Conclusion

I have met most of my brief for my although me and my group had to make some changes. We did create a new fiction film with the opening titles and the duration was just over 2 minutes. We came up with a original script and storyboard and all the video and audio material was originally produced by us.

The changes are that we worked in a group of three rather than four as one of the group members (Reyhan) left Haringey Sixth Form to study somewhere else, during the time we were filming. So we had to cut her out as she was one of the characters in our film and was not willing to be part of it no more. We ended up changing a storyboard and script as we changed our initial idea which was that Oraldo buys drugs from Dahir and is unable to pay him back, therefore Oraldo's girlfriend (Reyhan) gets kidnapped.

We changed it to a story about two best friends who get into a life of crime, drugs and dirty money. Eventually Dahir's greed betrays his friendship with Oraldo. Oraldo borrows money of Dahir but wen he doesn't pay him back, Dahir tricks him into coming with him to his house and shoots his own best friend.

The responses from our peers were quite positive as they liked the story and editing of most parts of the film. In the real world I think our film would be less successful as our peers understand how much work and time went into the making of the film and therefore are more symphatetic towards our work. I think the real world would less understanding and like the story and some of the scenes, but see a lot of mistakes within the scenes, filming and characters.

It could be argued that our film was not the best of all films, but I think the story was interesting. It shows friendship, betrayal, crime, money and everyday life. These themes are all very relate able to people and this may draw them in as an audience. My thing about the film is the "voice over", we wrote down a little script and Dahir went into the studio and it got recorded, then we learned how to put that into our film using final cut. There were some troubles with the editing as it did not have as much continuity, one scene cuts to another and this may be a bit confusing to the audience. We also did not leave enough time to edit as we filmed once and we had to film a lot of the scenes again. If I could change something I would definitely change the fact that we did not leave enough time for the editing because if we did we could have filmed anything that did not have continuity over.

Looking back from the beginning of the school year up untill now, I myself can realise how much I have learned during all my media classes. I analyse film in my head whilst watching without realising im doing it. I am now fully able to work a camera on my own without any directions as I did all the filming for our production. I also did most of the editing, but had both of my group members present so that I did not do anything they did not want me to. When editing I would change things and then ask my group members what they thought and we would then all together talk about what did not make sense and what we should do to change this. I brought ideas and when I went home I would go and think about how to do certain scence's or how to change other things within the film. My abilities to make a film and edit it are of average level, as I have obviously not learned everything there is to learn, but I am satisfied with the amount I know now and the overall effort I have put into the group work.

Audience types

Our audience is anyone over the age of 15 as it the movie includes violence, crime and drugs. Children aged under this age may not understand it the same way adults or older children understand it and it can also be confusing and too violent for their age.

Mainstream film: Defined as commercial films that have a wide release and play in first run theatres. Being sold at popular stores or general stored may also be an indicator.
Cult film: Acquires a highly devoted but specific group of audience, often fail to achieve fame outside of the small fan base.
Subversive: Intending or serving to subvert
Alternative: Does not fit into what is considered a standard film.

Our film is a mainstream film as it is a quite typical drama/crime story about drug dealing, life on the streets and the importance of money. It is also very commercial and it is the type of movie that gets sold in a store such as blockbusters, which sells a lot of mainstream films.

Personal role

My personal role within the group was to film the scenes. Within our group we would discuss where we could film our scenes, how our characters should be dressed, in what kind of position the characters should standing (body language) and also what shots we should use for the specific scene we are filming. My role mainly was to film and I have done most of the editing, but when editing the other two members the group would be sitting beside me and we would decide on which scenes to keep, which ones to cut out when to fade, how the writing should look/the colour of the writing.

There have been a couple of disagreements withing the group things such as; choice of dialogue, locations and dress code but at the end we would compromise and come up with something which we all agreed on. I have learned a lot about working with a group, as it makes things easy because you divide the workload, but also you have to all equally listen to each other. For example I thought we should film one of the scenes inside the Fish&chips shop but the other two disagreed and said we should film them coming out of the shop, this established where they came from and showed they were going somewhere. At first we wanted to film most of our scenes during the course of the evening as this may built up more tension for the audience but we later on decided that it was better to just film during our lesson times otherwise we would have less time to film and everything is more visible during the day.

