Becky Doyle IG3 Production Log

Date What I Did

10.09.12 Today we discussed as a group what our individual job roles would be while filming, and we put this into a word document along with pictures so it’s easier to understand.

11.09.12 I had to email Chris Gladwin who is in charge of filming kit, to book our necessary equipment. We also made a meeting minutes plan, and we had a group meeting and discussion about our film. We discussed what we need to do in the next few weeks.

13.09.12 We set up two projects in Adobe Premier Pro for our short film for when it comes to the editing process. One project is set up for HD the other in standard definition. When it comes to editing we will have a choice of both projects to choose from. They are both saved to My Computer in the E new volume drive ready for when I need it.

13.09.12 I checked my emails and Chris had emailed me back to confirm our equipment booking. We picked up the kit today ready for filming.

17.09.12 A member of our group wasn’t in so I Emily and Jenny went out of college and did some practice shots with the filming equipment. I’m the camera person so I had to refresh my memory on the controls and settings on the camera. We wanted to test different locations where Emily can be filmed in her first shot. I tried some camera angles but unfortunately they didn’t work or fit in with our type of film. The exposure wasn’t right and the shots were out of focus too, and this was a fault on my behalf as I had forgotten how to use some of the settings, to make sure they were right.

18.09.12 Today during our break we decided to film our first shot, as we had booked our equipment out the day before. We were hoping to film a few more shots than just one, but one of the actors didn’t have the right costume so held the filming back. We went out to our local area on a main road, and set up to film Emily walking down the road. We came across a lot of obstacles while filming such as people walking in our shots and not realising, people walking dogs and passing buses and vans. We managed to get 5 takes of the scene 1 shot 1, because this was all we could do. It went really Well. At the end of the day I transferred the shots from the SD card to my documents and renamed them to the relevant takes.

20.09.12 Today in class I put the shots in the shared folder, for rest of the group to access so they could then put them in their documents. We opened our saved HD version project and imported the files in to it. We watched through them and decided on which take looked the best, which was take 5.

24.09.12 Today we had a production team meeting, as we had a few things we needed to discuss. The main topic was when we will next be filming, and this coming Sunday is a possibility. We plan on spending the entire day

Becky Doyle IG3 Production Log

in Bolton to get as much filming done as possible and this is our main location, so it’s important we crack on.

25.09.12 Today I started to look at opening title backgrounds, to help me with ideas on how to create my own. I found and image from an old Laurel and Hardy film, and I put this into illustrator. I created different layers to represent the different components of the image; I added a few of my own using curves. I’ve finished it to make it look like an old style title background, and for this I will place the opening credits of my film.

01.02.12 Today we had to have another meeting to discuss filming dates and times. We came up with a conclusion that we have to improvise and get the filming done whether we like it or not, due to unavailability’s of some of the group. We booked kit and filled out the meeting schedule record.

04.10.12 I was absent from filming on the 02.10.12 due to being ill, so jenny took over my job role as camera person.

04.10.12 Due to being ill I had to catch up with the entire group on the following Thursday, as to where they were up to with the filming. They had transferred all the shots and renamed them and I just had to put them into my new volume area where my project is saved along with all its’ files. I deleted what was originally in my project and imported the new files. We decided our next filming date too.

09.10.12 Today this was filming day and we knew we had quite a bit to get through, but one of the actors was absent from college ill so there was only limited shots which we could film. We did as much as we could, but there is still a lot to do. We filmed nearly all of scene 1 which will get us started on editing our project because we’ve got shots to work with. It was a nice day to film as the sun was out, but we had a lot of setbacks with filming on a public main road. We had to work around this and get on it, it was quite frustrating but we cannot restrict people from walking down the road. We worked around this and got there in the end. We know that this is going to be the case every time we film but we will manage it like we did today.

10.10.12 With not having Iain’s lesson on a Wednesday all I could do was put the shots off the camera on to the computer. They are now ready for Iain’s next lesson for me to rename them and let the rest of the group have access to them on the shared folder.

11.10.12 Because my shared folder has the folder that holds all the footage, I had to be one to rename all the shots. This took a while as we did a lot of retakes, with different angles so I had to rename them carefully so nobody got confused. I imported all the new shots into my HD project on Adobe Premier and started to get to work. I found it hard trying to fit some of the shots together, but we tried to keep continuity as much as we could and we did it well.

Becky Doyle IG3 Production Log

15.10.12 With the shots I’d put together I added in some of my title shots that I made in Adobe Illustrator. At first I had previously made some but I set the dimensions wrong so I had to do them again. I eventually got them right and I can only learn from what I did wrong, that when importing pictures files I need to make sure all the dimensions match my HD project.

16.10.12 I sharpened up on some for the editing in my project today, i asked Iain to watch through it and he gave me some feedback on what I could do to make it look slightly better. He suggested that I shorten some of the shots to prevent the film from dragging out too much, as it is a slapstick comedy based genre, they do not use long winded shots. I took his advice and cut some of the shots a bit shorter and they do make a difference from what I have noticed. For now I have the beginning of the film and I have my titles in their too for scene 1.

18.10.12 Today was filming day so we went to location after our first lesson. We had to do retakes of some shots because some of them were highly exposed so they couldn’t be used. We wanted to film for the whole day up until half 2 in the afternoon, but the battery on our camera died so we had no choice but to go back to college. I transferred the shots off the camera on to the computer ready to be renamed.

22.10.12 Me and Emily watched through all 31 shots and renamed them. I imported the new footage into my project and replaced some of the shots I had put together in my sequence. I’m now editing scene 2 and have got more footage to put into the sequence. The filming for scene 2 went really well, and we improvised some ideas on the spot to add extra stuff. It’s important with our film that we show emotion through facial expression and body language so we suggested to Mark he does gestures to suggest that he’s happy, sad or confused.

