Feedback From Facebook On Final Film

Final Film

More Ideas for Film

Having watched and captured the video footage from our video tape, we came up with even more ideas that we could film in our next filming journey. We thought that as we still had to do video footage of the protagonist leaving his house, we came up with even more shots which can represent him in a bad way, portraying him as a bad youth in the community. In addition, we thought of retaking some shots as the camera was shaking. hence when we retake the shots, we will use a tripod which will make the shot even better. finally, we came up with a shot in the location that will make the short film even more exciting and tense. it is basically a shot of the protagonist jumping a high obstacle.

Fast tracking shot Inspiration

This shot was inspired from the song 'stuck in slavery' ending. The song was sang by two un-signed rappers named 'ard adz' and 'shallow'. Whilst watching the song as a group, we realised that the ending shot was very catchy and thought of putting it in our short film. on the second filming day, we tried to preform this shot. both of our group members had a try and actually we thought it turned out to be very good. when we got back to the mac book pro, we inputted the video taken and however when fast forwaded, it didnt turn out to be as good as we thought as we tilted the camera too much whilst walkin, and the camera was shaking too much. Hnce, we even had a second try on the next filming day and we decided not to tilt the camera whilst walking. when we got back to the area, we saw the footage that we filmed and it turned out to be very good. Hence the music video that we watched in our group turned out to be useful and inspiring to our media group.



Here is the video where our group was inspired to do the 'fast tracking' shot. The shot is on 2:42s and is approximately 2 seconds long.





Here is our fast tracking shot which we done. We thought it turned out good after practicing how to do it on the second filming day. Although it took us time and effort to do, our group was willing to put in the commitment to create a better ending of the film with this fast tracking shot.

Filming diary 2

On the second day of our filming diary, we were also required to wake up early at 6:00, s we had to get to our location which would approximately take 50 minutes from were our group meet. We took notes with us, on what we need to film, and also what shots we have to film again from our last filming diary. Many of the shots were of the protagonist however we filmed some 'cctv' shots and the 'deal' shot. We left the main shot to last, the shot where we reveal the protagonist as a runner with his running ttrainers and his 2012 olympic shirt.

Feedback from rough cut film

After showing the rough cut of the beginning of our short film, we good some very good feedback from our audience. 5 people agreed to watch the film and give us some feedback on what they think, and how they think it could be improved. All the pparticipants claimed that the shots and angles were very good in term of our genre of the film. The also loved the location that we filmed in and the character used to be the protagonist, they said these two factors suit the genre of the film the most. They even claimed that they havent even as good shots as we used in any other A2 short film! However, 2 people said that they didnt really understand the plot of the film and what it is leading to, they advised us to change some shots in order to lead the audience in what you want them to think. They claimed if we do this, it will be one of the best twist they have ever seen from a paddington academy group of A2 students!
After we gathered this information, our group had a intense discussion in what shots to change in order to 'make the audience think what we want them to think', as one of the participants said. We came up with different ideas within our group of which shots to change and even thought about changing the order of the shots to make the twist better and create more tension into the 'hoodrat', which later in the film reveals that hes a 'runner'.

In adittion, we also created a survey from asking students from our school, what they think about footage and how do you think it could be better. We had many useful results such as; some students said that we should use the grey scale as we predicted to use in the film planning. also some students said that we should make the protagonists look more serious to create tension in the short film and so it does not reveal the twist in the film. however, most student said it was very good and if we keep working at this rate, we will hopefully recieve a greate grade in our a2 media coursework!

