Filming and Editing Preliminary Task

Once the planning had been done, we got our camera and tripod so we could begin filming our short task. We chose our setting, then began filming the whole situation from many different angles making it easier when it came to editing the whole thing together. We filmed Ollie walking into the hall, then walking across the hall over to a teacher, who then spoke to him and told him off.
We then went into the media room and began editing it all together, we put the shots together so that the walking around matched the next frame and eventually we had the whole scenario put together with many different camera shots giving the film some variety.

Planning Preliminary Task

We were then told that we needed to create a small task that would get us used to using the camera, choosing camera shots/movements and framing the different shots. We need these skills so that our final coursework opening looks professional and suits its purpose of intriguing the audience. We got together a story board, which included the frames we were going to film, the initial storyline and the timing of each shot. Doing this job meant that when it comes to filming the task, we will know exactly what were doing, and will take half the time.

Researching Universal Studios

The next part of our task was to create a detailed presentation on a well known production company. We decided to use the company 'Universal', this decision was well thought about as we took the most popular romantic comedy films that had been released and found out the distribution company/production company for each film, Universal was one that stood out.
We looked at the different stages of the film production, development, pre production etc. We also looked at the key elements of the film industry and why they were significant to the production. The films that have been released recently, and the genres were also explored and we put all this information onto a powerpoint presentation that we performed to the class. Mr Cramb said that our presentation was good and that the presentation had significant details on it.

Evaluating Our Texual Analysis

We then gathered together all of our textual analysis results, we found the common conventions within each of the different micro elements. We looked at the recurring themes, recurring settings, the typical lighting, the common colours used, the typical costume used, the stock characters, the actors, the use of editing, the sounds used, the camera shots and the camera movements. Aswell as looking at the movement and gestures, the narrative, the iconography and the enigma created through all of the films. Going into so much detail will improve the way our overall opening will look, including these typical codes and conventions will also help us to ensure that the genre of our opening is easily identifiable.

Textual Analysis

When it came to this part of the task, we had to write 8 detailed textual analysis on other well known romantic comedies. I chose to look at films such as Love actually, P.S i love you and Nothing Hill, not only did these all get mentioned in our questionnaires but i had previously seen this films, making it easier to do a detailed analysis of the films. I also analyzed the openings, looking specifically at the codes and conventions that typically appeared in each opening and seeing how they set up the setting and introduced the characters and storyline.
These detailed analysis will make it a lot easier when it comes to creating our own opening.

Presenting our Questionnaire Findings

After this lesson, we collated our results and created a presentation to give to the class about our findings. We created graphs and tables explaining the differing results and found this very helpful. We noticed that the results gave very particular results, particularly when looking at the gender of the audience to romantic comedies. We found that male viewers watch the films with their girlfriends or wives, not one male said that they had watched it with friends. This made us aware of particular target audience.

We also found out the typical codes and conventions that people expected in the opening of a romantic comedy. These will help us make our openings genre easily identifiable.

We were given feedback about our presentations and were told that they were very good, and that we had sufficient detail in our presentation in order to move onto the next part of the task.

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