Animatic

Diana has been producing this animatic for ages and here are her thoughts on her time making the animatic:

'Here is the animatic I completed during filming using scanned-in versions of the storyboards, later augmented with the lyrics version of our soundtrack. It took a rather long time to cut away individual panels from each board using Photoshop, and some of them ended up in Bitmap format as opposed to a normal image, but this would have taken too long to amend, considering the imminence of the deadline. The entire process did, however, allow me to re-familiarise myself with this older version of the software.

It's interesting to see that, even while allowing only around 2 seconds for each shot, if we had stuck to our storyboard our film still would have been at least half a minute longer than the time limit. In the end, there are several shots (such as the point of view one with the tail of the hat obscuring half the screen) which I'm sad we had to get rid of, but, compared to the final product, it's obvious that these were necessary to remove, as the overall fluency of our work improved greatly as a result. '

DY

Rough Cut Edit 2

The cut shown above will be one of our last edits before we are finished as we had recently managed to cut it down from around 5 mins shown in our last edit to around 2.40 in this one. In our last lesson we again managed to cut it down even further down to the length we want at around 2 mins, this edit will need some fine tuning but it is extremely close to what we want. Both Diana and myself are both amazed at how much we have been able to cut down, as we never thought we were going to be able to cut off 30 seconds let alone 3 minutes. But so far it has been enjoyable, although slightly frustrating when you have to cut some of your favourite shots as although they look nice you eventually come to terms with the fact that they are pointless and take up far too long. We still have to do several things most notably the soundtrack which should be recorded over the following days. The graphics we also need to add, although that shouldn't take any time at all. Hopefully we also have some time to mess around slightly with the colour in our opening as that was something that we were planning to do and looking forward too.

AF/DY

Rough Cut Edit

This is the first cut for our media coursework. As you can clearly see from watching it is very rough as we have only began to edit it, so far we have taken out all the sections that we 100% know won't be in our final piece (the '3, 2, 1 Action' at the start of every take) and then we have put all the shots that we are going to use in the right order, this doesn't mean that every shot shown will end up in the final piece. The most obvious flaw with this cut is the length as it is around 4 mins 30 without our ident added and needs to be 2 mins with the ident. This is obviously a big problem but one which can be easily solved as we are now going through it and cutting it down as much as we can. As this is also only the rough cut we also haven't added or made the music yet, this is something we need to do soon as we need to make sure the picture fits in with the sound.

So far I am enjoying editing although it can be fairly repetitive at times and a struggle to do. Though all things considered I am very happy with how the editing is going at the moment and have several ideas about how we can improve and cut down our opening, although I'm fairly certain Diana isn't going to like my ideas very much as she seems to love every shot and does not want to take any out. I think eventually she will realise however that a couple of her favourite shots may have to go. One of the things I am happiest with the editing so far is how well we have managed to sync up the audio from the recorder to the video (the parts synced up at towards the end in the alleyway) as I think we have managed to get it perfectly synced, which I thought was going to be a struggle but just took a little bit of fiddling.

AF/DY

Filming: Session 3

This time filming went nearly perfect, with only one small hiccup that was easily fixed and four very cold people. We decided to meet outside Piccadilly Circus at 11.00, I can't speak for anyone else but for me the journey wasn't too bad, as I just had to take one bus for around an hour , once I arrived I waited for everyone else. I was also carrying all the equipment but as I was on the bus and had very little walking to do, it worked out alright. Weirdly they all decided to trust me with the directions again, which was strange seeing as everyone who knows me knows my directions aren't great, shown by our troubles filming the weekend previous, but I prepared before hand and knew exactly where we needed to go and so I managed to get us there with no trouble.

Then once we arrived at the location, we discovered the one hiccup, the battery was running low. Looking back down I think I forgot to turn on the plug as I don't remember seeing a red light appear. This however didn't turn into a huge problem though as even though it ran out while we were filming our final 10 seconds it gave us a brilliant opportunity to go inside a shop and take a break while it was charging and then finish filming after. The only other difficulty that came up consisted of the dreadful weather, as that day it was freezing cold and around three quarters through our filming it started to pour. Most of us were alright as we were wrapped up warm although still slightly cold from the wind but I felt awful for Clara whose costume consisted of only one thin layer and so she was extremely cold throughout the filming and went every we made a cut quickly ran to put her coat back on

For the first time that day I also used the sound equipment, which we hadn't used previously. I think that the recordings worked extremely well, as you can hear all the dialogue clearly as it was very easy to use. Other than those two hiccups the filming went perfectly with us getting all the shots needed and it not taking too long. Looking back at the footage now we are both very happy with it as you can't see the rain at all coming now at all, my one worry with the footage.

And so now all our filming is complete, so we now need to put it all together and cut it down.

AF