In our film we tried to use the best technology available to use make the high quality product that we could. We used the Sony HD1000 Camera for the most part and we also used my Nikon D5100 DSLR for some of the shots as a second camera angle to reduce the amount of time we had to spend filming as we didn’t have to waste time setting up one camera for multiple shots and retakes. The quality of the two cameras are both very similar and they are both full HD and have the same frame rates. Last year during our Preliminary Task and our main project we used a Sony Handycam which was HD quality but not to the same standard at the HD1000 and the D5100 we used this year, this means that we have superior footage to that of last year to enable us to create a more professional looking product. The Sony is an Industry Standard product for Film and Television and recently more and more filmmakers have started using DSLR cameras because of the great quality, and also the size compared to the larger cameras.
This year we have also had more ease in editing due to our practice last year. We were able to experiment with using effects layers for things such as the ‘Rec’ text and the slowing down of frames to make certain angles look like CCTV footage.
We also used Gaussian Blur on the title sequence part to keep the focus on the title and just have the timelapse as a lesser item.
We have also progressed in the way we incorporate audio into our films, in our preliminary task and our introduction to a film we mainly used the audio captured from the camera microphone and we used a Zoom recorder for the voice over if necessary. This year we used ProTools HD to record the voiceover in one of colleges industry standard recording studios and used a Neumann U87Ai microphone which is often used for vocal track in some of the best studios in the world. This gave us crystal clear sounding recordings for the voiceover where the Zoom did not give us that quality. We also used ProTools to add effects to the audio such as reverb and delay to make the audio sound more natural, ProTools was also used to create our Radio Trailer for both recording the voice over and cutting and inputting all the other audio clips.
When filming/editing we constantly went over the scenes to make sure that continuity was in place or was the best it could be and not noticeable. When filming in Callums bedroom we made sure that things on his desk were in the same place as the last time we filmed there by going back over the footage and putting things back in their place.
When we were filming panning shots we set up the tripod to make sure that we got the smoothest panning shots that we could get with the equipment used.
In our film we didn’t really use conventional narrative because there isn’t any that applied to our story since our film is meant to be a documentary which doesn’t have a story that gets resolved at the end because it’s following a day to day life. We mainly researched mockumentaries for our film as we wanted the story to be comical but also be in the style of a documentary. We looked at films such as Super Sized Me and Sicko, these gave us an idea of how documentaries are put together using voice overs and also camera angles and editing techniques. We based the style of documentary on a typical wildlife show by people such as David Attenborough and then twisted it so that the student would be seen as an ‘animal’ and have a presenter doing the voice over. I think we have made a film that follows the genre we chose pretty well although I don’t think it was as comic as it could have been.
Our film is based mainly around parody of the documentary genre, known as a mockumentary. This means that we deliberately tried to ‘play’ with the documentary codes and history to try and make comic value from it. The main parody is the fact we treat the student as an animal rather than a human because of the typical student attitude and appearance. We also parodied the presenters name, Donvid Artenburg, which is obviously similar to David Attenborough who is probably the most famous documentary presenter. The film we looked at to research parodies within genres was ‘Blazing Saddles’ which is for the most part a cowboy film but includes characters dressed as Nazi’s and the KKK which is completely comical for the western genre.
The audience pleasure we tried to achieve was ‘Community’ from Richard Dyer’s Theory of Entertainment, and I feel we made this to some extent although it may not be clear at some point as the character may seem lonely when his mates leave him and the girl ignores him. The community aspect is appropriate because the character is someone most of our target audience could relate to at some point as they have been/are students at some point and have also probably felt isolated at some point in that period. The character also follows typical student traits such as sleeping through the day and having beer bottles laying around and also having small change to get by on.
The comparisons between our film and a real
media text can be found if you watch such films as Borat and Spinal Tap as Callum has mentioned in previous posts, but you can also see similarities in how our film has been shot and editing in tv shows like Trailer Park Boys and The Office where the story is based around real life scenarios and has comic value by either narrations or how the characters act and the viewer can associate situation with stereotypes and experiences. The scenes in our film that use the ‘Rec’ frames are made to look almost Big Brother-esque so it is like people are watching the subject without them knowing which can also be seen in wildlife programs like Planet Earth when the producers leave low-res infra-red cameras out in the wild to try and capture wildlife movement and activities which is what we have achieved here in our film.
"Badger Watch"
"Trailer Park Boys"
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