RECORDING THE VOICEOVERS

When we met up to film on the 27^th we found that we also had time to record the actors reading the letter for the voiceovers. We did this using my iPhone and Catherine’s too. We did this as we found that the microphone on the iPhone gave us a very high quality sound and was also convenient for us as a group. This picture to the left is the software that we used on the iPhone. We planned on making Becka read out the first paragraph and then blending in Catherine’s voice so that it made it sound as though the letter was coming from Catherine’s character. At the end we then planned the voiceover to blend from Catherine’s voice back to Becka’s voice. Doing this proved to be quite difficult as we had to record the two voices blending into each other, this took quite a long time as it was difficult for the actors to sync their voices. It took a couple of practices in order for us to produce an outcome that we were all happy with. We will then edit these into the opening sequence when we next meet up for editing.

THE FINISHED WALL

Here is a picture of the finished wall that we filmed for our opening sequence. We found it quite difficult to put all of these photos together as it was quite time consuming and difficult to edit. With the photographs where Catherine is ill we felt that it would be the easiest option to Photoshop these pictures, but this proved difficult, which is explained in the post below. However, we felt that our final decision to take the pictures of Catherine with her headscarf on was more realistic of a teenage girl. Doing this also made it easier for our group as we don’t have to worry about Photoshopping photos which will be time consuming and might not turn out the way we had wanted.

FIFTH MEETING FOR FILMING

On Wednesday 28^th March me, Becka, Abbi and Catherine met up after school to finish filming our opening sequence. We needed Catherine to be there for a couple of reasons. The first one being that we needed to film her walking up to the house to show that the film has gone back in time to a year before, as Catherine will be healthy in this part of the footage. The second reason is so that we could quickly take a couple more photographs of her when she becomes more ill. This meeting was extremely successful as we finished all of our filming for our opening sequence.

We had originally planned to use Photoshop to make the non-stereotypical teenager look bald as this would give the audience a big clue as to what her illness is. However, this proved to be difficult as none of us had a particularly good idea on how to use Photoshop, we tried to look at videos on Youtube but this didn’t provide us with much help. Abbi then told us that one of her relatives knew how to work Photoshop and said that he could edit the pictures for us. Unfortunately, Abbi’s relative was in the end unable to do the pictures because of other personal issues. As we knew nobody else who could work Photoshop in the time we needed, we decided to make other arrangements and take more photographs of Catherine with a headscarf on. We felt that this might be a little more appropriate as we felt that a teenager in this position would feel more comfortable with her head covered when she is around friends. So, we felt that this was more authentic. These pictures show me taking photographs of the two actors in different areas of Becka’s garden. We decided to take pictures in Becka’s garden as we felt that it was very picturesque and would look a lot more effective. As it was also sunny we could use the light to our advantage by taking pictures from different angles to change the lighting on the camera to make it look as though the pictures were taken at different times of the day.

Before taking pictures, we had to make sure that Catherine’s head scarf looked realistic and we had to make sure that all hair was covered. We did this by scraping all of Catherine’s hair back into a tight ponytail. We then wrapped the head scarf around her head and tied it back and used small hair grips to stick down any loose hairs and to make sure that the headscarf was firmly on and wouldn’t come off when taking pictures. When we had finished we felt that Catherine looked as though she was ill and enhanced this appearance by making herself look weak. As Catherine is already a thin person, her appearance looked more realistic when she tried to make herself look weak.

When we had taken all of the photos we printed them out and stuck them on the wall to fill in the gap. We then filmed all of the bits we needed to and completed filming!

CHANGING CATHERINE’S APPEARANCE

When making Catherine look as though she has lost her hair, we initially wanted to Photoshop her appearance to make it look as though she had no hair. Abbi told us that one of her relatives could do it and would have it done as soon as possible. Unfortunately this didn’t happen due to personal reasons. So we had to come up with another plan. As we are scheduled to take the last photos tomorrow when Catherine becomes ill, we had to come up with a new idea quite quickly. I had the idea of just using a head scarf to make her look like she’d lost her hair. I felt that this would be a little more realistic as it is unlikely that the character would want to have pictures taken of her when she looks most like a cancer patient. I felt that it would make more sense to have pictures of Catherine wearing a head scarf as it would reflect how a normal cancer patient would behave. We will do this by taking inspiration from My Sister’s Keeper when the ill character is wearing a head scarf. We feel that this will be effective and will make our media product look more effective.

