Note To Moderator

Welcome to my blog!

Thank you for taking the time to view my blog.

On this blog you will find all my finished work from my Ancillary and my main projects at the top, with all the research and planning underneath.

All the research carried out was all individually done and is all talked about in my final evaluation which you will find at the very top of my blog with feedback.

All of my posts are in chronological order throughout going from my research to planning and then my ancillary task to my main task.

I hope you enjoy going through my blog and that the posts all show my development and enjoyment of the project.

Tomas Noad. Candidate Number. 2384

Short Films ans the ECU Film Festival

Most people who make a short film may produce it for many of reasons: many use it as a starting point to get a team together and get experience under their belt for future plans, seeing if they can cope and enjoy making film. Linked with the experience, many join a team and form partnerships to get the full experience of what its like making a short film.

Alot of people making short films produce it bcuase they want to pursue a career in filmmaking or in the film industry so they use the film as a way to show off their skills in film making. A lot of amateur film makers will use short films as a way to test out their own ideas and also to create a higher profile of them selves, making themselves more known in the filmmaking world. SHowing their films at things like film festivals.

We went to Paris on the 30th of March 2012 to watch the European film festival. Over the weekend we watched a variety of film including animations, features, shorts, music videos and documentaries. This gave us the experience of lots of different style films and inspired to when making our own. One film in particular that stood out for me was "The Forest is Red" a feature film making is debut on the screen, was an emotional well shot film about a schizophrenic called Nathan.

Distribution:
Distribution in the film industry is when an individual or an organisation represents your film, trying to get it shown at film festivals and then selling it on to be able to shown in TV, or other media networks. A distributer is an individual at film festivals that chooses the films that will be shown. this is an example of exhibition and distribution, the distributor will watch the films and then choose his favourites and exhibit them at a festival for audiences the view. We saw an example of this at the European Film Festival, the main spokesman at the front, was the distributor, he talked about all the films and why he had chose them and discussed the films in terms of their conventions and the future plans of them, hoping that the film festival would be a starting point for them. 

evaluation

This is our recorded evaluation, we decided to do it in a podcast form as we felt it showed our creative side and allowed us to get across all the information we needed.

feedback evaluation

Feed back by user4290811

This is our second podcast consisting of feedback from peers taking about our film, giving both strengths and weaknesses about it.

Feedback for Final Film

We have received some professional feedback for our film from one of the other media teachers, he has expressed that he likes the idea of our film and likes that we have chosen and followed a certain style of film (film Noir) that not a lot of others did. He commented on our editing and felt that the black and white style that we chose was very effective to to time era we were aiming for with the music linking it as well to the time era.

When discussing what we could do better next time for improvement, he explained that some of our camera shots and edits could of been improved, for example, we cut out certain body parts (cutting out someone's head) and the shot wasn't in the right angle and we lost some of the meaning, to improve this, we will have a look at our film and maybe cut the scene down before the camera error or re-film those specific sections of the film. Another weakness mentioned was that he felt that we rushed the story and should try and slow it down to build tension and not rush through the story, for example, when the hustler realizes he can play snooker and plays well all happened too quickly, he suggested that we should slow that down with a different choice of shots or story to get the full effect of the story and build the tension up as much as possible.

Final Film

Reflection of Work: This is our final film which we have fully edited and added all the music too and made corrections to, in our view going with the feedback given from our sample and first drafts of the film, making it as good as we possibly could. This is the final product of nearly half a year of working, researching and planning. personally feeling that it had paid off and we were able to show off the skills and development that we had made over the last 2 years, using everything we had learnt in both in side and outside of lessons to produce our project.

Facebook Feedback

We uploaded all of our tasked (Film, Poster and Trailer) on to facebook to get feedback from all of our peers,we did this by creating a page allowing people to both comment and like our projects, this went down really well and was successful, getting comments such as :great Film :)" and "I enjoyed watching that". so looking back at these comments was really nice for m,e and lucien and the feed back that we got back was mainly positive so we were happy. Uploading our stuff onto facebook was a good idea as it allowed us to get an even broader range of comments for our film and other tasks.

Trailer

Reflection of Work: This is our first draft of our radio trailer, there are a couple of things that we want to change and feel could be improved, but overall, we felt that our trailer was very effective in using sounds from the film with he voice and the music from added in as well. This was a result of the research that we put in, and that helped and made our creation and creativity a lot easier when producing it. Allowing us to show off all the skills that we had learnt and developed.

poster

Reflection of Work: This is our final poster that we edited in Photoshop, using our own photography and editing the colour and size of the picture. we made the red ball stand out to show the emphasize of the hustling and also to show off our own skills when using Photoshop. I felt that the poster was a success and is good compared to real life posters and fits all the conventions that a trailer should be targeting. This was the result of all our research and planning coming up to deigning, all the sketches and planning, allowing us to have a complete visualization of what we were doing when creating the poster.

