Evaluation - Marty Leggatt

Our preliminary task was to film a conversation between two people in the correct way to excecute the 180 degree rule. Our conversation was between two friends that were planning to get there own back on a rival football gang, again Josh played the part of the second actor. As it was filmed inside we didnt need to worry about lighting as the ceiling lights gave a natural bright light. We filmed from 3 different angles, 2 from behind each actors shoulders and a third from in the middle of the room between the two actors, we also added insert shots and extreme close ups.

Our main task in our media coursework was to produce an opening sequence for a film, i worked with Gareth and we chose the genre of horror to do this sequence on. Throughout the work we didnt really encounter any major problems, the first minor hick up we had was finding people to appear in our film as only 1 of us could act in it because of the other having to be filming it, in this instance i was filming. After drafting in Josh to be the main antagonist we had all of our cast sorted, then began the filming, we had to fit all the filming for 1 day in around a 45 minute time period because of the fading light, and we needed it be getting dark to fit in to the atmosphere of our opening sequence. All the lighting came out very well in the final cut of the film so this never really caused a problem, one improvement we could of made concerning this would have been to carefully plan our time to fit around the lighting as we filmed more on a different day and the light wasnt exactly the same but did not cause much of a problem.

Our aim for the film was to attract a mainly male adult audience as these are commonly more drawn to the genre of film we were creating, to achieve this we put in all the conventions of most 15+ rated horror films, such as the creepy atmospheric music and a frightening enigma. I learnt quite alot while constructing the sequence, as we were using Apple Mac's which i havnt oftenly previously used it took a bit of getting used to, but i figured out a lot of handy techniques for editing film on them, some of these include diffetent types of cuts and creating music on garage band. We had various drafts of our opening sequence, we eventually settled on only using the first minute of our film, cutting in when Gareth enters the house, we decided to do this as its a good cut off point to enter the titles and then carry on with the rest of the film. We got very positive feedback from the class for our opening sequence so i am very happy with the way it turned out and look forward to future filming. One of the most positive points about our piece was the non digetic sound we created on garage band. We made it dark and atmospheric, to start with we had quite fast paced music but we decided that it would be better to slow it down and make it eary. The feedback we got from the class when we first showed them our film suggested that we should take out the later scenes of our peice as they could find some technical faults with some camera work and access noise. However we didnt take it out just for the faults, we also felt ourselves that the piece would work better as just the 55 seconds opening rather than the 1 minute 50 seconds opening. One thing they liked alot was the insert shot we used of a broken bottle when the credits are still rolling. We achieved this shot by placing the camera low to the ground and filming the protagonists legs with the bottle on the ground to only capture these two things in the scene.