FOURTH MEETING FOR FILMING

On 27^th March me and Becka met up at her house to do a little more filming. Unfortunately, Abbi was again unable to film with us because she was out for a meal with her work mates. This wasn’t particularly a problem though, as me and Becka knew what was needed to be done and how to do it. We had originally planned to finish filming today but couldn’t because we did not have all the pictures ready, so we will have to finish when we meet up again tomorrow.

During this time when we were filming, we achieved quite a lot. We filmed the shots of the wall that we were able to, and filmed various shots of Becka’s character crying. At the beginning of our opening sequence we wanted to have a still shot of various items in the bedroom which would play in time with the music. We originally thought we’d film just the teacup, but before filming me and Becka discussed filming more than one still shot of items in the room that were quite girlie. We found a couple of items that were quite feminine. We found a headband that had flowers on it and felt that it looked quite feminine. We also did a still shot of the fairy lights and a ribbon around Becka’s bedpost as we thought that this was quite girlie as well. We also re-shot the mug still shot as we felt that the shot needed to be more focussed on the teacup and we felt that the other shot we did was too far away. Doing this will contribute towards the final piece as it will emphasise the main characters interests and show that she is a feminine character who goes along with the stereotype of a teenage girl. The pictures below show the items that we filmed for these still shots

As the weather was extremely sunny this week, this meant that we could film for longer with a lot of light as the clocks also went back recently, so this allows us to film for longer without having to worry about it getting dark. However, one problem with lighting could be with how bright it was. As this lighting didn’t exactly match the lighting in other pieces of footage. In order to overcome this problem, we will have to alter the lighting using Final Cut Pro in the editing suite at school.

These pictures show the various angles we used when filming our main character crying. We decided on doing close ups of her face as we felt that these would reflect the most emotion, as close ups are stereotypically used to convey some sort of emotion. The camera we are using is also very high definition so we felt that if we used a close up we would be able to really focus on the characters eyes and really exaggerate the emotion that is felt in this opening sequence.

After yesterdays attempts with trying to make Becka cry we had to try and come up with a different way of making her look as though she had been crying. During a free, I researched different ways of making people look as though they had been crying. One of the most popular suggestions was to rub a small amount of Tiger Balm underneath the eyes, however Becka didn’t have any of this. We then found out that another alternative to this is Vicks VapoRub. As Becka had some of this in her house, we gave it a try and it worked. The VapoRub made Becka’s eyes red and watery which were made to look like tears. This will make the opening sequence much more effective as it will portray how a teenager would behave if her best friend had just died which will make the piece a lot more emotional for the audience. We also tried to emphasise her tears by applying a little mascara to her bottom eyelashes so that when Becka began crying, the makeup would run a little bit

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EDITING – PART 2 & 3

As there is not much time left to put together our opening sequence, Abbi decided it would be a good idea to begin editing the footage together during one of her frees as the clips had been converted from Friday. When she began editing she had to take some time getting used to the different facilities that are available on the Mac. After using these and getting used to the Macs she felt a lot more comfortable and confident with what she was doing. She managed to put together 22 seconds worth of the footage which was a very successful beginning and was a good achievement for the first time for editing. The only problem that occurred during editing was that the overall piece didn’t flow as well as we wanted and found that it was quite jerky. To overcome this problem Abbi cut and edited these shots in order to make the piece flow a little more fluidly.

During a media lesson me, Abbi and Becka went into the editing suite to look at the editing that Abbi had done on Monday. In this lesson we added some more footage in and talked about what else we needed for filming. We talked about when we wanted the music to start in the opening sequence and when we wanted different shots to appear. We all felt that we wanted the teacup to appear on the screen in time with the music as this would make it more effective. We also felt that we wanted more items to be filmed, so this will be done tonight when me and Becka meet up to do more, and hopefully finish filming. I believe that this lesson was spent well as we all have a clear idea of what we want to achieve and how to achieve it.

