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

What I have learnt about new technologies during the construction process of my product? - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

7. What do you feel you have learnt from the progression from your preliminary task to the full product?

I think that from my journey from the preliminary task, to the development of our second idea, to the creation of the final product, I have learnt so much in terms of production, filming and editing. For example, in the placement of characters within shot. In the preliminary task this was very poor, however I feel like since learning the rule of thirds, I feel like i have tried to use this effectively to draw the eyes of the audience to the right place.

I feel like the decision to change the idea from what we had thought of originally was definitely the right decision to make. This is because, as you can tell from the footage, it was not working effectively even after two attempts of shooting for the sequence. Filming for this proved to be really hard as we had two protagonists to film for, and trying to organise a few days which we could all be together for was really difficult. It was evident to us that after to attempts of filming, the idea wasn't going to work and so towards the end of December we decided to change our idea and try and come up with something better. This is where the idea for the Christmas theme of our newer opening sequence has come from. 

From task 1, I took away what sort of conventions opening title sequences used and applied in order to engage the interest of their audiences, and then in task two I learnt how the creators of coming of age films applied these conventions to their sequence successfully, so I started gaining knowledge of the sort of things to look out for and apply when it came to starting to create my own opening sequence. One of the best ones that I looked at was Ferris Bueller's Day Off and so it was from this film that I started making comparisons across media and took which things I liked and didn't like in terms of editing and narrative structure of a sequence. I also looked at the Breakfast Club and it was from here that I was inspired to do the jump cuts etc of things relating to Christmas and things associated with it, like they do in this sequence.

Sixteen Candles, a film I analysed in task 3, was quite influential to the ideas behind our project because it gave us a basis to go on as to how teens were represented in films: self-conscious, but also kind of overlooked by others in society. This was a way in which we represented the protagonist in our film in order to link her back to and engage with the target audience of our film so that they would empathise with her and see that she isn't so different from themselves. 

Tasks 4 and 5 were useful when it came to the production of our opening sequence because it taught me how different companies and directors use different codes and conventions to personalise and put their own mark on things that they produce. This made me realise that in order to make our sequence a success it had to stand out and be different from all the others, e.g in terms of atmosphere created and ordering of the narrative. Task 6 was then also really useful because it was all about audience research - learning who our target and secondary audience would be, doing a questionnaire to find out what people of our age group wanted to see in films, which ones they preferred and what it was about these coming of age films that they liked. We took away information from this task which was vital for the production of our opening title sequence, and this is how we built the structure of our new idea for the opening sequence.

Task 7 proved to be really influential to our final product because it was the titles which we struggled to get right a few times, but which in the end, I feel have brought the opening sequence together in that the authenticity and ambiance they bring to the sequence make it appear more sophisticated and professional. The typography we used was difficult to pick but on the place cards suited the titles really well, and we also learnt what the order of titles was here, and so this explains the order of titles in order to fir the convention of other coming of age films.

In task 8 I studied narrative structure within an opening sequence and is what lead us to revealing an equilibrium which was shortly followed by the disruption of an equilibrium in our opening. The representation of characters within this narrative was also really important, as I learned in task 9, because it was through this that I learnt the ways in which I could make the audience empathise with and feel sympathy for our protagonist, and also how I should present these characteristics and events to the audience. I learnt in this task that I should give the main character in the plot of the film an obvious hamartia which is what leads to the route of their problems, which in our characters case is carelessness in her youth.

Task 10 was where I finally got an idea of what opening sequences produced by others doing Media Studies A level looked like, and it gave me an idea of what they did well, what I certainly shouldn't do and also what I wanted my final product to look like. My final product from this course has turned out just how I wanted it to and so I feel like I have made something which fits the ideals of a coming of age opening title sequence.

The preliminary task made me realise what a difficult task it was going to be creating our own sequence and it taught me that I needed to learn how to control a camera, the techniques I should use for achieving good camera work, the correct positioning of characters and the way in which a narrative should be laid out in order to engage an audience in the opening two minutes. I feel like I have done all of these things from the progression from my prelim task to my final product, and that the development of my ideas for the sequence to the production and editing of it have improved vastly over the course of this task, and can be seen throughout the blog.

Edit 3

The content of this video is the same as that of our final product but we have decided that Paramount would not be a suitable distributor for our film as it doesn't fit the rest of the sequence and looks very out of place, therefore we have decided to have Vertigo be the producer and UK distributor for our film.