23.10.12 My group filmed on this day but I was off college due to being ill. So they went on without me, and Cesca and Mark out of our class went along with them and helped with the camera work, which is my job. I was gutted that I was ill as I was because I was really starting to enjoy filming because it was getting funnier the more we was improvising but they did a good job either way.

25.10.12 Emily and Jenny told me how much footage they had shot and I had to copy them in to my area on my computer. I imported them into my project so now I had more footage to work with as well as what we shot the week before. It took a while to watch them all because there was so many but they were all really good. There are only a few shots that we need to reshoot because their bags were in the shots. I began to place and cut shots to continue on from where I’d left off, and I had to make some more title images so I could import them into their relevant places, to coordinate with the shots. I didn’t get as much done as I had wanted to do before half term but I know what I’ve got to do when I come back into class, and I can finally produce my rough edit and write a summary of it ready for my blog post.

Becky Doyle IG3 Production Log

06.11.12 This lesson t was important to get my edit completed and uploaded on to YouTube ready for me to embed it on to my blog. I added the rest of footage i had and the titles and I finished my edit. Although we haven’t completed the filming for the last scene, we had to work with we had done up to now. Once I uploaded it on YouTube I watched through the clip and had to pick out everything that i would improve and what worked well and what didn’t. I did this in a word document.

08.11.12 I added some more to my write up for my rough edit and I also added some print screens to illustrate some parts of what I have talked about and explained. Mainly about the transitions I have used in my edit. I’ve put this all on Task 4 of my blog. Now I’ve done that I have started to write about the locations we have used in our filming for Task 2. Previous times when we have filmed, we took pictures of the locations to show where it would take place. I pasted these into a word document and wrote about why we chose these particular places and how effective they are if they work well.

12.11.12 When it comes to making the final edit of my film, I need to age the footage so it imitates the 1920’s movie look. For practice, I got Chris the media technician to come and help me to show me the process in which I would take, to add the effects to my footage in Adobe After Effects. I imported my rough edit and use this as my effects practice. He talked me through the stages in which I would add the effects and I used effects such as contrast change, hue and saturation and used the transform option on the adjustment layer. On the adjustment layer, anything I do on this layer changes whatever is underneath that layer. So I fiddled about the hue and saturation, and came to an aged effect colour that I liked, and it’s almost a sepia colour. I tried it with black and white too and it worked well but I really the effect sepia gave it. Once I got it to the stage where I was happy with the way it came out, I rendered it so it was ready to upload to Youtube. This has really helped me get a better idea of how I want my final edit to look.

15.11.12 I uploaded my effects edit on Youtube so I could embed it on to my blog. I also made some print screens of it and I added them to my summary for the rough edit, and I wrote a little bit about what I did. Then I had to embed this again because I had added more information.

19.11.12 I was out on a trip with another teacher so wasn’t present in Iains lesson.

20.11.12 Although some members of the group were absent, we had to go out and film what we could with just me Emily and Mark. The parts we shot were a few reshoots and some extra bits so we could link the rest of this scene together. We didn’t film for long because there was only so much could do. We went back to college about an hour later and I copied the shots from the camera on to my documents. Emily renamed all the shots and put them in the shared folder for everyone to access.

22.11.12 I imported the files in to my project to complete Scene 2 of my short film, but they are yet to be edited together.

26.11.12 I was out on a trip with another teacher so wasn’t present in Iains

Becky Doyle IG3 Production Log

lesson.27.11.12 Today I finished my location reccy and put it on task 2 of my blog.

Although there are more images to be added I wanted to get it on there because it is nearly done. I was going to put my photo diary on there too but we need more photos for this of me filming and of the actors. This is proof to show that we are sticking to our allocated jobs, even though this changes slightly when people are off sick.I watched through the newly prepared shots on my project so I need to pick out the one I’m going to use, and replace the reshoots to the correct ones.

29.11.12 Was absent from college04.12.12 Today I added some more shots in to my project as I was a bit behind

from being off college through illness. I wanted to check that I had got everything in there for the story to flow. Due to members of our groups and myself being absent for so long, we had to compromise and hold off filming the last scene, so the film becomes to be continued. We didn’t really want to do this as it would have been even better if we could finish it, but due to the deadline we have it wouldn’t have been possible. It still looks good even when it is like this as it makes you wonder what will happen next and you can determine your own ending.

06.12.12 I watched through my film a couple of times to check for any gaps and ended up adding a few more shots in just to add length to it. I’m at the point where it is nearly finished, but I want to make sure it’s the best it can be; watching through my sequence and seeing fi I can cut or lengthen any of them.

17.12.12 I had been ill for a couple of weeks so I was behind on my editing and production log, but today I got it all back up to date. I watched through a member of the groups film, and I noticed she’d had used some shots that I hadn’t, and I wanted to add them in to mine. So I found them and put them in their appropriate place where it would look right and link in. Once I’d done this is was finished and I had to research some music online and YouTube. I found a track on YouTube that I really enjoyed the sound of and it would fit perfect for my short film. I had to convert it to an mp3 through the internet and import the track in my project. From here, I then had to listen to the track while watching my film, to see where I had to cut and copy some of it. At the beginning I had to copy it 3 so it sounded like it was looping, and as the track progressed, the sound got deeper and more mischievous like to fit in with our part of the film where Mark our actor, was creeping up behind the couple. This was hard because you had to listen really carefully but I got it done in the end. I rendered out the finished product.

18.12.12 Today I had draw all my work up and import the rendered footage in to the After Effects document that I created a few weeks ago, which has all the aging and old effects already in place. I imported the film and then rendered it out again and uploaded it onto YouTube and my blog.