Skills audit

My skills audit at the beginning of a2 from arreb001_308

Before starting my coursework I did a skills audit using my experiences from last year and rated each skill. I then set myself some goals to achieve during A2. 

A2 Media Studies

From this point onwards my blog will be used for my A2 coursework. I will be working with Roshani Perera. Our task is to create a music video.

Our Evaluation

Final Piece- Mind Games

Our Final Piece

This is our final piece; we were able to get to this stage by taking on board the comments that were made by the audience. The original idea for the storyline had to be changed because of the challenges which we face, for example the corridor light were automatic meaning that the fill would be too bright for it to have the thriller theme to it.

People's Opinions On Our Final Piece

We asked people to watch our final piece and comment on the good and bad things of our movie. From the audiences comments we saw that everyone enjoyed our movie. This meant that we managed to create an opening to our movie to good standards as the audience were attracted to it.

Changes we made to the scenes

Our story line had to change from our initial storyboard due to a number of reasons. One of them being the reliability of the actors who we needed were unable to make it during the times were we wanted to film. This put more pressure on the group in terms of time and keeping to a schedule. To go around this issue we were able to obtain a new character, Mario Tofaris who was our new character in the role of Christina’s father rather than David. This allowed us to be more flexible with filming as Mario attended our sixth form as a collegiate student making it easier for us to film after school without so much of a delay.

Another reason for changing the story line was due to issues with the school as we were not allowed permission after the first filming to shoot on site. This gave us even more limited time on filming and put more pressure on the group to finish. Luckily we were able to find permission to film on another site – Trinity at Bowes.  However as the building changed we were unable to film the scene with the corridor as it internal design was different to that at school and would affect the consistency of the filming if our character would be viewed in a blatantly different location.

We attempted to get around this issue by turning the lights off in one room and shine a torch on our character. This made it unclear of the room and would only view the location as though it were a corridor. However because the lighting was too dark even with the torch it still appeared too dark for us to film. This led us to come up with the idea of the lift scene which was also in the new building where we were filming. After the attempt to film the corridor scene in the one room did not work we had to quickly think of how we were going to film this part of our thriller and how we would link it straight after the toilets scene. We decided add more suspense to our thriller through the CCTV camera which allowed us to use the conventions of thriller of the use of black and white.

For our thriller we had intended to use white noise to reveal Mario in the toilets scene with Christina to add to the sense of suspense and give it that skipped heart beat effect. However because of the short amount of time which Mario was viewed in the filming we decided to keep it out and leave it only on the background music. This also kept the texture lighter so that not too many sounds were layered all at once.

Challenges we faced with our location

Our Locations had to be changed. This is because the site manager at our school was delaying his decision on whether or not he would give permission to film on school premises with boys for the third time filming. We required filming this many times because we didn’t have the sufficient camera shots. In addition, some of our camera shots weren’t to the best of standards which meant that we had to re-film them. As our school closes at 6pm and needs students to start leaving at 5:45 we only had a limited time to film. This is because we had to wait for the majority of the school students to be off the premises, which were at around 4:00 – 4:15pm, before we started filming.

However, after about a week of waiting, we were told that we couldn’t film at school with boys on site for the third time. This hugely impacted our planned filming and also resulted in three scheduled days of filming to be cancelled. We therefore had to decide whether we changed our storyboard completely and changed the location or if we would find somewhere similar to film. After some persuading, Beatriz’s volunteering place, Trinity at Bowes church, allowed us to use their halls to film our coursework. However, they asked us to agree to repay them by filming a music concert that was happening on Friday 30^th March.

As our filming was pushed back so far, we had to work extra hard to complete the editing of our two minute movie opening. This also meant that we had to attend school during our Easter holiday on Thursday 5^th April to finish our blogs and final two minute movie opening. Beatriz Arredondo recorded the final version of the voices we used in our final piece. She also edited the credits. Roshani Perera created the CCTV monitor effect. Mary-Grace Vicente was unable to attend as she had to go to work.

Checklist

This image is a printscreen of the checklist that each of our group member had. It allowed us to be organised as we used it to check what step we had to complete next.