Time Management Update

After spending a few weeks intensely editing my film, along with recording the audio for the film and gathering stills for my ancillary tasks, I have nearly finished my final draft of the film. Sometime soon I will be uploading this final draft to the YouTube channel as I have previously stated.

I have gathered an ample amount of stills to use in my ancillary tasks, and I will also be using screen caps from the film to add to this. I am going to be beginning these tasks this week if everything goes as I have planned.

Original Song

As part of my film, and to avoid copyright infringements, we wrote an original song which we called 'Lungs'. I decided to upload this song to the YouTube channel as a promotional video for the film.

This video can be found here

After filming this promo video, we realised that ripping the audio from this recording would suit the needs of the film, as the recording was not high enough quality. We got in touch with a local recording studio called The Garage, whose website can be found here, and booked in to record. We managed to get a great version of the song recorded in just over 2 hours, and then I uploaded the song to YouTube, along with a free download link if people felt like they wanted to have this song on their iPod etc.

The final version of the song, with the audio I have actually put in the film, can be found here.

Production Company

I decided to name my production company 'Dawson Woods Films'.

I chose this name as it is a combination of my surname and my Director of Photography, Peter Dawson, who contributed greatly to the film, and I feel he has had a great deal of influence on the film, bringing in ideas for shooting etc.

I have also created a YouTube channel for my film company as I will be uploading my film to this channel. I also created a logo in Photoshop which I used as a basis for a display picture and channel art for the YouTube channel.

The channel can be found here

Here is the logo I have made, and what I am going to use for a title card in the film.

Post Filming

I recently spent a day filming my actual piece. We managed to get everything filmed with two hours left over to do pick ups and various other little experimental things that I may include in the film.

I was extremely happy with the performance of my actors and the crew and got some feedback on how my actors felt I handled things.

One of my actors, Jon Burton, commented that I ran a very productive and creative set, and he enjoyed working with me greatly, but thought I should have spent more time filming scenes from different angles so I had more to work with when editing, which I felt was a good piece of criticism.

Unfortunately, we were working on a clock as some of the actors had to go early on, so we needed to film their scenes as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Production Company Research

In the process of making my own production company for my short film, I felt it appropriate to look into a few smaller production companies for short films.

One company I looked into earlier for my pitch, was BFI (British Film Institution) which is a company dedicated to helping people in the UK appreciate the art of the moving picture, as well as helping people produce films, both small and larger in scale. Their logo is quite simple and reflects film as an art form, combining elements of depth of field, lens flare, as well as focus.

This is the logo for Coffee Films, a company that makes many independent shorts as well as wildlife movies. I notice there is a through line in the colour scheme. This is a very professional, black and white colour scheme that I feel gives a great impression. The artistic style of this logo in particular gives off the right messages from Coffee Films, making them seem artistic and creative. 

I think the black and white, simplistic styles of these companies will have a very large influence onthe final brand identity of my production company.

Pre-Filming

Resources Needed:

- Camera
- Tripod
- Sound Equipment
- Camera Slide Mount
(Peter Dawson, cinematographer, is providing all above)
- Bottles of Water for Cast/Crew
- Notepads
- Copies of Scripts

All above, except recording equipment, is being provided by myself. All of the resources are needed on Saturday the 9th of November. We have called all of the actors at 9AM to begin recording, and have told them we should be done by about 3PM.

Potential Problems on set:

Absences are a potential problem. We intend on shooting everything in one day, but we are willing to go over into he next day if this problem should arise. Lighting is also an issue we will have to take into account as we will only have so many hours of daylight to work with, since the artificial light in the room isn't brilliant and we cannot find any other lights to bring down and use.
No permission slips are needed for set as none of the Cast or Crew are minors and have all verbally expressed their intent to be there.

Magazine Spread Deconstructions

This is an example of a magazine spread. Most of the spread consists of stills in the film, as well as behind the scenes images. In the pictures we see primary characters, as well as primary props from the film. The whole thing is dominated by promotional images, and I will reflect this by including many stills from shooting and from the final product itself. There is some boxes including highlighted quotes from the text which I quite like the look of, and might include something similar in my final piece to bring the reader's attention to specific pieces of information. There is also something to the left related to another film, which appears to be a frequent piece in the magazine which is something I will think about incorporating into my final product.

In this spread, it seems again that it is primarily dominated by movie stills. This is likely to make the large spread more digestible for the reader. The piece seems primarily concerned with providing teasers to the audience, in an attempt to draw them into seeing the film. It provides small pieces of information, and large stills from the films showing various characters and shot types, providing a range of different thoughts as to what this film may be like. 

This spread, from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is the same. Most of the spread is image and a smaller portion is text. Again, I believe this is to generate hype for the film in a way that is considered quite digestible. This is not supposed to be an informative piece, but more of an advertisement.

Throughout this deconstructions, I have found that they are all dominated by images to make the article more digestible to the audiences. I believe this to be quite patronising to the audience, and I am going to try and avoid this by having equal parts images and interesting information about the film in my magazine spread.