Evaluation Q1 : Did you enjoy the main workshop shoot day? What role(s) did you take? What were your best bits and why?

Different Set-ups I was involved in

For me, our music video remake workshop day was by far the most fun I have ever had doing media studies and also gave me an immensely valuable learning experience, working with professionals, such as our Director Dom and Camera OP Ed. The entire process gave me performance skills I never knew I had, let me learn and work alongside professionals and have fun with my friends at the same time.

How the studio changed throughout the day

Throughout the shoot day, I took on many roles, such as the lead finger tutter, backing dancer for the hip-hop, cheerleading and end dance scene and the pianist in the band scenes. I also marked the ballet scenes with the clapper board.

For me there were 3 main parts of the workshop that I really enjoyed, they were:

• Performing my finger tutting
• Learning about the lighting desk from Eddie
• Being the pianist in the backing band

However, my favourite part was performing my finger tutting, because I had put lots of time into learning and perfecting the routine for the previous 9 days, so seeing it all come together so well was really satisfying.

Finger Tutting

My Finger Tutting Routine

Evaluation Q2 : What have you learnt from participating in each of the prelim tasks 1, 2, 3 and 5?

When completing the preliminary exercise, we had to complete many other tasks, other than just the main workshop day. These include:

• Task 1 - Completing an audition video (as seen below)
• Task 2 - Learning and practising our performance with Tash and Jasmine
• Task 3 - Helping to plan and organise our costumes with Olivia and Mrs. Dymioti
• Task 5 - Editing our remake video

The video below is Jerom, Gabriel and my audition video, to the Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk"

Below I have included a haiku deck which goes through each individual task and highlights key skills and ideas that I learnt and improved upon, whilst completing each task of the prelim. For me, I most enjoyed Task 4, which was not required for this blog post, but I also enjoyed Task 5 a lot, as I am a keen editor and enjoy learning new techniques.

An example costume shot of Gabriel with his Hip-Hop costume

Our Dance Coach "Tash" Performing my Routine

Olivia (Head of Costumes) adjusting my tutting outfit

Over 200 Shots across 7 Tracks, Our Editing Timeline

Evaluation Q3 : Are you pleased with the footage and your finished edit? Is it how you expected it to look? What works really well and what would you change?

I am very pleased with my final edit of our remake video for Taylor Swift's Shake It Off, which I completed with Alex Nicolaides. All of the footage captured looked really professional and sharp, which made it exceptionally easy to grade and edit with. 

Our Editing Workflow

Occasionally we could not achieve perfect shot-for-shot likeness with the original, due to complex dance moves or cinematographic techniques for example, however in these cases appropriate and good looking footage was captured instead, through guidance by our director, Dom and main camera op, Ed. Below I have Alex N and my completed edit.



Alex N and myself edited the video over the course of 2 weeks, both inside and outside of lesson time, using dual monitored edit suites and Premiere Pro CS5.5. The actual cutting and positioning of the shots took the longest period of time and due to the high quality nature of our rushes, grading only took a couple of days. I think our grading for some set-ups definitely looked different to how I originally imagined it would, such as the band set-up I did not expect to look so dark, however other set-ups such as the end dance scene definitely look as bright as I had first envisioned. Overall, I am still extremely happy with all the shots, however if I was to complete the remake again, I would have tried filming a few different shot types as slow-mos, as we often had close-ups, but not necessarily the wides or mids that the original used.

Annotated Diagram of Premiere Pro CS5.5

I really like how well some asepcts of the video came out in particular, for example:

• The tutting set-up
• The ballet shot's grading
• The slow mo ribbon dancing

I liked these most of all, as I felt they fully met, if not exceeded my expectations for how professional they look. For example, I think the grading of the ballet shots very closely mimics the cold, yet glossy hollywood look of the original ballet shots.

Before and After Grading

The ribbon dancing slow-mo

Evaluation Q4 : How do you think your prelim experiences will impact to your approach to next term's music video coursework?

