Unit 11 Journals

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Wednesday 11th - Friday 13th of November In College

Today our lesson with Attila, our Wednesday tutor, was very technical. We had an introduction to different video file formats about how video is compressed to reduce file size which continued into learning about codecs which is the order used to layout data in an audio or video file so that it can be played back. We learnt about AVI files and different WMX and Div formats, finishing the lesson off with a video that outlined all of the different file formats and their uses to conclude what we learnt. I did get to handle a Lumix camera with a 70mm prime lens, in the video settings our tutor showed us all of the different audio and video format adjustments, the choice is overwhelming and confusing because each format can have a different outcome in post production. Going into the film industry or being on a set its vital to know the basics of technical knowledge, from camera handling to recording video on specific video and audio files, our lesson gave me a basic understanding of the variety of file formats, to further my knowledge id need to do my own research to gain a better understanding of this technical topic.

On Thursday we used adobe illustrator to remake the Buckinghamshire college group logo. Me and my partner changed the colors of the logo and learnt the basic settings in illustrator. Personally I am not interested in graphics but I can see how our study of lower thirds and logos (text that overlays a video at the bottom of the screen) can be used in sports television, presenting and documentary film making. At break my classmates were filming a video for YouTube, I had a small on screen role and acted alongside my friends while getting involved in lighting and adjusting the keno lights in the television studio where we filmed. Small projects like these help me develop experience within college facilities using lighting and filming equipment that I wouldn't have got to use in class (setting up tripods and tracks for cameras, using reflectors etc) while also gaining more intercommunication knowledge when working in a group on set by sharing ideas when deciding whats the best shot for a scene or speaking to whoever is acting about capturing emotion is just an example. Being in a filming environment even if its student and amateur continuously helps me gain small pockets of knowledge. For example, after filming this video I now properly understand why the 180 degree rule is so important in film making. My friends don't always film with two cameras and it can make filming take longer or we have to settle for re filming a scene a few times to capture two perspectives.

Friday was reflective. My class looked over their websites and I asked my tutor to read over my research paper for unit 11 to make sure it was of a high grade. I was told to add more statistics to back up my points in my paper and I carried on doing my research to do so.

Wednesday 18th - Friday 20th of November Online

Wednesday began with a technical lesson on sound and its importance within film and telling a story. We had an initial exercise on why sound is used in films: To indicate mood, emphasis whats on screen, evoke emotional responses etc. The main reason being that sound simulates reality and makes footage come to life, immersing the viewer. Sound tells us about character, time and place while giving us formation that visuals can't. Our lesson then continued on to the different types of sound in media.

Dialogue -people talking onscreen
Ambient sound- background sound within a scene
Additional dialogue recording- if there's is a problem with footage actors sometimes have to do whats also known as dubbing and record themselves saying their lines again to be put over the footage.
Narration- someone speaking over the film telling the story
Soundtrack - music specifically made for a film or production

I shared my opinion on sound and film in a class discussion. I said that a good film should be understood even with sound turned off because film is a visual medium, a story told through pictures. Sound comes after and helps the story come to life, through the use of scores, dialogue and Foley.

We identified classic scores from notable films like the Godfather and John Wick as a short exercise, while then watching a video on how Foley is created in a Foley studio. A man created various sound for media with various objects. For example he walked on a bag to emulate the sound of walking in snow or punched a thick book to record an accurate punching fight sound. Overall this lesson refreshed my memory on the topic of sound, particularly when we talked about deadcats and shotgun microphones. I learnt that Foley is time consuming and difficult to create while also engaging with my peers on their opinion of sound and its importance.

In our next lesson our objectives were to understand the importance of classical literacy in media studies and how codes and conventions work in film. We began with an introduction to the meaning of classical literacy which is the body of high culture literature, music and art that is valued in western society. This crosses over with film literacy which is the ability to critically watch a film and be able to evaluate the content and technical aspects of it, its a understanding of film. Next we discussed the meaning of cliche in film, simply meaning something that has become overused and unoriginal. All of these key words link to theme of our overall lesson which is to use our film literacy to deconstruct technical codes and conventions of sound in film. Particularity overused scores and sounds, linking to the key word cliche.

