Evaluation: Q.7 Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final product?

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

Evaluation: Q.5 How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation: Q.4 Who would be the audience for your media product?

Evaluation: Q.3 What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

 Here is an interview with the managing director of Film4.


 

Evaluation: Q.2 How is your social group represented?

Evaluation: Q.1 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Please view my website below on conventions i have used, developed and challenged in my opening sequence of 'The Blur.' http://reece031098.wix.com/the-blur

The Blur - Final Edit

Editing Diary - Final Edit

Now that we now have all of our sound, titles and camera shot in the order we want; our opening sequence is near enough complete.

To finalise, we add a couple of blur shots to the end of the sequence to ensure that the impaired vision of Ralph is stated.

Furthermore, we add the institution and distributor clips at the beginning of the sequence to make sure the film looking professional. As a result, we feel as if the opening sequence to The Blur is now complete after the final additions through the blur shot and the added film shots at the beginning of the opening sequence.

Editing Diary

After a week of editing our second bulk of film footage, we found that it was much easier to construct on IMovie. This was due to the fact that we could easily drag and drop our footage from Quick Time Player (from the camcorder) to the IMovie application to edit.

In addition, the footage we had from our second filming day was much more interesting and varied in angles due to the fact that we had accurately thought about what angles we needed to add to make the film more engaging than edit 1. This, in turn, allowed us to edit the footage much easier. As well as that, we felt it made the fact that Ralph has impaired vision make more clear.

We managed to make the narrative much more clear in this second version of our film because of the way we edited it.

The first way we did this was by making sure that each piece of film was correct in relation to the time of day. By this i mean that in our original opening sequence we had pieces of footage later on in the sequence that were lighter (earlier in the day) than footage earlier on in the sequence (later in the day). This original footage made the film very confusing for viewers because of the changing backgrounds of lighting throughout the film. However, we were able to avoid this error in the editing process by arranging the footage coherently.

Next, we also improved our editing techniques by all contributing to the editing as a group. We did this through all taking turns at ending which meant we could all offer different qualities of editing techniques. For example, we quickly learnt that Ryan was much better at adding text credits to the footage than the other people in the group. In comparison, Harvey was better at using keynote in order to create the fonts we wanted and the transitions we wanted them to come up on the screen. Finally, i was able to offer a different quality to the editing process. This was the ability to make sure the footage was in the correct place in relation to the narrative we had planned via storyboarding.

Finally, we were able to add sound much easier to this version of the opening sequence. We did this by using the fade technique on the sound bar. This allowed us to smoothly add the diegetic sound over the top of the non-diegetic sound which meant the sound was much more fluent.

Editing Diary - Sound

During these series of edit lessons, I have developed the non-diegetic sound into a much more suitable way of being introduced.

This was done through using the 'fade' tool on IMovie to try and distinguish a subtle start to the music. I did this so it would not take the audience by surprise as well as ensuring that the tempo of the music matches the way in which the non-diegetic sound is meant to portray and foreshadow the narrative.

Editing Diary - Title Placement

Editing continued throughout the week after filming. There was one main aspect of the film we were looking to develop:- Titles

Discovering that titles could not be added on-screen to where we wanted, we had to use two separate programs to add the text.

IMovie

We added the majority of our titles in the corners of the screen to emphasise the lesser importance of the characters in the mid-section of the sequence.
This created no problems for our editing because we could easily insert the template we wanted and type the text in the appropriate font and size.

However, when it came to adding titles such as the director's name and the protagonists' name, we found issues. The reason we wanted to add these titles in the middle of the screen was because we found from research and planning that the more important names were in the middle of the screen.

The problem we had with IMovie was that the templates only fitted certain regions on-screen with specific fonts. Therefore, we used another editing programme called Sony Vegas. This editing could add text at certain parts on-screen that IMovie couldn't. As a result, this made it much easier to add text where we wanted and thus make the importance of certain names greater than others.
      

Opening Sequence - Filming day - 2

After arranging a second filming day due to the amount of improvements we were looking to make we found that filming day two went much better.

The main reason for this was this because we made much more time to film thus allowing more time to shoot the shots we wanted. As well as this, we found that we had much more time to think about different shot angles we could use to include in our final film.

Next, we found that the weather was much more favourable for what we wanted to achieve. This is because on our previous film day the weather was much more windy. As a result, we found that this second filming day allowed diegetic sound to be picked up much easier than in the previous filming day.