Winding Up

Below is the link for the evaluation blog. All you need to do is to click on it :-


Evaluation

These are two of the titles we made:-

Video 1

Video 2

Linking the Genre

On our way to developing our product and finalizing it, it seemed incomplete to just conclude it without looking up on other similar products before this (which are professional of course).

http://www.watchthetitles.com/articles/0092-The_Dreamers

This is the first opening title of another film relating to our genre, which is Drama. The opening title is sleek and simple with a consistent pan movement downwards from an iron building, which most probably is the Eiffel tower. What is important here is that the titles have been made elegant due to the iconic tower and the font they have used to name people. Except for that, the font which states "The Dreamers" also denotes simple behavior with no resemblance to anything thrilling or slashing. 

http://www.watchthetitles.com/articles/00125-Taking_Chance

This is the second opening title which was quite interesting to observe than the previous one. Brilliant color contrast, brilliant yet simple effects have been used in this title. It starts by fading titles while on the background layer, the viewer can observer a paper on which something is being written in black ink. The sequence continues with the same theme, but shots in different angles and as well as different properties. The font has been kept simple and most importantly, soft rhythmic music is being played in the background which establishes a connection with the title sequence and helps the audience in interpreting more of the movie. This is where the critical part comes in, no matter how technically fancy the title is, it can not predetermine meanings without the appropriate sound. 

Another set of tools

Basically, I missed something really important in my last post. Here it is.


A set of softwares that we made use of while we were in the process of post production. 


-Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects (Non-linear video editing and motion effects softwares).


-Adobe illustrator and Adobe Photoshop (Respectively, vector and raster graphic designing softwares)


-Sony Vegas Pro (A multi purpose software specialized to be used for sound).


-Xilisoft Video converter.


-Garage Band (A Macintosh based software designed for multiple purposes, used for sound composition).

Conclusively

Here are some of the things which were professionally necessary. 

The Shooting Schedule :- 

01:00:00 PM	:00	Reach at my house.
	:15	Set up the equipment and the props in the room.
	:30	-
	:45	-
02:00:00 PM	:00	Finalizing the mise-en-sene.
	:15	-
	:30	-
	:45	-
03:00:00 PM	:00	-
	:15	-
	:30	Set up the camera and the tripod.
	:45	-
04:00:00 PM	:00	Begin Shooting.
	:15	(Target for the first scene) Alarm clock scene.
	:30	Shower scene commences.
	:45	End scene (mirror scene).
05:00:00 PM	:00	-
	:15	Break
	:30	-
	:45	-
06:00:00 PM	:00	-
	:15	Flash back shots (computer scene)
	:30	Flash back shot (Fired from the job scene)
	:45	Rechecking and taking spare shots just in case. Ending the shoot.

Then we also made a table for the things we bought extra for the shoot. This would hardly be any close to being professional but what we thought was that professionalism has no starting point and no ending point. To be professional, we just have to think like professionals.

Serial No.	Item	Price (Rs.)	Rate	Purpose	Total Cost (Price x Rate)
1	Mini DV Tape	300	2	The base recording tool for our film.	600
2	DVD-R	100	1	To keep a backup for the footage we import.	100
3	Copies of questionnaires	2	250	This was in order for us to conduct our survey on hands.	500
				Total Cost	1200

Reaching the end

Apart from the normal (usual) sources I could dig for my information, I found a book from one of the scrap sellers which is The Home Video Handbook by Stuart Dollin. This book is quite old but yet, somehow useful for beginner film makers and for those who have just stepped into the world of filming and media. 


As this book is old, it has some old basic conventions of how media came into being and then how technology improved covering many aspects of digital film making through a camcorder and also describes the functionality of these things. Much about the old VHS recording system and how sound was then added into the sequence and etc etc. Something which people like me can extract from this book for their benefit is that it tells us how can we improve the sound quality for our video while recording and camera techniques that are close to professional film making. In fact, this book also suggests timings that are good for shooting (such as afternoon is the worst time for shooting because you have very deep shadows) and many more things as well. Truly speaking, this is a great book regarding film making and video production and if anyone has access to this book they should definitely peek inside it.

Location Shots of The Final Film

Here are some of the location shots I tried to capture for the new film and hopefully will give the viewer an understanding of the location from many aspects.


Location 1

Location 2

Actually, I was also experimenting with focus and related camcorder functions in order to check how will the settings affect the quality of the footage. 

In the pictures below, I tried switching between the different white balancing options. I observed that these options also acted as 'tints' to the footage. Luckily, this helped me derive out all the extra light which was disturbing the footage.

Here is how we proceed to the film. We have got 2 story boards, in which both of them are made by us but with certain time intervals and we made it in pairs. What we will do is that we will combine these story boards.

A presage of Achievements

After a long period of confusion and turmoil, we finally reached on our conclusion to create a questionnaire for the audience survey. The survey consists of a total of 7 questions in which almost every question is close-ended and has limited choices. This is because of us limiting ourselves to a specific genre, namely Drama. Hopefully, this survey is to give us a good amount of quantitative data that we can use in order to establish a strong point in our film. Apart from that we have shared the official link on Facebook, which increases the chances of maximum replies. Something really amazing about media is definitely it's link with secondary socialization methods. The final results of the survey would be posted in a day or two. Here is the image of the survey link we finalized and we already got 29 responses, courtesy : Facebook. The 7 questions are :-


- Do you like Drama ?


- What gender would you like to see portraying the main role ?


- Do you like to watch melodrama films ?

- What do you think is the most important part of the film ?


- Should the opening of a drama film include dialogue ?


- What type of mood does a drama film create ?

The 'pre-production' questions are written below :- 

- Did you enjoy the film ?

- Do you want to watch the rest of the movie ?

- Did the film represent the genre Drama ?

- Did the film create enigma or suspense ?

- Did the scenes have connection ?

With their results :-

Here is something else.

This is the link of the preliminary video I worked for. This is not applicable at present because, as earlier posts mention, one of our teammate dropped out of the subject for some of his personal reason and therefore it brought me to a block. So I handed over this video to my only teammate, who is Mohsin Hussein Zubeiri and after that I started working with a group of teammates I actually enjoy working with. The video was shot and edited by me, while Mohsin added the soundtrack, which is basically a song by Linkin Park he gives away without the fear of copyrights.

Secondly, me and my teammate were assigned to design something for a literature festival being held some days ahead and here is what we originally came up with.

This image simply consists of an image I found on the internet and saved, while I had to download the font and I even had to generate some of the parts in 'Nastaliq' (The Native Urdu/Arabic Font). Really, media today heavily depends on the technologies that derive from ideas. For example, the Nastaliq was generated by the 'Character Map' software found ready in almost every version of the famous operating system Windows. Secondly, with just a few clicks you get a bloom of ideas and techniques to make your product strong. Nothing much fancy has been done in this image except for the English font named 'Birth of a Hero' and some blending.

This image might not seem what it looks like. It actually involved more technicality than the previous one. The paper was basically transformed in 3D (which can be quite obvious).

We used the conventional Adobe Photoshop for this purpose. This helped me learn more of how technology helps media and also how expectations regarding representations are set. For example, the ink pot and the feather along with the textured rugged paper is what will make the audience expect that the subject is related to something old, valued and antique, which is literature. What we find difficult to do on a paper, we find easy to do by computing. More over, this just keeps spreading.

Hopefully, the film would be finalized on Friday and some of the shots will be available on the post (just for a sneak peak into the drama title) on the next day.