I think one of the biggest takeaways from our preliminary exercise is the massive improvement to be found in our performance skills. Our ability to lip sync and perform in front of a camera is a massive asset to us now and could definitely be utilised in our actual music video. I also think I would pay far more attention to the costume, hair and make-up of our characters as good hair and make-up really improves the professionalism of our music video. I also think that all of the organisational work done by our 1st AD, Amy, cannot be overlooked and will definitely be imitated when we produce our own video.



Overall, I found our music video remake workshop extremely good fun and I learnt lots about making a music video that I could apply to our own video in September. I think the project has also inspired me to be adventurous with my own video in September and use a mixture of figurative and performance based footage, perhaps tackling the grime or EDM genres of music, whilst trying to utilise the immense possibilities available to us in the Seward Studio, through its lighting decks and cyclorama.

Our Media Class at the end of the Workshop 

Evaluation Question 1 : In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

When producing our film opening, we took alot of inspiration from real films, for example Juno and Submarine. Firstly, I have produced a set of captions for the youtube video in English which discuss the thought processes of the team behind many of the shots.

Unfortunately, the length of the captions are limited so the last 10 or 15 seconds of the video do not have a commentary. However, the only major moment missed was the final punch. We included this as although it is a negative action towards our protagonist, it is very humorous at the expense of our main character and such humour is a key convention of Coming of Age cinema. To watch the video with captions, simply activate the English captions that are NOT auto generated and feel free to pause and rewind as necessary.

The aforementioned punch

The commentary makes reference to a few films that greatly inspired our opening, such as Juno and Submarine, below I have included the examples I was referring to.

Juno's Titles

Submarine's Soundtrack by Alex Turner

Submarine's Institutional Titling

Our Submarine inspired colour grade

Grading

An example of Submarine's colour grade

One important aspect of our opening briefly mentioned in the commentary was the grading of our footage. We really liked the grading used in Submarine and in a number of the sequences in our opening we really wanted to replicate it as best as possible. It seems like they tried to do a split, by pushing highlights towards a warmer orangey tone and the shadows towards a colder blue tone. This resulted in a very interesting, almost sepia looking grade which we really wanted to use in our sequence. I think this is best demonstrated in the shots by the lake, where the orange and blue of Craig's jacket really standout. I feel this grade really worked well with our piece and helped bolster it's indie aesthetic.

Narrative Structure 

Although narrative theories of Todorov and Barthe are explored a little bit in the video, these theories greatly impacted how we constructed our opening sequence and thus ought to be explored further. Below is a table detailing how each theory affected our opening, as well as a short summary of each theory.

Evaluation Question 2 : How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our film aglet has a many representations of members of the LGBTQ+ community and more specifically older teenage gay males. We felt it was very important to portray them and the issues that face them in as true to life fashion as possible, given our acting, editing and cinematographic resources. However, we also felt it was important to not alienate the LGBTQ+ community and thus sought feedback from a few teenage members of the LGBTQ+ community on the representations that we had built within our piece.

Below I have included a Prezi with some examples of where and how we have represented the LGBTQ+ community in aglet. I recommend viewing in fullscreen for best readability.

Evaluation Question 3 : What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Quak Films:
Quak films are our invented production company. They are a small British production company who focus on films discussing minority social groups in British society and the issues that face them. British independent films have an ever increasing market share in British cinema, with a 16% share of the market in 2014 (BFI Film Fund, 3rd February 2015) , which is the highest it had ever been. Quak Films believe that the British Independent film style of ownership suits films with smaller nicher markets, therefore discussing these issues is better suited to a small British independent film production company than a massive vertically integrated media house, such a Warner Bros. Our film would also only require a small production budge of around £1.5 million (for scale, Submarine had a £1.2 million production budget), due to the unknown actors and little to no CGI and VFX required in the movie, which also lends itself to a small British independent production company, as they wouldn't be able to raise large "hollywood-esque" production budgets. Therefore, it is in Quak Films's interests to produce our movie about teenage members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Film 4:
Film 4 are our primary distributor, as they already are an established distributor of British indie films and worked in the distribution and funding of other British indie films, such as Frank (2014), '71 (2014) and Submarine (2010). Film 4 have their own TV Channels that they must provide content for and thus being involved in the production of films helps provide Film 4's TV Channels with content. Film 4 also have the potential to make money from the distribution of the film by selling off rights to the film to other channels and distribution firms, such as Focus Features who distributed the large British independent film Suffragette (2015) in the US, whilst Suffragette was distributed in the UK by Pathé.