Our deconstruction began with the understanding of what Dies Irea meant, (Latin for judgment day) a piece of music for catholic funerals. It is a unsettling descending four note sequence and connotes sadness and danger. Our tutor wanted us to watch some videos about the use of Dies Irea in film. We watched some clips from many films and were able to identify the four note sequence in all of them. Films like: A Clockwork orange, Its a wonderful life, The lion king and most notibally in The Shining opening sequence. The score is mainly used in moments of horror or in the climax scene that leads to a resolution. It begs the question, is Dies Irea cliche? I don't see it as overused because each composer makes the score sound different through various different instruments. For example, in the Shining the score is slower and descends lower and lower as we watch car drive the wilderness alone, the family is unknowingly going towards the danger that awaits them at the hotel. Whereas the score in the lion king is short and used to highlight a moment of betrayal. To conclude our lessons on sound, I expanded my media literacy by finding and criticizing media texts on their use of sound, in this case i wanted to find id Dies Irea was cliche and to identify its use as a sound within film and evaluate if it was effective.

Our Friday lesson was constructive with reflection on our website and research paper. The lesson began with our teacher going over our unit 11 brief and Discussing what principals we need to include in our promotional advert. The main points being to make the advert memorable and stand for values that are linked to the brand you are promoting while communicating how the advert will fit into the target audiences lives. Our teacher made us consider the ideas for our adverts and to begin doing the pre production work for it. On our online zoom call we got split into small break out rooms with the people we wanted to work with on our advert. I was put into a room with my partner and we began brainstorming ideas for our advert idea. Our final concept was to create a John Lewis Christmas advert. We want to make it emotional while keeping the theme of Christmas central to the advert like John Lewis does. The Story line is about a little girl who looses her beloved dog and wants to come back for Christmas. After running over shot types and visual concepts, we had a particularly good idea for a final shot where we have the little girl get gifted puppy, it would be a small slow motion sequence with the puppy running towards the girl. We then began constructing a shot list.

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Wednesday 25th -Friday 27th of November In College

Wednesdays lesson was to do with the importance of sound design within the film industry. We watched a short tedtalk video about a sound designer that discussed why sound was an immitation of realty, what we hear onscreen is infact fake. For example in the video, we were shown three different clips of rain with a rain soundscape, we had to guess which video was infact a real rain sound scape and which video had the sound of frying bacon as the sound effect for rain. All three videos had the sound of frying bacon emulating the sound of rain. Creating sound effects within a foley studio creates more realistic and clean sound rather than using the real sound when filming. I was shocked to discover that most of the time only the sound of the actors dialogue is used and the rest of the soundscape and score is created in post production.

After watching the video we moved onto a practical task which included recording some of our own foley sounds with a recorder and microphone that we could potentially overlay onto our silent film that we did for unit 9. We got into small groups and recorded the sounds of someone eating crisps and the sound of paper being torn. It gave me an idea of how long a process sound designing and foley creation is. It can take many tries to get the right sound or get a sound to be perfect in timing to be used for a clip.

Our Thursday lesson was associated with unit 10 and we began constructing an ident. To link our ident to our unit 11 project me and my partner decided to recreate the John Lewis and partners logo and decorate it with a Christmas theme. We opened illustrator with the idea of making the logo into a Present box with a bow and wrapping paper. We imported the logo and a picture of a bow and a gingerbread man. We then turned the gingerbread man into a wrapping paper pattern on the pattern setting on illustrator and overlaid it behind the John Lewis logo. Idents for news channels and brands usually move or are animated in some way, BBC news have a red ident that consists of a spinning globe with circular stripes that move. We saved our logo and imported it into Adobe after effects. There are many transitions in after effects our main goal was to make the red wrapping paper of our logo shine and looked. At first we found it challenging because we didn't have a good understanding of the after effects settings, with help from our teacher who found a way to make the logo have a shine by importing a picture of glitter and then overlaying a wave like effect that made the background of our logo look like shiny wrapping paper that got caught in the light. We found an effect called 'snowfall' that was literally snow falling on our logo, it linked to the christams theme and made our logo come to life.

After lesson me and my partner for unit 11 advert decided to record the musical score for our advert. We rented out a zoom H5 recorder and a microphone from the colleges equipment facilities and headed to a piano room. We struggled to record the score and had a lot of technical difficulties. Firstly we didn't properly know how to use the recorder and every-time we tried to record something the file didn't show up and we couldn't play anything back. We ended up having to come back and do the recording later or on the next day after asking a turor how to use the recorder. During our break me and my friends decided to film a short skit inside of a classroom and in a hallway. For the hallway skit we rented out a tripod and a track to do one long tracking shot down the hallway. The scene in question was about two boys having a conversation while the camera follows behind them. I played an extra in the shot and had to stand and act like a student in the hallway to set the scene. Filming went smoothly, with the only interruption being from a teacher at the end of the long shot (if we messed it up the whole thing would have to be filmed again) but even that fitted perfectly with the unscripted comedy and improv that the actors in the scene were doing and ended the skit just in time.

On Friday our lessons continued to be focused on our written work for unit 11. I had finished my research paper and planned to do my research later so I left the lesson early with my classmates to go to my friends studio. I was an actor and helped my friends group film their promotional advert that was a film noir 60s cigagrette advert. I bought some props in advance, some cat eye sunglasses and a silk headscarf to fit with the 60s fashion theme. (I drew inspiration from classic looks like Audrey Hepbrun in Roman Holiday). We got to the studio and set up two box lights and a black backdrop. One of the scenes was the main actor holding a cigarette, the creative vision was to have a spotlight on the actors face to show him holding it. We didn't have a spotlight so to improvise we used the flashlight of an iPhone and held it through toilet roll to focus the light. It created an effective spotlight that increased the production quality of the shot. The next scene was our main actor lighting a cigarette that was being advertised. We wanted to have a backlight to create an outline silhouette of the actor to separate him from the background. Again we worked with what we had and I knelt behind my friend and held an iphone with the flashlight turned on, it had the desired effect and made a nice outline of light. For the last shot I put on my props and had to walk into the shot and have my friend put his arm around me while smoking. The advert itself begins with the actor being a boring man, the cigarettes then change that. Overall the advert was easy to film and I enjoyed giving creative direction to all of the members in the group, I gave suggestions for shot ideas, I pitched that in the first shot that showed how boring the actor was, I could walk past and ignore him which would link to the last shot where he gets the girl because the cigarettes make him cooler. We adapted to what we had around us, for example using toilet paper as a spotlight and an iPhone as a backlight.

Wednesday 2nd - Friday 4th December Online

Our Wednesday lessons were technical, ranging from learning about the news to different types of sound. The learning objective for our morning lesson was to define and identify news and to discuss the importance of news credibility and the news values. This lesson is linked to unit 10, we defined news which is a report of a current event, and then began to define what was the difference between news and information. For example, the notice board at a train station displaying the train times is a source of information, whereas if there was to be a train crash that would become news, because it is a current event with value added to it. We covered what makes news, with the basic who? what? where? why? questions and looked at the values that journalists and news channels look to:

Timeliness and currency- News has to be new and fresh and to do with current events, an incident that happened last month is not interesting. News channels and journalists want to get the information as quick as possible to get views, readers and to battle other news outlet competitors.

Impact and proximity - The impact of an incident can affect news being regional or international. For example, corona virus is a global pandemic and it effects your proximity if there is a high amount of cases in your area.

Controversy- Atnything that is connected to conflicts, politics, arguments, tension, fights becomes news.

Prominence- if a famous person is involved in anything it becomes news. for example Johnny Depp's ongoing divorce to do with domestic violence allegations has become controversial and prominent news. Whereas if Jonny Depp was an ordinary person, no one would really care.

Oddity- Unusual events make news

Emotion- The Madeleine Mcann case. Stories of human interest.

Use-fullness- News about the weather

We went over the different types of news, International, national, regional, and local to distinguish what news would fall into what category. We then looked a journalists values, them wanting their repots to be fair, objective and credible. Objective meaning without any bias, fairness meaning that the story takes into account two sides and credibility meaning that the story is backed up with facts. It started a small debate where i shared my personal opinion about how the news itself is biased. All news channels and newspapers, be that tabloids like The Sun or broadsheets like The Times support certain political parties and therefore it impacts their news and their outlook on a current event. Also the news can twist and villainies anyone they want to, like mentioned earlier even with the Johnny Depp example The Sun was sued by Depp because they referred to him as a 'Woman beater' in a headline. Whereas I did my own resaerch and i think he is innocent. Therefore, I think that it is extremely important to be an active viewer that makes his/her own opinions when listening and watching the news and to not passively consume everything you are told, because the news has its own political agenda.

Our afternoon lesson was about the different types of sound. We did research on each type of sound and then did and exercise at the end of the lesson where we linked the type of sound to an example from a film or any media.

Non diegetic sound- Sound that is not from the films world. A music score for example.

Diegetic sound- Is from the characters world, voices of characters speaking, background noise.

Internal diegetic sound -is sound coming from within a characters mind. A narration for example.

Metadiegetic sound- A source of sound is diegetic however it is distorted to create drama, basically sound effects that are not connected to a characters internal thoughts.

Thurdays and Fridays lesson was mainly group work that invloved brainstorming ideas for a part of unit 11 which is to create a opening title sequence. I was put into a group with my friends and we initially had the idea of recreating the intro to Come dine with me, because of its simplicity however sourcing food in college is difficult and the production value would not be high. We decided to recreate the How I met your mother title sequence because its essentially a bunch of photos accompanied with a good soundtrack. We would only need to take some photos and then find a template online that could arrange them in the same format that How I met your mother has.

Wednesday 9th - Friday 10th December in college

This week was independent and we carried on with most of our written work for unit 11 in class on Wednesday. On Thursday we had a technical lesson on how to use adobe after effects and adobe illustrator to create a title sequence. Our teacher used the infamous title sequence from Catch me if you can Directed by Martin Scorsese. He showed us how to transform the white letters and make them move across the screen in lines like in the opening Catch me if you can sequence. A video I found online demonstrates what we did. I originally thought of recreating this as a part of my sequence project for this unit, however I am not used to using after effects even after our lesson. With the project deadline looming I planned to make a sequence that I could film and edit instead.

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On Friday I helped my friend create his promotional advert for unit 11. We had a small pre production process and pitched our ideas about what the advert should be to each other. I proposed the idea of a chocolate advert. Their narratives are always quite simple and stereotypical don't always have to make sense, usually including elements of romance and relaxation to advertise chocolate products. Our main inspirations were The Audrey Hepburn Galaxy advert that paid homage to the actress and A Cadbury advert about a little girl who buys her mum a chocolate bar. From these we gathered that most of these adverts have a very short and simple narrative and are focused on the chocolate being an anchor to the story. We decided to go with a comedic approach and came up with a short story about a girl breaking up with her annoying boyfriend and settling for chocolate instead. I agreed to act and we proceeded to find a classroom we could film in. We only had minor technical challenges that we had to work around, the equipment studio was closed so my friend had to film on his phone with no tripod. He had to hold the phone at a lower angle to get a mid shot and stay still. I had two lines and overall filming went quickly and smoothly because the advert was around twenty seconds long. With the only desired changes being that we would have preferred a different location, a more stereotypical looking classroom with books and posters, all the classrooms in the college are restricted due to covid boundaries therefore we had to adapt and use the room that we had in mind.

Wednesday 16th- Friday 18th Online

Our Wednesday lesson was a small introduction into unit 10. our teacher made us watch a radio broadcast called 'The war of the worlds' by Orson wells, it was a dramatisation of the science fiction novel which scared the cbs radio's nigh-time listeners, however it was aired on halloween eve and Orson Wells was clearly joking. For the next lesson we as a class made a group radio podcast discussing the coronavirus vaccine, my classmate wrote down what each of us were going to say and then we all went down the page and everyone said their lines.

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