Planning: Storyboarding- Ms Begum

What is a Storyboard?:
A story board is a graphical representation of a narrative that has been created, within the storyboard it shows each movement of each character scene by scene. Storyboards may look like square boxes on a piece of paper but they are used by every film maker in order to make filming the actual film less stressful and it also means that the actors, directors, camera operators etc. know what to do and when to do it without having to stop and talk about how they will plan out the next scene.


Storyboards need to contain information about: cinematography, iconography, lighting, actors, sound, narrative, location, duration and the Number of shots.
Including all of these in a storyboard will make producing the scene a lot easier as the producer and the director can work with and around the information they have on the storyboard. Storyboards also ensure that you don't forget any shots/ scenes by accident they make it easy to know where you need to edit the film e.g. fade to black, straight cut etc.

Our Task:
In this lesson we were working within our groups to create a storyboard that represented the narrative my group chose to use. To do this we had to think about how we wanted our thriller to look, how long each scene would be, the locations, dialogue, sounds, lighting and the actors/ people needed to film that shot.

Our storyboards:

Above is the storyboard my group were able to come up with, it's features include clear images and the micro-elements we will use in our thriller. It is well organised and clearly presented, this will help us when it comes to filming our thriller as we can easily understand it and we now know who is needed, when they are needed and where they are needed in each shot. Furthermore, the storyboard  helps us to be sure of our narrative as we can gather an idea of how it will look after filming.

Conclusion:
From creating my own storyboard, i believe it will help me and my group when it comes to filming due to us having a clear understanding of our narrative and how the shots should look when it comes to actually filming. A storyboard will make producing the scene a lot easier as the producer and the director can work with and around the information they have on the storyboard. Also it will help to ensure that we don't forget any shots/ scenes by accident and it will make it easy to know where we need to edit the film e.g. fade to black, straight cut etc.

Planning: Preliminary task- Miss Begum

What is the Purpose of the Preliminary task: The purpose of the preliminary task is to learn how to operate and use a camera. During the task we had to experiment with the camera by playing around with different camera techniques, including the angles, sizes and movements. This was all done to help us gain some sort of experience of filming before we move on to shooting our own thriller films.

Introduction: The preliminary task is where our group is given a camera and told to go out and experiment with the camera enabling us to get used to using the camera. Furthermore we are supposed to make a short scenario in order to show that we have gotten used to controlling and holding the camera effectively.  The preliminary task also tells our group who is the better person behind the camera.

The scenario: In our preliminary task we didnt follow the normal conventions of having a conversation between anyone. Instead we showed two people walking with minimal conversation, and we only focused on the camera angles and movements of two people walking. We chose a few different locations and then edited the clips in order to make the film flow with clarity.

                                                                 

Group Roles: During the preliminary task our group had separate roles in order to carry out the task for example; I was the director of this task and the camera operator, this is because i know how to organize fairly well and i have an eye for different angles and camera movements. that were the group roles and why. The editor of the preliminary task was a joint effort of all the group, this was because we suggested that we needed to all put in our efforts to edit the preliminary task to our best abilities.

Difficulties?: During the preliminary task we was faced with one difficulty, this was the editing of the clips that were filmed, this difficulty came about because my group was not to sure about how to edit the clips and place them together, however,due to us practicing on the preliminary film, we were able to overcome this difficulty and edit the clips together so that they flowed with clarity, and people could understand it easily.

                                                           
Paragraph 4:  Using a hand held camera recorder has helped me to see in myself that I have he eye for angles and angle sizes e.g. Reaction shots/ mid shots etc. These techniques have been developed by my whole group and we now know and understand what is needed to make a thriller film conventional to the thriller genre and we also feel confident to the point where we can look at any genre and create a conventional film for it.

The last technique I have been able to develop and use is to edit the film and clips in order to merge them together to make them flow with clarity and make it understandable for the audience. I will admit that the editing stage came with a few problems and complications, however these were problems were erased with hard work and practice. Within my groups thriller there was many different transitions entwined between the merged clips, these varied from fade to blacks, to montages, to fast-paced editing, these transitions enabled my thriller to look and seem high quality and it also helped to make my thriller look more conventional to the thriller genre. 

Conclusion: This task has helped me and my group significantly in creating our own thriller, this is because i now fully understand how to use final cut pro and edit my clips together. Furthermore taking part in the preliminary task has helped me to develop and train my skills of directing and filming a production and then editing it to make the clips understandable and effective with in an audience.