Main Task Commission

Our main task for this course is to create, plan, design, and film the first two minutes of a full length feature film. We must make use of all skills and techniques obtained throughout the course, and then present our finished piece available for examination.

Our Chosen Film Genre:

We have decided on the 'THRILLER' genre for our film.

We have chosen this genre because it usually attracts the largest audience variety. This is mainly because no matter what age viewers are, people of all ages can be 'thrilled'. Whereas if we had chosen a Romantic Comedy, we would have a very specific target audience - mainly young to middle aged women, most likely on a "girls night out", who might enjoy romantic mishaps, optimistic characters, and the traditional "happy ending" of Rom-Coms, but a 50 year old tradeworker may not enjoy those elements and would hence not go to watch the film.

Technique Tests

The task we were set here, was to experiment with 'Three Point Lighting' and to use a "dolly" (basically a trolley for our camera that rolls along two parallel tubes) and to experiment with 'Tracking and Panning' shots.

Below is a diagram demonstrating how to execute 3 point lighting:

See below for example of how to operate a 'dolly' to film a tracking shot:

These types of shot may be useful to us in the future as we may wish to include them in our final film for the AS course. The results of the task are displayed in the video below. Thanks.

AS Preliminary Task: 'The Caretaker'

This was our first ever time filming in our new production teams, and so gave us a chance to get used to working with each other closely.

In the Preliminary task that was set, we were given the following requirements of the film that we should adhere to:-

• Film someone walking through a door in two shots (i.e. one shot was done from behind the person as they open the door, then in the second shot; we film that same person coming through the door from the other side), taking care to avoid continuity errors and hence create succesful 'match-on-action'.
• Include a few lines of dialogue between one character and another.
• Clear use of shot/reverse shot, and adhering to the 180 degree rule of shooting.

The finished piece is displayed below for your viewing pleasure. Thank you.

We felt that our film was quite good for our first try and the audience feedback provided us with some positives and negatives points. Our audience said that our framing was good yet our sound could have been improved by integrating it with the initial soundtrack that we produced.  The amount of dialogue we used was also a strong point that our audience picked up on; yet our match on action could have been improved when Lewis and Dean run through the door, this error could have been fixed in editing and we shall take this into consideration for future tasks. I feel that producing this has gave us some of the basic skills we need to make our films in the future better.

WELCOME TO MY BLOG

Hello, and welcome to my blog.
My name is Dean, and I am studying AS Media Studies at Great Wyrley PAHS. Through this blog, I will present all my work from the course for your viewing and assessment. Thank you for your time.
The members of my group are:-

• Myself
• Rebecca Wheeler
• Jessica Jones
• Laura Gardiner

Our film company is called 'DOMINO Productions'