Comparing aglet and Submarine (2010) release plans:
-Premiere:
 Submarine premiered at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival, September 2010.
 aglet would also premiere at an international film festival, such as the BFI London  Film Festival in October 2016.

-Release Date:
 Submarine was released on October 10th 2010, which falls outside of the major  hollywood film release times of Christmas and the Summer holidays.
 aglet would be released at a similar time of October 2016, as therefore it would not  be forced to compete with big hollywood films for attention.

-DVD and Blu-Ray Release:
 Submarine received it's initial Blu-Ray and DVD release on October 4th 2011.
 aglet would likely receive a Blu-Ray and DVD release around a year after cinema  release.


Exhibition and Exchange of aglet:


Cinema Release - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Evaluation Question 4 : Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our Target Audience : The LGBTQ+ Community
Below I have included a mindmap about our target audience and their media consumption, lifestyle and specific decisions we made as a team, to directly target the LGBTQ+ community with our film. To zoom in and out use the + and - buttons in the top left corner of the diagram and pan around the diagram using your mouse.

However, our film is also skewed towards a more teenage audience, due to teenagers and teenage problems such as first loves, being a focus of the film. This means that our film will also have a large secondary audience of teenagers, however again I feel that this film will be far more relatable and entertaining to British teenagers given the British settings, accents and cultural codes, such as the archetypal "Essex Chav" present in the narrative, which is inevitable given the British independent film status that this film possesses. Therefore our film is likely to have a secondary audience of British teenagers. Below is a gif illustrating relevant media content, consumed by British Teenagers, relevant to aglet. If you click on the gif, it will also link to a youtube video version.

Evaluation Question 5 : How did you attract/address your audience?

The Uses and Gratifications Theory
The uses and gratifications theory dictates that members of an audience who consume the media are active. This means they actively seek out and choose media to consume, however different members of the audience will use and find pleasure from the media for different reasons. 
These four main reasons are:

• Social Interaction
• Entertainment and Escapism
• Personal Identification
• Information

Below I have included a Google Slides presentation discussing how each of these parts of the uses and gratifications theory relate to our production, aglet.

Expectations of the Audience

Contemplative Craig

The audience will also have certain pre-concieved expectations from a film opening, from a Coming of Age film, from an LGBTQ+ film, from teenage characters, etc. and when planning and creating the opening for aglet, we had to bear these in mind in order to effectively entertain our audience through manipulating these expectations and conventions. For example, the main narrative of aglet should be about gay culture and should portray it in a realistic  or positive manner, as the film is an LGBTQ+ film and the audience may be disappointed, or feel alienated if the film does  not  achieve this with the given themes. Therefore in aglet we were very careful to maintain a true to life portrayal of gay men and sought lots of feedback from our gay peers on  how these characters should be represented. From the beginning we wanted to have one effeminate gay male and one more reserved gay male to argue against the stereotype that all gay men are archetypally camp.We clearly  showed David as camp through his dress and hair style, which is stereo-typically camp and Craig to be more reserved through his contemplative and quiet mannerisms, such as writing in the notebook.

David harassed for his effeminacy

We also had to pay a lot of attention to continuity techniques, as using them would help us create  the effects of one "continuous piece of media language prose" that would flow and allows the audience to suspend their disbelief and be pulled into the story, as if it were reality. This often means  the audience are more immersed in the piece and get more joy out of the film. Immersion is often achieved by hollywood film studios through expensive IMAX and 3D screenings, however as we are only a small indie film production company we must utilize cinematographical skills, such as continuity theory. A good example of us using continuity theory would be our use of match-on-action in the breakfast sequence. Here we showed one section of time from many different angles to make it interesting to watch, however to give the impression that no time is skipped, filmic time has to match real world time, so Craig's actions must match from one shot to another. This is match on action.

The Breakfast Continuity Sequence

Audience Reactions
After producing the opening sequence to aglet, we thought it would be an interesting learning experience if we heard back from our target audience about aglet. Below I have produced a haiku deck picking out some common themes from our audience feedback. I personally am very happy with how our audience react, as it is similar to how you would expect an audience to react to a Coming of Age film. I also think its positive that they do not often mention the characterization of Craig or David, because it means that Craig and David seem like normal and realistic portrayals of young gay men, which is exactly what we wanted as a group.

Also, during our production and post production stages we received alot of critique about many aspects of our production, some that were in our control (and thus were fixed) and others that we simply did not have the time or resources to fix. These include:

• The punch was not close enough
• The bullies were not threatening enough
• The conflict warranted a change of music, not the complete stop of music

The first two bullet points come down to casting. We found it very difficult to find people who were both willing to act, but were also threatening looking people. This was made even more difficult as we wanted both a male and female bully, to get better gender representation in the opening sequence. Had we perhaps had a production budget that had allowed us to hire actors, these issues could have been negated, yet alas this was completely out of the scope of our production. We could maybe have hidden the punch better by showing it from a different angle, but we did not get any good takes of the punch from any other angle and so we were forced to use this one. The second bullet point we may have been able to tackle had we had more time, as producing the sound tracks for our piece was very time consuming. However, we were already pushed for time when we received this critique and although we agreed it would have improved our piece, we felt that the time would be better spent elsewhere, than creating a whole new second song for our soundtrack.

Evaluation Question 6 : What have you learnt about technologies from the process for constructing this product?

Reflections on the technology used to produce aglet:

Annotated screenshot of Premiere Pro CS5.5

Personally, I feel that as a group we were very good at utilizing all the technology at our disposal. We were able to produce a high quality product that I am proud of. That said, I feel that some improvements definitely could have been made. For example, we didn't know how to get a grid up on our camera monitor for nearly all of our shooting time, which meant we had to line-up all of shots by eye. I think that had we had the grid, it definitely would have made centering objects and keeping framing consistent far easier. This was definitely a big learning point for me and had we known about it, we would have asked for help with finding it earlier.

I really liked how we organized the group. It allowed all of us to become capable at using all the technologies we were using, whilst allowing each of us in the group to also specialize in utilizing specific technologies to above and beyond what was required of us. I would definitely recommend this to future groups. However, I feel that perhaps we could have allowed each other to specialize even more and divide the work in this manner (similar to an actual film studio), however in reality we simply divided the work by whatever needed doing soonest.

My Technological Learning Curve:

Below I have included a prezi which discusses my many technical skills and improvements I have gained from completing this project, as well as demonstrations in applying certain techniques.

Evaluation Question 7 : Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The Influence of the Brief on my Preliminary Task and Production Task
When undertaking a project you always have an end goal which you strive to achieve, be this set by yourself, your team or an external party. In our case it was a brief which outlined to us what our tasks should aim to achieve. Below I have included copies of the prelim brief, the production brief and a flow chart explaining how they influenced our thought processes and what we learnt from the briefs.

The Preliminary Task Brief
Continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she/he then exchanges a couple of lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.

My Preliminary Task Edit


The Production Task Brief
To produce a 2 minute opening sequence for a fiction film. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music and audio effects from a copyright-free source. It should be clear from your sequence who the target audience is.

How did the Preliminary task influence my Production task?
When working on my preliminary task I learnt many key skills in producing video content, especially continuous video content, such as narratives. We learnt a lot of theory behind continuity theory in lessons and our preliminary task was one of the first tasks we got to actually start to apply our theory in a practical manner, such as recording and editing to achieve match-on action. The lessons learnt from the preliminary task affected our production task, all the way from pre-production research and planning, until post-production editing and grading. Below I have included a presentation to illustrate this, again I recommend viewing in full-screen.

Construction Post 10: Looking back - reflections on our final outcome

I am very happy with the final look of our piece. We were able to produce a film opening that gave a good sense of who our main character was, as well as clearly convey the genre of the film to the audience. I think we were able to do this through a number of different avenues, for example our font for the titles was always going to have a scrap-book-y feel similar to that of Juno(2007), however after seeing the Art of the Title post for the CAMP Festival 2015, we knew we wanted to use a white font on top of B-Roll of nature and through merging the two styles of titling, we created our own format. Another influence to our titles was the film Submarine (2010) which used plain navy blue background and white text to form its titles. We borrowed this format to produce our more lengthy titles, such as crediting the institutions.

Looking back on our project, I am very happy with the aesthetics of the film, however if I were to tweak them I would try to push our "indie look" even further, through perhaps trying out a few different filters. I definitely feel that some of our shots around the lake could have looked even better had we shot them with neutral density filters, so that there was slightly less dynamic range in the shots, which sometimes lead to overly harsh shadows or areas of light. I also feel like if we had been more organized with casting the less important roles in our piece, such as the bullies, we definitely would have been able to get better actors to fill these roles and thus end up with a higher quality final piece. This minor fault with our opening was picked up on by many members of our focus group and would have been good to fix, had we had more time. That said, I am tremendously proud of our film opening for aglet (2016) and I hope you enjoyed watching it.

Construction Post 9: My technical learning curve

My home edit suite (nov 2015)

I have always felt that I have been strong with dealing with technology, given my keen interest in computers and gadgets of all sorts. However, this project has really allowed me to further develop my skills, given the fact that we were able to have so long to work on our piece. For example, in this project I was able to further develop my understanding of the use of keyframes in Premiere Pro and find new ways to utilize this feature. Keyframes essentially allow you to animate any property of any media in your timeline and adjust it over time. For example, you could animate the opacity of a video clip and have it go from 0% to 100% over five seconds and the result would be the video clip fading up from the previous clip over five seconds. We used such a technique to adjust sound levels or hide blemishes in the sound, by animating the audio gain in our audio tracks.

Our Editing Software, Premiere Pro

Another important technical lesson I have learnt during this project is the importance of having a few seconds of "live" time between the moment the director says action and the actors start acting. During our main shoot we did not make such considerations and thus editing clips sometimes became difficult as we had to avoid including the directors call of "action", however by the time we reached the final shoot session, we had learnt from our mistakes and this was no longer an issue for us. Overall, I am very proud of the skills I have learnt from this project and hope they continue to improve in later work.

Construction Post 8: My personal contribution to the Edit Sessions

Me editing after school

Personally, one of my greatest strengths when it came to our production was my editing ability, as I produce GoPro videos as a hobby, so already knew alot of what had to be done. This meant that I personally felt that I was able to work quickly and achieve a high standard of work. Most days I would try to get in early and do 15 or 20 minute short sessions before school started, but as we got closer to the deadline for our project, I began to work for 30 to 40 minutes most days before school. We also all gave up the majority of our free periods and a couple days a week after school in order to finish the project on time. I did a lot of the cutting of shots and grading. I also recorded our music and was involved extensively in the sound mixing of our final edit.

Looking back, I would have paid slightly more attention to the lighting in our shots, as it would have made grading far easier. The same is true for our sound, as we often had a lot of background noise in the recordings and thus were required to take sound from other takes and overlay this over the chosen take's visuals. This was a time consuming process that could have been avoided.

Construction Post 7: My Personal contribution to the Shoot Sessions

Our Group Photo Taken on a Shoot

I feel like I personally contributed greatly to the success of our shooting sessions. When shooting the bullying scene at the lake, in every version of the scene, I played the male bully and when shooting our interior shots in Craig's home, that was in fact my home. This meant that I had to do some of the set dressing myself before everyone arrived on Sunday, as we had building work being done on the house and thus my room was otherwise extremely messy and dusty from the builders. When shooting at home, I was often in charge of the camera and I also sought to be involved in the directing and sound when I was not acting in the park. I also really wanted us to get a GoPro involved, even if it was only for a couple of shots at home, which I was able to achieve and I believe these two shots are of high quality.

Me as a bully in aglet

In hindsight, I wish we were able to have gotten an actor to play the male bully, as I really would have enjoyed helping manage and shoot the continuity sequence of the bullying. However, as we were not able to get an appropriate actor and I was the only male member of the group, I was forced to have an attempt at acting as the male bully in the shot. Overall, I really enjoyed shooting our media project and I can't wait to utilize the skills I learnt in future projects as well.

Construction Post 6: Reflections on Edit Week 2

I feel like the hard work we put in as a group in edit week 1 left us in good stead to have a highly productive, but not overly stressful 2nd edit week. This week we definitely had more of a focus on polishing the look of our sequence through grading the footage, as well as finalising the look of our titles and producing them. This was done largely in collaboration with our teachers and focus group, who were always keen to feedback on our choices of font and colour. A very useful effect in Premiere Pro for colour correction and grading was ProcAmp. This effect had a range of useful pararmeters, such as saturation, brightness and contrast, which we could adjust in order to achieve a precise colour grade. ProcAmp also allowed us to do a split screen of before and after it's effects and thus allowed us to see if we had lost any details from the original shot, that we wanted to keep in the grade. A good example of this, may be some details in shadows or white clothes, that could be easily lost if the saturation or contrast was turned up too far.

Our Post-It Notes

In retrospective, I am very happy with how smooth of an experience week 2 of our edit was, because it very easily could have been made far more difficult had we been less organised. However, if I were to do the project again, I definitely would have changed one part of our edit organisation. As a group, we used post it notes to keep track of changes and what we had to do next, however by the end of our final edit week, we had post it notes everywhere. Therefore I think that if I were to do it again, I would devise some sort of system for storing old post it notes, should we need to reference them, yet keep them out of the way when we are working.

Construction Post 5: The Back-Up Shoot

Me monitoring the sound

The back-up shoot was definitely our most successful shooting session, with us only shooting new footage for all of the lake scenes. Due to us needing to capture less footage on this day, we were able to start shooting an hour later which greatly improved morale of the whole cast and crew and ultimately positively affected the outcomes of our back-up shooting session. One major improvement we made to our shooting style over the main shoot session was the improvement in quality of our mastershots, which we received good feedback and guidance on from our teachers, as to how to improve our mastershots. We made sure that each continuity sequence had atleast one good mastershot and in the case of the bullying shot it was very important to us to have more than one.

In hindsight, there is not much I would change about our back-up shoot, however when editing we realized there were occasional takes that we could not use as the sun had gone behind a cloud and thus there was a dramatic change in lighting. I think that perhaps we should have waited for the sun to reemerge in such situations, given the amount of extra time available to us on our back-up shoot. That said, we took enough takes of each shot, to have atleast one take in good lighting of each shot, so this issue was largely negated.

Construction Post 4: Reflections on Edit Week 1

Our Main Font Used

During our first edit week, alot of major ground work had to be done by our group to get the post-production of our project off to a good start. This meant that in actuality, this was probably the busiest week of the project as we had an intensive editing week followed by a back-up shoot on Sunday. It was important to the group to simply put as much time as possible into the edit and get as much: shot renaming, take selecting and clip cutting done as possible this week and so our editing timetable was practically filled from 8am in the morning, til up to 5pm in the afternoon. During this time, we also trialed many different styles of titling and produced many test titles to try out in our sequence and see what we liked most. These titles were produced on a Macbook in LiveType, using the fonts such as "A Song for Jennifer" or "Briasco Rustic" which both had a distinctly handmade feel about them.

Edit Week 1 Schedule

Looking back on the week, I am very proud of our group as the work we did here really helped us get on with fine tuning the project the following week. However, I personally think that it would have been useful for us to not have more than 3 people booked to a session, as only really 2 people can work at one time on the edit suite and only 1 person could really work on titles. Therefore, if we had 4 people booked for a session, normally one member of the group would be left out, feeling as if they weren't contributing much to the session and their time could be far better spent.

Construction Post 3: Reflections on our Main Shoot Session

Personally, I felt our main shoot session went very well and in fact all the footage we shot at my house in the afternoon we ended up using in the final edit. All of this footage was well lit, shot and acted in and thus it was an easy call for us to say that we were happy with it. During this shoot we had fewer technical issues than on our practice shoot, with the only major issue being a loud buzzing coming out of our monitor headphones. This was not too big of an issue as the sound was still properly recorded, it just meant that we were not able to notice disruptions to our sound recordings, which could have been caused by the nearby train.

Myself and the lead actor on the shoot

That said, our footage captured for the conflict scene was next to unusable, this is because the continuity in this sequence was exceptionally poor as we only had one master shot, which meant we found it very difficult to produce something continuous and interesting to watch as our final product. This was fixed on our backup shoot, by liaising with our teachers beforehand and working out an improved shot list and procedure for filming our takes. If we were to do our main shoot again, I would have definitely placed far more emphasis on capturing multiple high quality master shots from a range of angles. That said, as a whole I was happy with our main shooting session, although it definitely could have been improved on.

Construction Post 2: Our Post-Production Kit

When working on the post-production for our sequence, we were allocated an edit suite to work on. We were also allowed to record the voiceover in a quiet back room, so as to not get any noticeable background noise. Our edit suites ran the windows operating system, where as our titles were produced on macbooks.

Our Post-Production Kit List

Our Edit Suite and Premiere Pro Timeline

• Macbook Computer
• Dual Monitor Edit Suite
• Blue Yeti Microphone
• LiveType software for creating titles
• Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 for editing our sequence
• Audacity for recording our voiceover

Construction Post 1: Our Production Kit

Our Camera Setup

For our shooting days we were able to borrow our production kit from our school's media department under 2 conditions. Firstly, that we had our equipment contracts signed and secondly that the shoot was authorised by our media teacher, Mrs. Blackborrow. It became my responsibility each week to take the kit home before a shoot and return it back to school by 8:35am the following Monday morning. 
Our Production Kit List

• Canon Legria HRD30
• Tripod
• Shotgun Microphone
• Sennheiser HD 201 Headphones
• Shootboard
• Clapper Board

R+P Post 20: Reflections so far / looking ahead

Our Primary Moodboard

Below I have embedded a Prezi which discusses my thoughts and reflections on our last week of research and planning. As a whole, I am very happy with the work completed by both myself and my group during the pre-production stage. I personally think the most useful documents produced by us, were the mood boards as it got everyone in the group on the same page and got us to all start having to fully explain our ideas to each other and I felt the moodboard really helped aid this communication of ideas.

R+P Post 19: Our rough cut

Our rough cut helped us work out exactly which shots we wanted to film in our main shoot. When reviewing our shots at the start of the rough cut it became clear that although certain shots seemed good inside of our own heads and when filming, these shots infact did not look as we expected and ended up being completely scrapped, even in our rough cut. That said, some of these shots we looked to rework and shoot from a slightly different angle in our main shoot.

Another important part of our rough cut was working out exactly how we wanted our voice over and music to sound as we recorded our music and voice over ourselves. Recording the music proved to be far more time consuming than we expected, however recording the instrumental allowed us to record each individual verse, chorus and bridge independently and have full control over how the music would fit with the visuals. Below is our rough cut.

When we finished the editing of our rough cut, we showed a focus group of LGBTQ+ teens for feedback on our rough cut, to integrate into our final product. These faults and improvements are listed below:

• A more concise, yet more authentic voice over
• Script the conflict and conversation between the bullies
• I was in the cereal GoPro shot
• Shoot longer takes to improve continuity
• Improve the consistency of the lighting
• Make the representations of the characters more obvious
• Increase the volume of the music

If we were to do our rough cut again, I would have spent more time grading our footage. This would have given us a good idea of roughly what sort of settings we want to use in our main edit and also allow us to try to pin down a look for our footage. This would greatly decrease the time required to complete our main edit, which is normally a time consuming process.