an outwardly respectable 'family man' with hid normal home and framed pictures. However, his actions don't reflect his profession, with him appearing to be similar to characters such as Tony Soprano in his lack of empathy and compassion.

Adam: Victim/Tester

Adam defies the stereotype of the conventional victim in that he isn't female, as is the case in films such as Psycho, possibly going against audience expectations if they aren't familiar with the gangster/thriller genre. However, this doesn’t have as much impact as if say one of the drug dealers was female, as it is often men who are involved more in the dealing of drugs, not women. As it wouldn't be expected of a woman to be the tester, the casting choice makes sense, and obviously men are very often victims in the real world as well, adding to the sense of realism in the storyline. Within the crime genre there are frequently male victims, especially the 'gangster' sub-genre where they are seen to claim to have a 'code' but are then portrayed as brutal psychopaths who will betray each other when necessary.

Evaluation Task 1: Directors Commentary

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

The Tester: Final Edit

The Tester: Rough Cut

We have reviewed all of our raw footage and edited all of our best shots into the order in which we intend them to appear. We have also cut some of the shots to their appropriate lengths. There are lots of points for improvement however, which we acquired from a feedback session of 9 of our peers; the general consensus for improvement were these...

Evaluation Points:

• Add sound effects to emphasise events e.g. car running over Adam and Max slamming the table.

• Edit the car scene to cut out continuity errors and fine tune it to make it look more realistic i.e. speed the shot up when reversed. Cut out unnecessary shots.

• Add institutional information at the beginning (Miramax for distributor first and then our own studio/producer).

• Record dialogue of Kieran whispering into Adam's ear.

• Reduce the overall running time.

• Add soundtrack that emphasises each individual scene's mood and atmosphere.

Setting up the Interrogation Scene

Final Storyboard

The Tester - Final Storyboard from Max Lake on Vimeo.

The shots in the storyboard were changed in the final edit for numerous reasons such as lack of physical space in the location etc.

Final Shot List

We re-wrote the original shot list as we came up with some more ambitious ideas.

1    1.      Long shot of Max getting ready in his bathroom
2.       Extreme close up of tie being done up
3.       Side shot of him looking in the mirror
4.       Camera inside mirror with it being opened
5.       Straight cut to the gun and his hand picking it up
6.       Extreme close up from the side of him cocking the gun
7.       Over the shoulder shot of Max walking out of bathroom and picking up keys from radiator     cover
8.       POV tilt of Max opening door and then looking at Kieran
9.       Two shot of Max and Kieran in the backseat of the car with the camera behind them.
10.   Long shot of Adam
11.   Extreme close up of his hand being handed something
12.   Adam walking towards camera, car following behind
13.   Camera on the dashboard looking at Adam
14.   POV of Adam turning around and seeing the car speed up
15.   Long shot from side view to see him sprinting and the car following
16.   Mid shot from the side of Nixon being hit by the car
17.   Overhead shot of Nixon on the floor
18.   Two shot of max and Kieran dragging his body.
19.   Shot from the backseat showing the boot go up
20.   POV of Adam looking at Max and Kieran as the boot shuts. (Boot shutting indicates fade            to black)
21.   Medium shot of Adam tied to a chair
22.   Extreme close up of his hands trying to free
23.   Max walks to the door (Match-on-action)
24.   Close up of his hand turning the door and entering (Match-on-action)
25.   Long shot of the other side of the door with Max entering (Match-on-action)
26.   Long shot of Kieran follows from behind
27.   Mid shot of Max pulling a chair towards him
28.   POV from Adam of Max sitting down on the chair
29.   Mid shot of Max relaxing on a chair
30.   Side shot of them all. Begin conversation.
31.   180 degree rule, shot reverse shot between Adam and Max
32.   Long shot of Kieran interrupting by slamming the table
33.   Low angle shot of Max saying his dialogue (Transition!!!!!)
34.   Extreme close up of Adams hands trying to get free and he breaks the rope
35.   Long shot of Adam getting up with Kieran facing the opposite way
36.   Over the shoulder shot of Nixon getting up and running at Kieran (Match-on-action)
37.   Side shot as he hits into Kieran (Match-on-action)
38.   Close up of Kieran punching Adam in the face
39.   Mid shot to reveal a stab wound in his stomach
40.   Max dragging Adam away from Kieran
41.   Two shot of Kieran and Max with dialogue
42.   POV of Kieran picks up the knife
43.   Side shot of Kieran walking towards Adam
44.   Close up of him holding it against Adams neck
45.   Adam tells were the drugs are
46.   Over the shoulder of Adam to reveal Max putting his hand on Kieran’s shoulder with dialogue
47.   Max walks to the door with Kieran behind him
48.   Mid shot of the door opening and Kieran looking at Adam
49.   Extreme close up of Kieran’s hand touch the light switch and the light goes out
50.   Cuts to black with a crescendo