Rough cut of our short film

Filming Diary day 1

Our first day of filming required us to wake up at 5:00 in order to travel to our filming location. As one member of the group and the protagonist lives near each other, they met each other at 5:30 at the bus stop, which then they travelled to meet the second member of the group and together they went to the location and started to film. However there was a specific reason why we had to get up at this time, the sun rises at the time we went to the location. Hence, we needed some footage in the dark to create tension and suspense, some whilst the sunrises and some in the light. We managed to come up with most of the filming as everyone was on-point, and nothing came in the way. We filmed:

• The protagonist leaving his house in the location
• Many shots of the protagonist running in the area
• Shots of the protagonist jumping obstacles
• Many shots from objects such as car mirrors and doors
• Shots that end up in a twist. for example, we filmed a shot of the protagonist running however the shot ends with the number '13', representing bad luck.

Production Logo Images

In constructing our production logo, we wanted to make it feel as urban and gritty as possible and thought about what images we should use to create this feeling. We firstly found an image that represented youth and a little bit of the stereotype of young people today, so opted for this of a teenage boy wearing a dark hoody, a cap and low-slung jeans.

We then modified this image on Photoshop, as we wanted it to be more striking and animated. We did this by quick selecting the different areas of the boy (ie. arm, face, hat etc) and then adding on colour overlays for each section. We chose to do this with the colour scheme of black, grey & white as this fitted in with the urban feel of our film, and also, we wanted to create a slightly menacing, faceless youth, whose grey face seems to represent that it is not always black or white when considering the issue of young people today. This also is in keeping with the main idea of our film.

After modifying the original picture of the boy, we also wanted to create a shadow that offered an idea of the boy's potential future if he chose the wrong path. To do this we created a shadow on Paint, as we found this easier to work with, and wanted it to look quite unreal and cartoonish.

We then looked to combine these two images using Photoshop, so that the shadow appeared as if from the boy.

After initially constructing the image, we then thought about a background that would offer something more than just plain black, so we chose to find a background that was representative of urban London and thought that a set of tower blocks would work well.

We wanted to change this background though and added a Threshold filter to create a grittier feel. We then smoothed this out to help it blend in. We did this on Motion and I will discuss how we animated the logo next.

Using Motion we were able to work with the different layers of our production logo to create a dynamic piece of animation that we felt represents our brand identity, style & content very well. We wanted to have a sinister, edgy feel to the logo, so chose a font that represented this called Bearpaw. We found this free font online, downloaded it and added it to the fonts on the Mac. After this we chose to animate the boy by having the image move in from the left off-screen, and at the same time fade in the background. To make the background more 3D we added a smoke particle emitter that gave the image some depth. We also chose to animate the logo and chose a text animation called static to give us the edgy feel we wanted. A very tricky part was animating the shadow. We knew we wanted to make the shadow shoot itself in some way, but didn't know how to. After discussing with our teacher, we tried adding in a mask over the head of the shadow, animating when the mask came in, and then on top of this we added an ink splash film that we turned red, to represent the blood. Finally we added in another of Motion's ready made films in the style of a larger inksplash that acted as transition at the end. To give the logo even more impact, we added sound effects using Soundtrack Pro, blending a cocking of a gun with a gun shot, and then following this up with a police siren, as if they were chasing the culprit. Finally we added our signature image of the CCTV camera in the bottom corner to continue with our sense of brand identity.

Production logo inspiration

Shadows are commonly assosiated with paranoia so therefore we decided to include this in our production logo. Our shadow of the man has a gun to its own head.

Sample shot (with filter)



After looking at the overall colour effects on the show 'Misfits', we decided that we wanted to create a similar feel for our own film. We experimented with one of the filters on Final Cut Pro called Luca's Image Adjust. (seen above) We increased the darken & saturate bar, giving a full, warm and intense feel to the shots, really deepening the dark colours. We then desaturated the film, giving a more stripped down, steely, urban look. We chose to use the darken & saturate as well as the desaturate control to ensure that the dark tones in the shot were really pronounced, giving an edgier feel to the shot.

We have embedded clips of the test footage with and without the filter to give an idea of the difference that it makes to the film. We hope to maintain this overall look throughout our film, perhaps shifting to a brighter, lighter shot at the very end, to give some impact for the audience and link in with the twist at the end of our film.

sample shot (without filter)