Film titles should include: distribution company (e.g. Warner Brothers, this gets the film out there and this cmpany funds the film), production company (produce the film), a film by (could also say directed by, their original idea), main star, film title (appears before the film starts), editor, executive producer, producer, writer. The colour of our titles are green and we made it bold we kept it simple. We decided to go for the more simple font as our movie hasn't got too many complicating issues. The reason why we decided on the colour green for our titles is because it is the colour of money and our film is called "Money Matters" showing the audience that the film is money orientated as everything relates back to money. We did not use alot of music in our film as there is alot of dialogue and we also did a voice over, which is one of the two characters telling his side of the story, this makes the audience emphasise with him eventhough he is the "bad guy" as he kills his best friend. The only piece of music we used was during the non dialogue scenes which was two. We used a fast upbeat music, which represents how everything in life changes and goes quite quick, at the end we would fade out the music to hear to dialogue or as the scene changes the music would have to stop as the characters would exchange a few lines of dialogue.

All films must have credits by screen guild (authorise whether the film can be distributed or not), requirements at the beginning and end of films.

Camera, filming,editing & technical accounts

Our technician gave the class a training class on how to use a sony camcorder, tripod and how to edit. We got taught the basics of how to insert the tape, zoom, forward/rewind, play back, focus and blur the background. We also got thought how to edit after uploading our footage.

We learned things such as, effects such as fade/dissolve, adding text using final cut pro express. This is a programme used to edit a film and this will be what the audience sees rather than the untouched footage.

When we got taught about the basics it all starts to make scene and begins to become more easy, but you would really need to understand the basics to be able to do more things with the camera. When filming we also learned that when using the tripod we could do still shots, but when filming a dialogue where two of the characters are walking and talking you will have to follow with the camera in hand, but this m

ay make it shaky. I also learned a lot of different things when using final cut such as; cutting scenes, fast forwarding/slow motion, fade, blur, changing colours within the scene, putting music into the scene and voice over.

The locations we used in our film were; an estate near college, back roads/main streets and we did a shot outside our college, The reason why we choose these locations were because it was easier to just film around and near our college and it was also not too busy, this meant we could film there without being disturbed and also it fitted in with our story .

We started of with a lot of time, but towards the last two weeks we really felt the pressure as we realised we still had a lot of scenes to shoot, therefore we decided to cut out some part of our story and change it around so that we had to film less and we had more time for editing. We decided to cut our Oraldo's girlfriend Reyhan as she left College to study somewhere else. We therefore had to change around a couple of things, but we kept the main point in the story which was the fact that Oraldo owed Dahir money and he was willing to do anything to get the money back.

We also had a problem with the weather as we would begin filming and wanting to finish the scene the next day it would be raining or even snowing, which would then mess up the mis-en-scene (which is everyting within the scene except for sound). We would also start filming and then people who were in the background would not be there later on, which also confuses the audience. There was also a problem with sound as we would film after school and alot of cars would be driving past which would make it hard to hear the dialogue.

Scripts, Storyboards & Synopsis

Before our filming we had to produce a script, storyboard and also a synopsis.

A script is ultimately an aspiration towards making a film. A page of script roughly equals to a minute of screen time. When writing the script we used New Courier size 12, this is a fixed-width font which is supposed to make it easier to read. There are different key terms in screen writing;scene (these are the different scenes within the screenplay this can also be defined as a unit of dramatic action), slug line (information about the location and whether it is day or night),scene directions (descriptions of the characters actions and events), character cue (name of the character who speaks), actor direction (used to describe the way or who they speak to) and dialogue (what the character says).

Before writing our script we had to have some sort of idea of what our story what about so therefore we wrote a one page synopsis. The one page synopsis deals with who, what and how, but also establishes the other major characters and their lines of conflict. The key element of any synopsis is a clear indication of the story's structure that is how the story begins, develops and ends.

My initial script:

We also had to draw a storyboard which would give us ideas of where to film certain scenes, position of characters and what camera shot to use when filming. storyboards are graphic organisers such as series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence.