Donna Massam

Betrayal

On the whole i am very happy with my edit of our groups one-shot movie. We had a lot of fun filming the footage and i really enjoyed writing the script. This project has influenced me a lot and has increased my interest in audio/visual on a whole

Obviously before we could film our footage we had to prepare the details for the script, dialogue, storyboard, the composition, the style.

The first thing we did was decide on the roles each of our group members would obtain. (below)

Donna: Scripting and character profiles
Hayley: Storyboarding and Lighting assistance
Cliff: Lighting
Tom: Booking equipment and studio and Camera duty

After we all agreed on the basic storyline of what we wanted to happen i filled in all the details for the rest. I included character profiles on my blog as i wanted to give others who watched the movie some idea of the characters backgrounds (although when filming we took Hayley's character out mainly because of film timing issues).
From the basic idea which was to have one guy standing there with his friends stood round him whilst the main guy talks about them and how they left his life, I produced the dialogue, what he would say about each person. For this i decided he would say very little but these little sentences would explain a lot to the viewer giving them a good idea about what is going on.
(All of the details above are explained in previous blog posts)

Tom then booked out a studio and a camera and the lights out ready for us to film the movie.

Movie Strengths:

• It includes narrative, expressing to the viewer a story in such a little time and using little dialogue.
  
• The credits at the end, with the use of the sad music i included here, it a) fits into the characteristics of the storyline and b) creates an atmosphere after the viewer has watched the movie.
• The title screen, i like this feature to the movie, i have use a bold and sharp text as i felt that this helped to introduce the characteristic of the storyline.
• The dialogue, the spoken dialogue is very clear, we chose cliff originally to be the main character as he has the most strongest and deepest voice, meaning that the camcorder would pick it up most clearly without distorting the sound or making it hard for the viewer to hear what is being said.
  

Movie Weaknesses:

• The footage includes a lot of negative space on the left side of the screen, remembering from previous seminars this is bad to include due to the framing and how the viewer sees the movie. Our reasons for filming it this way is because with the darkness it helps to create a loneliness and alone atmosphere. Also with me and tom being on screen then removing ourselves off screen it was hard to avoid as this was how we wanted the movie to look.
• There are a few camera issues which distorted the quality of the movie in certain places, for example the footage blurs around half way.
• I feel that the lighting could be improved for one me and tom are lite up as well as i thought we would have been once we put the footage onto the computer.
  
• The sound at the end of the movie, after showing a few friends my movie, they noted to me that the sound in which we had intended to be of a body dropping to the floor, they thought that it sounded more like a gun shot.
  

Movie Features:

Audio: The first sound that is included in the movie is the spoken dialogue, this is simply Cliff telling the story from the script to the camera, this was recorded using the camera itself. I feel that the camcorder picked up this really well. The other sound included in the movie is the music included at the end of the movie for the credits. I included this as i wanted to give the movie a 'realistic movie feel' (as films generally include sound for the credits). I used this particular sound loop as it holds characteristics that the movie holds, sad and slow which then gives off a sad atmosphere.

Filming: We didn't use any camera effects on our movie we just simply adjusted the positioning of the camera to how we wanted the characters to be placed within the frame. Hayley pressed the record button the simply pressed the record button again after we had finished the filming.

Lighting: This was one of the main features that we wanted to include in our movie as it was used to create an atmosphere to how the main character was feeling. We spent quite a lot of time adjusting the light to how we wanted it, firstly using both a key light and a fill light but we found that using them both created a lot of shadows that we didn't want, so we experimented in using just the key light and found that this worked better for us, as it lite cliff up well and reflected onto me and tom (although when we put it onto the computer if found that this hadn't worked as well as we thought.

Added Features/Effects: As its a one-shot movie, this means that no editing work is to be done to the movie footage itself the only thing we were able to add was the title for the beginning and the credits for the end. I have explained these two features above. The only edit that i did do to the actual footage was adjust the contrast slightly, this was because the light hadn't worked as well as we expected.