Evaluation - Part 1

In the brief we were told that we had to produce a two minute opening sequence to film four for a BSR film targeted at 16-24 year olds. We had to conform to the typical conventions of BSR films and to meet film fours audience expectations while having to create everything from scratch to keep costs low.

I think that we met the brief quite well in terms of originality and trying to meet film fours audience expectations. We conformed to the BSR style in a lot of ways, for example BSR films are very gritty and due to a low budget aren't very polished in terms of camera language, ours followed the same style being that the entirety if the film was filmed handheld which gave that shaky effect to shots especially during the first  360 tracks between 00:07 - 00:24. Also I think that we met the brief in terms of the target audience because it was set to be shown to a target audience of 16-24 year olds and we looked to use characters who were clearly between those ages and make the production more relatable in that sense.

Our title is 'CLASS A' which instantly points in the direction of the connotation of drugs and ties in with our narrative quite well, our narrative is basically a boy who gets in with the wrong crowd, starts dealing drugs, he sees how drugs can effect people, he tries to get out of it and is willing to do anything to do so. So 'CLASS A' I think is a suitable title for this production because the narrative itself revolves around drugs.

I think that this opening would set up the rest of the film quite well due to the fact that we have used a smash mouth opening, this just means that we have created a few different possible outcomes for the rest of the film just based on the opening alone, also the coda after the title is like a red herring for the audience so continuing the rest of the narrative. For example in the coda two of the characters were two characters that were in the main part of the opening which means we could add a back story of how he got involved with drugs.

In terms of themes the opening clearly sets up a few such as; drugs, violence, corruption of youth. The drugs were clearly denoted when the boss character pulled out thee bags of cocaine, violence was implied with the gun and corruption of youth also ties in with the previous two themes because 16/17 year olds shouldn't be able to get around drugs and guns as easily as they are.

Production log 18

I think we started on a positive note when we first started planning and the initial filmin of the production but eventually we became complacent and started to slack in terms of what we could actually produce but in the end we pulled it together and i think it came out quite well.

I think i contributed quite well to my production, i filmed a half and Niraj filmed the other half  final piece though the directing was also done by him and also i took charge of the editing. 

I think my group functioned okay, except for Jay sometimes due to the fact that he had work as a factor which limited us to certain days of filming which didn't always work out because our schedule was based around our actors because they weren't part of our group.

I think something that worked very well was when we did get to filming we did everything quite quickly and effectively. There were't any arguments during the filming process either because we knew what we had to do and just got on with it. I think in the future we would have to be much more prepared for worst case situations and try to do things to our best standard first time round

Production log 17

Sound editing wasn't a major issue but we found that on the version of imovie that we were using didn't have the option to duck the sound to give sound perspective so i have to use two tracks where one was quieter and the other was louder. They overlapped so when the protagonist got closer the music got louder. That was the only real issue we found.

Production log 16

Due to the fact that we re-filmed many more times than that was intented, we didnt get a major amount of time to edit our final piece. We stayed and edited everything on the deadline though we didn't get as much time as we would have liked to edit, i think we did quite well in terms of putting everything together.

We found that the feedback given helped and allowed us to createore tension. The feedback was that we had to many cuts in between shots and it took away from the tension. Taking a few shots out added to the continuity and i think made it a lot better.

JNK - Class A

Production log 15

A lot of issues came up this week such as the factors we had to deal with while re-filming if we chose to re-film we'd have to film to the whole opening again. This wasn't too bad because we already knew what we wanted the production to look like, we just had to adjust a few things to add to the fluidity of the production.

Eventually we re-filmed the opening three times after though this became a set back to our schedule this was also a big help because we could then compare footage from past takes and see what worked best and chose what we had from our video library to make the final cut.

Production Log 13/14

This week we have had quite a few issues when it came to filming such as weather conditions, filming in tight spaces and not being able to get a correct angle on shots, and keeping to our production schedule was quite difficult to keep to because initially it was built up around our actors and a problem we encountered was that our protagonist wasn't in our group and couldn't be available all the time. 

After filming we watched through the shots and thought that it alll would fit together onced edited, we allocated the first day of filning to filming the first half and the second day of filming we finished off our initial shots of the whole production. 

We found while shooting that we had to alter some shots somewhat, due to the restriction of space in the room we found that some of our initial shots had to be changed to make it more effective.