Final Product: i am alive

Question 7: Self Evaluation

Question 6: What Have You Learnt About Technologies From The Process Of Making This Product?

Question 5: What Elements Of Your Text Would Attract Your Target Audience?

Question 4: Who Would Be The Target Audience For My Product?

Question 3: What Media Institution Would Distribute My Film?

Question 2: How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?

Question 1: In What Ways Does My Product Challenge, Use And Develop The Codes And Conventions Of The Genre?

Audience Feedback

I took criticism from my audience feedback about the volume levels of various points in my film, for example the static sounds drowned out the monologue at various points throughout, and the sounds at the end of the film being too loud in comparison to the rest of the film.

This was the only part of the criticism that I could improve on because anything else would involve having to re-film parts, which I did have time for.

Luckily my audience thought that a lot of elements that I tried hard to do correctly and focused on a lot, such as mise-en-scene and good editing pace, we're good and done accurately so this will hopefully mean that everything I've done is done well and correctly.

Shooting Schedule

DAY 1 OF SHOOTING

On this day, we ended up filming in a different location, to make it appear a lot more friendly and practical. We managed to get the lighting well set up and correctly aimed around the room to allow for the footage to later be turned from bright and well lit, to looking like its low level lighting and filmed at night time, except this way it meant we could avoid having the grainy effect you get on darker bits of footage and flickering in shadows like when you actually film in a dark environment, such as in a dark room or outside at night time.

On this day, we filmed all of the shots that involved being out side. Doing all of these at once meant that I didn't need to drag all of the characters out at once on multiple days. I think this was an effective way of filming because it meant that there was no problem with the characters wearing any different clothes and looking any different. Not all of the shots that I filmed on this day were used, but the ones that I did use I think were well filmed and effectively do what I wanted them to like I originally planned to.

This was the final day of filming. I filmed all of these shots on my own, as none of them involved having any of the other actors in shot. I think I filmed these well and did so in manner where it shows the audience what I planned on showing, this being that the characters is dipping in and out of consciousness and is injured in some way. As I wanted to make this the final day of filming, I made sure that I properly filmed everything and did it multiple times over, just in case anything went wrong or didn't look right. Luckily, the shots that I wasn't happy with, I'd re-filmed and had a version of them that I was happy with, meaning that I could still use whichever ones I wanted in my film.

Testing Footage: Gun Shots

Test Footage: Gun Shots

Tester Footage: Gun Shot from Connor Green

This is some tester footage I tried out for any kind of fight scene that could be included within the opening sequence of my film. For this I tried out a few different kinds of fight scenes, including the use of guns, punches and pushes, all of which could be used within a typical movie fight scene. 

The shot where we tried out using a gun, involved editing the footage within Adobe After Effects to get the best and most realistic effect I possibly could. When doing this, the three key things I needed to do accurately was the muzzle flash on the actor and gun, creating the tracking path at the end of the gun for the smoke, flash and fire to follow and distort around and an accurate syncing of the gun shot sound with when the gun appeared to kick back.

I started off by changing the 'Project Settings' of the testing footage to 32 bit channel and sRGB colour, and then ticked the 'Linearize Working Space'. This did:

• Changed the way the colours work, to make them act more realistically
• Better simulated the way lighting is shown and simulated (meaning any areas of footage where there is no lighting is shown as black, as it would be shown as if you were viewing it in real life)

Doing this made it so the addition of a muzzle flash and flare to the footage would add another layer of realism and make the gun shot more believable. The first step to making the gun shot seem real was adding a solid colour layer with an orange/yellow tone, similar to the kind of lighting fire would give, and then masking around the actor, gun and anything else that the light from the muzzle flash would shine onto. I did this by using the Pen Tool and drawing around the outside of the actor and gun, but didn't spend too much time making it 100% accurate as the simulated muzzle flash would only be seen for a very small amount of frames, normally around 1-3 frames. You can see that there isn't as many pen points around the actor, which is what reduces the accuracy but also reduces the amount of time and attention need to focus on this step.

Next, I had to make a tracking point at the muzzle of the gun for the flash, smoke and sparks to follow. I did this by using the automatic tracking point built into After Effects, but this only worked accurately for the first few frames because the gun muzzle moved in such a large distance between the start and the end of the time it was being tracked that the software couldn't track and detect the one point accurately. Because of this, I had to manually track the point for each individual frame. This didn't take long because there was only a small amount of frames to track along, and provided a lot more accurate tracking sequence and meant the muzzle flash properly followed the end of the gun.

After I added the tracking point to the muzzle flash and sparks layer, I set the muzzle flash layer to slightly distort at the end of the flash by making it so the end would be a few seconds behind where the flash comes out of the gun and act as if the flash was being pulled up as the gun flung up, and this helped the flash not seem like it was just attached to the end of the gun, but actually coming out the end. Even though this doesn't make a huge difference, the difference is still noticeable and definitely improves the look of the footage.

Then I had to sync up the audio, which was the gun shot, with when the gun appears to kick back and when the muzzle flash originally appears to come out of the barrel. Originally, I struggled to get the gun shot to sync up correctly with the gun kick as the audio file I had of the gun shot didn't originally start at the very start of the file, and instead played a few seconds into the file.

To fix this, I opened the gun shot sound file within Audacity (a free audio editing program) and trimmed down the gun shot sound file started at the exact of the audio file, instead of a few seconds in. Then when I put it back into After Effects I was able to place the audio file at the start of the frame and the sound and the gun barrel movement synced up correctly.

Location Recce And Risk Assessment