Skills Update

Blog entry skills update. June- July 2011
Doc. Techniques. Vox pops. – framing – looking left and right- editing-
Doc analysis- bowling for C – own doc.
Music vid- lips sync practice- green screen
Film noir- editing- setting up the lighting and props etc.
Editing of dance vid



The last five weeks of year 12 we have been preparation for our A2 practical work. Firstly we focused of documentaries. We started by looking at the famous documentary ‘Bowling for columbine’ by Michael More. We analysed this carefully picking out the most dramatic and powerful parts of the documentary, one of which was when he went to ‘Charlton Heston’ and confronted him about appearing in a NRA seminar a few days after the attack in the school where a little girl died. After view this we looked at a very common part of documentaries called Vox Pops. We went pout a created our own version of these Vox Pops. We needed to make sure that the interviewee was framed correctly and either standing slightly to the left or the right of the camera. When editing this video we had to put in a title which was the question so that you did not hear the interviewer saying the question and then we cut together the answers making sure you swapped from left to right.

I also experimented with different film styles. In one lesson we tried out making our film noir sequence. One of the other students and I created the script for the short sequence and after that was finished we went out and filmed. We knew that all film noirs had the same aspects of camera and lighting in them, as this helps create the right mood of the piece. We used a lot of different lights to create back lighting, used to give a sense of secrets and makes the character look menacing. We also used, chiaroscuro lighting to give the fell that the character is hiding something about them selves. When it came to editing this short sequence we discovered that we did not have enough reaction shots to break up the action and we needed tighter editing as the actor had glance at the script so their eye line moved away from the other character to the script, to hide this we tried to fill it with reaction shot but we didn’t have enough to make the sequence flow.

The second part of the cause is to create a music video. We had the task of getting what was considered a ‘summer song’ so that we could create a summer music video. Before we set out filming we had to see if we could do successful lip syncing. We found out that to get this to work we needed to play the song aloud so that who ever was ‘singing’ the song could hear it and get the right tempo of the song. We then cut this all together. When doing the lip sync we also used the green screen. We found that when doing the green screen the cloth needs to be completely flat and lit correctly so that there are no shadows causing there to be different shades of green. This is because when you come to edit the film you need to tell the computer to take out all the green and replace it with a different image that you put into the timeline, however you can only tell the computer replace one colour. This is why we decided not to use the green screen and just used various different locations when we went shooting at Knebworth.