PROBLEMS WITH EDITING

On 23rd March Abbi and I had planned to begin editing our footage for our opening sequence. We uploaded the footage onto Abbi’s area on the iMacs but found that we couldn’t import the videos onto the software that will be used for editing, which is Final Cut. Although the videos were in the correct format, they were not working on the Macs. When we tried to view the video, the picture wasn’t visible but the sound was. After asking Michael, the supervisor he recommended that we go to the IT technicians and have our videos converted to a different format. This took the rest of the day to finish so while we were waiting we began the editing process by importing the Film4 ident and inserting the soundtrack that we wished to use. Although we did not begin putting our footage together we did make a start which will ultimately save us time. And next lesson we will begin editing our footage together to make our opening sequence.

EMAILING 14TH FLOOR RECORDS

As we want to use ‘Skinny Love’ by Birdy as our soundtrack we felt that we should email the record company so that we could have permission to use it as we didn’t want to get into trouble with any form of plagiarism. We had to first research the record label that Birdy belonged to and found out that it was ‘14^th Floor Records’ who has signed bands such as, Biffy Clyro and The Wombats. The picture below shows what we emailed the company:

SECOND AND THIRD MEETING FOR FILMING

On 22^nd March me, Abbi and Becka left school early and made our way back to Becka’s house to do the majority of our filming. We left school at 1.30 when we had media which allowed us to have more time to film our opening sequence before the lighting changed. We filmed parts such as the character looking through a box looking for the letter and pulling out the letter and beginning to read it. We also tried to film the pictures that were up on the wall; however this was quite difficult as we found that the camera was quite shaky and jerked a lot when we wanted calm, fluid movements with the camera. However, after researching it was found that you can easily solve this problem by placing an elastic band looped around the handle on the tripod that allows you to pan and tilt the camera which will ultimately get rid of the jerky and shaky movements. We will do this when we next meet up for filming and when we have completely prepared all of the photographs. Unfortunately, Abbi had to leave me and Becka at around 4.30 because she had to go to work again. When she left me and Becka carried on filming the character pulling the letter out of the box. We also thought we could try and film the character crying as she was reading a letter; however, this was quite difficult as Becka found it quite difficult to make it look as though she was crying. We tried a couple of methods to make it look as though she was crying. We first started by getting an onion out of Becka’s kitchen and cutting and breaking it up in order to make Becka look as though she has been crying, unfortunately this did not work so Becka tried rubbing her eyes and placing water on her face so it looked as though she was crying, this didn’t work out either so we decided not to film this part and rethink our strategies. This meeting was extremely successful in my eyes as we managed to film the majority of our opening sequence and can now begin to edit our opening sequence together.

Becka and Abbi met up the day before to do filming, however not much was achieved as we were not fully prepared to do the filming of the pictures. They encountered the same problem with the camera jerking and shaking and found it difficult to film, and this was when Becka and Abbi found the elastic band idea. They also filmed the girl walking into the room again as when me and Becka did it before on the 17^th we did not film her slamming the door. They decided that it would be more effective to film her slamming the door as this will reflect on her emotions.

We also converted our soundtrack to an mp3 format so now when editing we can add the music to run with the rest of the opening sequence.

CHANGING COSTUME

During our first day of filming we thought that the costume that we originally wanted Becka to wear during filming was too formal for her to wear in her own house. We originally wanted her to wear a black dress and tights but when we got prepared for filming we felt that it was too formal for her to wear casually. We thought about other possibilties for costume that would still make her look fashionable and feminine.

We decided on this costume as it looks fashionable as jeans are very popular with young people in general and the plain white t-shirt is still casual. The way the shirt and jeans are styled are also quite feminine as they’re quite tight fitting as opposed to a loose fitting t-shirt which is most associated with males which is quite masculine. The way that Becka wears this costume still allows her to look feminine and fashionable as well as casual.