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This is an evaluation of a preliminary film task which I did for Media Studies, it's not
the preliminary task I did about a guy slipping over a banana. It's another preliminary film
task which I haven't uploaded yet because my partner has hte file on it which we exported
on his, um, memory stick. And the rest, otherwise it's at school. I do have another edited file
which was not fully edited after we finished using the Macs which I'll probably play whilst
I'm speaking or something. So what did we do for the film task? Well we had to demonstrate
the 180 degree rule which we did which was easy because... The 180 degree rule is where
you have two people and you're not allowed to move the camer beyond 180 degrees around
the teo people so if you've got 2 people you've laways got to stay on one side of those two
people. You're not allowed to go on the other side so if you're filming on one shoulder,
over one shoulder at someone who's where you the audience are... Then you're not allowed
to move to that shoulder. It was fairly easy because we had, um, a wall running to the
right of our, um, stage I suppose you could call it, it was just a classroom but I suppose
you could call it a stage. So we were actually physically incapable of breaking the 180 degree
rule because there was a wall in the way. We did have point-of-view shots which means
we were probably on the line but probably didn't cross it. Yeah, we also had to demonstrate
match-on-action. Match on action is where you have somebody doing an action and because
you can't film all of it you do two seperate shots and hte action is implied. We had a
guy walking through a door, he goes in, opens... So you see him from one side opening the door
and then the other side walking through it. It's impossible to actually move the camera
through the door because... It just is. 'Cos other' it would just make a mess, like the
door isn't big enough for, um, two people to walk through with a camera it would be
really strange. And then the third technique we were supposed to demonstrate was shot-reverse-shot
which is when you're in a conversation you have one guy on one side, the other on the
other side and you um, you do a shot of them, a shot of the other guy and a shot of them.
So it's not a two-shot where you've got both people in the shot at the same time with your
camer perpendicular to them it's where you move teh camera to show where they're both
speaking. And the genre of our, er, whatsitcalled? prelimnary film task was black and white silent
social drama set in a school and what was conventional about it? Well it was in black
and white which is fairly easy to do, just drop the saturation. And it was silent fairly
easy to do, just mute the sound, add some music over the top, add captions. Given. We
edited on a Mac, which is hte film you'll probably be seeing down there or up there
or wherever I decide to put it. But we couldn't put um, film noise on the Macs because the
program used it iMovie and granted Macs are used in industry, but they're not used' but
iMovie isn't used in industry. Because iMovie is a really awful program it doesn't even
have a timeline it just has a sort of clip-thing which most, um, basic editing software will
give you, like, er, what's the other one? Windows Movie Maker! Which is another really
basic movie editing software. So we decided to use a PC instead, and we found the Art
room next door which has Adobe Premiere Elements 2. And that worked fine, we could do what
we wanted however the PC was really slow, it led to us... When we had to export it we,
we um, had to leave the PC on for threee hours, give or take. Because it was so slow at rednering
the file. And because it's in the middle of the art department it's like you've turned
it on, turned off the screen and walked away. And then you come back three hours later and
go "I'm sorry for having taken up one of your PCs". Well they are okay with it, but, it's
not something I want to do very often. Which is why next time we'll be editing on our own
PCs. Because it's easier, and simpler, and doesn't mean you end up feeling all embarassed
by walking into the art room and subtly taking up one of their PCs. And we also learnt that
'keeping stuff simple works'. We had a very simple story, it was just two guys, one of
them is, well they're getting their results from their exams I don't know if they're A-Level
exams or GCSE exams, we don't really care. And one of them hasn an A the other one has
a B. The guy with a B is jealous of the guy with an A. So when the guy with an A tells
him he has an A he makes an angry face and crosses his arms like that. It's not really
important, basically we're just using the story to show off the filming techniques.
And also it's really hard to fit a story into 30 seconds which is another thing I'll come
to. The other groups we saw had their films over 30 seconds. I dunno why that is, I was
told by Jonny to keep ours under 30 seconds. We may have made amistake there because if
we then find out we were supposed to make it over 30 seconds that would be a disaster.
I don't know what the current status is about that. So we made ours under 30 seconds it
was simple. People made theirs over 30 seconds, not simple. But for our main task, which is
the one which is 2 minutes long we're going to keep it simple, very simple. Because simple
works, simple's not complicated and people understand it. And the last things I'm supposed
to talk about is which institutions would distribute our film. Now I would have, in
an ideal world I'd say, well, the Pirate Bay would distribute it because they're awesome,
and swedish and... The purpose of the film is not to make money, okay? So why would you
distribute it on a commercial channel? Last year they put up - in place of their Pirate
Bay logo - they had an advert for a film called Nasty Old People which I do recommend you
see. And it's really good. Which was an independent film-maker who decided to distribute their
film on the Pirate Bay which proves that is it a distribution method. However, I don't
think people would download an entire torrent file just for a 30 second film. Alternatively
YouTube would be a um, distribution institution because, it's short, and er, it doesn't cost
any money either, put stuff on YouTube. Costs no money, apart from bandwidth. Although alternatively,
as a second alternative we'd distribute it on local BBC television. I've got to get this
video under 10 minutes. Local BBC television is really good because they give money to
local film-makers and let them make things which helps local film-makers which is good
because then those local film-makers have talent and they go on to work for big film
companies. Or they don't go on to work for big film companies. But anyway local television
is where it's at, because nobody on national television wants to see your 30 second Media
Studies film. It's a given they just don't. Er, they don't care. And most of YouTube probably
doesn't care about this evaluation. The music we used was by Joseph Carmichael from MusicFromMusicians.com
I've forgotten the name of the track but that doesn't matter. I've got to go and eat my
lunch, which is, Museli. So, bye everyone!