Film Poster on bus stop

For Further Advertising, we got our film poster onto local bus stops to make sure our film would get full viewing. Doing this gets our film out into the public for all to see so our target audience can see when our film is coming out.

Trailer Research

Refeltction of work: Looking at these two trailers helped me get some ideas of how to use sound and timing in our trailer, helping us choose what kind of sound we needed and whether we needed certain sound from pour film and the type of music needed in our trailer, we used these two trailers as they were both linked to gambling and were in the same category as our film. Looking at these film trailers gave us further ideas for our on trailer, but most importantly, gave us a full understanding of the conventions that were needed for our own radio trailer. but we had to take into consideration that the trailers we looked at were not radio trailers but we still could see the conventions needed.

Poster Sketch

this was our original sketch of our film poster, we will use this as a rough guide to help us decide and produce our film poster. We found that having this draft of pour poster made creating our poster a lot easier as we could work around the initial ideas made and be able to be creative with what we have and make the poster as good as we can. Looking at our draft, I feel that it was very successful in the fact that it showed a clear view of what the type of theme and genre we were going for. We wanted top make sure that our poster could portray the message without using much text and we felt that it has done that with the use of colours and imagery used.

First Draft

Reflection of work: this was our first draft of our film and from this we have received some further ideas of what we are going at add to it, we are aiming to add more music in and also edit some of the scenes, whether that involves shortening them or even adding a transaction, but overall, we felt that our film for a first draft was successful, but still needs some work. From the feedback and watching the film ourselves, we have learnt a lot of what we have to improve and also what we would do next time. It helped us with our development and for our future filming we are going to refer back to all our plans and other research work to make sure we cover everything.

Ancillary Task 2 (group meeting)

For our second Ancillary task, we decided to go on another route of advertising and produce and radio trailer. During our meeting we made a rough draft of a script for our radio trailer with another page of brainstorms for types of music and effects we would have in the trailer, we will aim to use these notes as a guideline for making our film trailer (radio)

Group Meeting

After re shooting with our new actors, we found that we were able to get more filming done with a lot more quality footage, this is due to our decision to change our actors. Our new actors were more flexible and helped a lot more with behind the scene issues as well such as setting the scene an getting everything sorted.

Overall our second shoot was so much better, s we got all the filming we had set out to done with no problems, and each scene didn't take so long to film, with the 2 new actors being a good decision by us two.

poster creation

Here's me on the design of the poster, me and lucien sat down and talked with brainstorms of what the poster should look like, thinking about the colours and the design, because we needed the poster to fit our theme but, we also came to the conclusion that we didn't want lot of text on the poster, so we had to make sure that the imagery used on the poster was clear enough to help tell the story. the picture shows me working on the poster, using the colours and the designing idea that we were going for. planning to use this as guidelines for our real poster, referring back to it as much as possible.

Creation Progress

Reflection of work: this is a print screen of Final Cut express, showing our progression during the creation of our film, showing, the sound, clips and effects used in our film, this was the main editing part of our film.

ACTOR PROFILE

Here is a basic Profile of our 3 main actors with images of them

Tomas Noad

Age: 17

Height: 5 ft 10

Lewis Fincham:

Age: 17

Height: 5 ft 5

Richard Cartwright:

Age: 17

Height: 6 ft 1

communication

Me and Lucien would communicate through both text and blackberry messenger (bbm) so we could always make sure we both new what was going on and neither of us ever forgot what we were suppose to be doing.

Trailer Script

"I used to be known as the hustler...

going from bar to bar...

playing the game the way i felt it should be played....

but it wasnt all easy sailing, coming to a sudden end...

cos sometimes even the best...

get played"

An Epic Drama staring Tom Noad....

shows the story of a guy, that thought he had it all....

but lost it...

"No Please...

I can get your money back"

In cinemas Summer 2012

This is a rough idea of what we want our script to be for our trailer, we will use this as a guideline for when we are recording the soundtrack. The Italic font in quotation marks shows the quotes from the films that we are planning on using, and the other text shows what the main voice over will be telling the audience. we wanted to use quotes from the film as we felt it engaged more with the audience and told more of the story, getting the attention of the audience to want to come and watch the film.