Production Day Twelve

Today we were able to record our voice over that we vitally needed. Luckilly there was only a few music students in the apple mac room and they had their earphones on, giving us the quiet area we needed to record. It took a few takes but we managed to do it in record time and with no editing it fitted perfectly with the pace of the visuals. We played the entire sequnce together now and it really worked well, the voice over was the icing on the cake that pulled everything together. We quickly put in the names of the actors and actresses in. We thought about whether we should have big names like Cameron Diaz in but thought would this really match up with the production company and their budget. For this reason we made the names up. Although this didn't go as smooth as it could have done. The programme decided it would over lap the names, this wasn't very helpful and we couldn't understand why it did this. We looked on the internet to trouble shoot htis problem and it gave us the solution. Everything was done now, all that was left to do was just to export our opening sequence and upload it on to our Youtube. Done.

Production day Eleven

We tweaked a few things today and thought about the feedback we were given last lesson, we addressed the extreme close up shot of my eyes and thought we would try to re record this shot. This could be done anywhere as we only needed my eyes and luckily my hair hadn't changed much meaning a continuity error wouldn't occur. Although we do have one already in there which we can't really do anything about. Anyway, we were a little worried with re filming the extreme close up shot as the lighting didn't feel the same. In Harriet's bedroom we had one of he spot lights beaming at me in a yellow light, the light we were now in was a lot brighter and whiter, it was more natural looking which we thought would not look great with the rest of our film. And we were proved correct. When we uploaded this clip onto imovie you could instantly tell this shot had been re filmed in a different place so we didn't use this shot, instead we trawled through the clips we didn't need to see if there was any chance we could salvage a shot. We were unsuccessful in this too. We had a rethink and decided to show a cut away here. The eye line of the character showed her looking at the props on the bed, we were able to edit a frame and show this in the place there the smiling eyes once were. We think this looks fantastic now.

We still don't know what happened with the Garageband soundtrack problem as we tried it today and it worked fine with imovie, must have just had a funny five on us. When we played the soundtrack over with the visual sequence a few adjustments were made to match certain beats to the start of the animated titles. There was one beat that we really didn't like and no matter what we did it just made the piece sound worse. We thought we might have been a little too paranoid as we knew it was there. We decided to ask a member of our class to listen as we asked if he picked up on anything that wasn't quite right. He seemed to think it was fine, this was a big relief as it showed us we were just being sensitive to it.

We still haven't done our voice over yet and we can't export our opening sequence until this is done so we are planning to come back after school on thursday to do this. Then we will have completed it, leaving just our evaluation to do.

Feedback of Our Rough Cut

Today we showed our opening sequence to our class. We ran into yet again another problem, for some reason our soundtrack wouldn't load onto imovie, this made things difficult. We couldn't exactly start playing the film then play our music on a different programme as it wouldn't flow well, so we just played the class our sequence without sound. They really seemed to like it although our critisms was this soundtrack problem. Our class also thought that on the exstreme close up of my eyes I looked as if I was smiling. We took this onboard and could understand why they said this. Next time we will sort out this shot and investigate the Garageband situation.

Production Day Ten

This is the final lesson we have to really get things done as next lesson we are showing our rough cuts to the class to show them our progress and ask for their opinions on where we can improve before submission in a week or so time. Today we finished our soundtrack and it sounded brilliant. It really made our film come together. We are a tad worried about our timing, as we still haven't recorded our voive over yet as there just doesn't seem to be any time due to problems like the computer being slow, the room not always being free, and each other's spare time with lessons and work comitments after school. However we hope everything will come together completely very soon.

Production Day Nine

Today we focused greatly on our soundtrack. as we have got our visual opening sequence pretty much done we thought it was best to re assess our non-diagetic music. when we had played with our track before it sounded rather good as you could tell the genre it was supposed to be emulating however when it ran on top of the visuals it just didn't work at all so we completely started again. we listened to the pre recorded tracks and did our best at putting them into sequence. we kept with the theme of the single piano to keep our piece sounding convential of the drama genre. we did not quite finish this today but will do in our next lesson.

Production Day Eight

We met with our teacher today and she went through with us on what we had done so far. She picked up on our problem with our animation and tried to address it in many ways to solve it however nothing really worked as we didn't have the correct software installed on the computers to animate still frames. We managed to work our way around it however, we simply cut down our shots into 1 second parts and we had over 68 frames to do this with. When we played this animation section through it still took ages so we sped up the pace in which the photos appeared on screen cutting the time dramatically. We also roughed a few titles to see what they would look like.

Although this was only a brief encounter today, we were quite impressed with how much work we actually got done. Uunfortunately we were sharing the room with other pupils so we were not able to get our voice over done, this is on the agenda for next time.

Production Day Seven

Today we did our title animation. To start with Harriett and I took half the total number of photos each and edited them so that you couldn't see the table that the titles were on. This was a little difficult because the photos were taken seperatly, more table was shown on some than on others and most were taken at an angle so it was difficult to cut the table out without removing some of the paper and clay used to create the titles, a tripod should of been used to combat this problem but the end result looked better than we thought running them through quick. I think this emhansed it greatly. We had to repeat this cutting 34 times each as we went halves on editing the titles. We used a piece of equipment called 'grab' on the computers to cut these photos. When we had finished these we uploaded them on to 'imovie' with the rest of our film. We moved the photos into the timeline at he bottom of the screen but the programme gave each still a five second duration, we didn't want this so we spoke to our teacher about this and asked if there was a way around it. She said to comeback tomorrow after school an she will have a look for us and give us a little help. So that is what we are going to do.

Production Day Six

In lesson time we focused on editing the main two chunks of our film, this was finishing the photo montage and editing the acting part. We had to cut down the length of the photo montage as we wanted the photos to drop in, in slow motion. We applied a slow motion piece to this sequence and it really looked good. At this point it would take almost one minute thirty to play through which was far too long seeing as our whole opening sequence is allowed to be two minutes long. We cut out the lengthy part between each photo falling and re-assessed the speed of them falling, combined this sequence was reduced dramatically. Then we focused on the editing of the second chunk of our sequence, the acting. This wasn't too hard and it didn't take too long either. When trying to edit the eyes we had to find a suitable bit that was long enough as my eyes kept moving about as I tried to fill them with tears. We were very impressed with a transition made by Harriett editing two shots together, Olivia's hand as she picks up a piece of paper to read.