Editing Diaries

Editing Diary 1 

After our first session of editing, we managed to import all of our footage from filming into the iMovie programme. We had already been through most of the clips and selected the best ones to put into the final product, but we still had a few that we couldn't decide between until we put them into the rest of the sequence. Once we had ordered the clips they came to about 4 minutes long, and so we knew that it was going to be a difficult job to edit down, even after cutting out all of the unnecessary bits from the beginning and end of each clip. 
During our next session, we will need to start shortening these clips and make the last couple of decisions on which are the best pieces of footage to use. 


Editing Diary 2

Coming back to the film today we could see that there were some clips which didn't fit in where they had been placed. This has meant that we needed to do some reshuffling with the clips so that they made sense in the narrative. We started cutting out the parts of the shots which were too long or weren't needed in the sequence and this has taken ages and ages to do because we had to somehow get it down to about 2 minutes. This took a few sessions to do, and finally we got it down to 2 minutes and 11 seconds. I have written on the blog post under Edit 1 what the feedback from out teachers was and that has given us a starting point for the next session.

Editing Diary 3 

Today we tried putting music the chosen music in to our sequence. It took a little while to work out how to get the music to go onto iMovie because the music file type wasn't compatible and so we had to use a programme called Clip Converter to make the file an MP3 to go into iMovie. After adding this in, we decided that actually the music was a bit to festive and christmassy for an opening sequence that is actually quite saddening and is supposed to evoke empathy and sympathy from out audience, therefore we took the music out and tried looking for another choice of music. Annoyingly, before we thought about it we took the old music file out and put the new music file in before we saved a copy of it so w weren't able to put an edit of this on our blog. On top of this however, we have also decided that there are certain parts of the sequence, like the match on action scene with the candle being lit, that are too disjointed and need refilming, so we've decided to organise a date to refilm these parts.

Editing Diary 4

Since our last editing session a few days ago, none of us have been free on the same day so we haven't managed to refilm these parts yet  but there were lots of other things that needed to be edited this session. We made the titles for the actors, etc a bit longer because from our feedback from peers, no one had long enough to read them properly. So we did this, and also when trying to make digital typography for the more important titles such as director and producer, we realised that they looked out of place in the sequence and so in a way it was a good thing that we hadn't refilmed already because we then decided to do more ambient titles for these roles too.

Editing Diary 5

Over the holiday period we managed to schedule a time for re-filming where we re-did some footage and also came up with some more alternative and creative ways to display the end titles. In this session we have managed to replace all of the shots which weren't shot well enough originally, and also add in the titles at the end, and the institution titles at the beginning. The project finally started to look like it is coming together when we added in our new choice of music which is slower and more downbeat and so suits the atmosphere of our opening sequence a lot more. This version of our edit can be seen under Edit 2 under the construction header on the blog.

Editing Diary 6

When re-watching this edit with our teachers, they said that they felt that something was missing from the sequence to bring it all together, and that was something to frame the sequence and make it seem more like it was telling a story over the time given. On top of this, they said that the main title which we tried to do using online typography looked very strange in contrast to all of the other titles in the sequence, no matter where in the sequence it was placed. So to overcome this problem we decided to use the idea of a calendar to document time passing over the month and to outline the build up to her Christmas, and that we were going to gradually cross out days on the calendar all the way up to Christmas eve, where we would write the main title of our film. So in this session , we made a lot of important decisions for the sequence, and also did a bit more tweaking to try and make it look as smooth, tidy and professional as we could.

Editing Diary 7 

As the most convenient time for us to film soon was when we were all in school together, we used the school's photography studio to film the calendar aspect of our sequence. This took about an hour and I brought in some Christmas decorations to tie it in with the film. In our this editing session we put these clips into the film sequence to see what it looked like and it ended up looking quite good. However we did put all of them at the beginning of the sequence and then only two at the end and we felt that this looked a bit strange so we spread them out more equally about the sequence, which also made us realise that putting the title of the film at the end of it made  it look a bit too much like a trailer, so we decided to put it in just after the main actors at the beginning of the sequence. This complied to the conventions of films in that this is the usual order of titles, and so we felt that this looked the most professional.

Editing Diary 8

This was the final editing session we had and so Ella and I decided to go back and do the last few tweaks on the final product to neaten it up a bit more. This was really important for us as there was a blip in the end of the sequence where two of the files had been corrupted since the last session. So, to overcome this we took these two clips out of the sequence and edited them back in a few times until finally the file played correctly. This final edit can be seen on my blog under the Final Product header.

Final Product

Below this you can click on the video to see the final product of our media coursework:

Edit 2