Research of Camera and Composition - Credit to Matthew

Whilst I was researching sound and editing, Matthew did some research on camera and composition. The screenshot below shows the research he did, and the post on his blog:

Reflection:
With Matthew researching this, Heather doing mise-en-scene and me doing sound and editing, the 4 aspects that we wanted to complete have been done. We may come back to them at a later date and improve the amount of detail, but we are happy that we've split up the tasks to get them all done. We all learnt about the different aspects of a Film Noir, and put this knowledge into practise because of the way we discussed what we researched and how we should adapt our final piece to suit each convention. To improve I think we all would have liked to do more in depth research, but we just aimed to cover the basics so we can use the research to move onto the filming process.

Photo Shoot

With research carried out about our location, and the synopsis of our narrative having been written, be decided it was time to do a photo shoot using one of our possible locations. The post I previously did about possible locations can be accessed by clicking the link below:
Location Research
This location features in the post above, but we are unsure about wether or not this will be the final place we pick for our actual filming. The purpose of this photo shoot was just to say what scenes will go where. We haven't sorted out costumes or props yet, so we are just wearing our normal clothes for this. Also, this shoot is during the day, but we will film our actual final piece at night to create the 'Noir' effect and match another convention. Matthew took the pictures of me and Heather on his iPhone 6 using a range of camera angels. He then sent them to me via Gmail, and I put them into a power point before uploading them to slide share:

Media photoshoot from Coey1611

Reflection:
In terms of planning, this was a big step up for us and helped us move forward in the right direction. From creating this photo shoot, as a group we now have a firm understanding of what scenes will go where when it comes to filming. We also now all have a feel for the location, because we all went there together to perform this photo shoot. We will now discuss further wether or not we think that this photo shoot could work for our production. From this task, I learnt about the importance of doing a photo shoot, and experimenting with different places throughout our chosen location. We could've done this task better by doing it in the dark or in costume, however we just wanted to draft each scene briefly to give us all an idea and I think we did that very well.

Narrative Starting Ideas

Our task for Media is to recreate an opening title sequence of a particular chosen genre. For my final piece, I am working with Matthew and Heather, and we have started to plan a narrative for our production and discussed different ideas for a story. We started by talking about a genre, and landed on the idea of recreating a Film Noir as much as we can. To do this, we will need to have a full understanding of the conventions that a Film Noir has, and attempt to recreate these into our production. Soon, we will allocate roles to each of us to ensure that we have that full understanding of this particular genre of film. Research will have to be done on things such as sound, so that we know what the soundtracks generally are, not to mention the way the dialogue is embedded. We will also need to research typical camera angles used, and the way that these films were edited, and how, not to mention the mise-en-scene, such as costumes and location. Another aspect of research will be the audience of a Film Noir; with an understanding of who these films were generally aimed at, we will have a good idea on the way we need to adapt our production to suit this particular type of audience. As a starting point, we talked as a group about possible ideas for our film and also about how many characters we would plan to have and what the general idea would be. From this, we were then able to write out a general synopsis of the narrative that we want our story to follow. Obviously this is just a starting idea so we will undoubtedly build on this idea and develop it in different ways.

'Micky is staring in the mirror with a gun... Flashback:

He was a successful person, but he had a big secret.

He employs an assistant (femme-fatal) who finds out his secret but agrees to keep quiet by blackmailing Micky.

Leaves him broke.

In his anger he kills her.'

Reflection:

In terms of planning, this was a good starting point for us. We were able to pitch all of our possible ideas across to each other, and adapt each one as a group. This was also good because now that we have picked our genre (Film Noir), and created a general synopsis, we can move on to research and future planning for filming our production.

This task also had some negative aspects, which allowed each of us to learn what we need to do to improve as a group. The discussion we had about out genre and narrative took a long time, and we were quite indecisive at times about deciding exactly what direction we wanted our production to go in. With future discussions, we plan to try and be more decisive about the decisions we make, which will allow us to work faster and develop ideas quicker. If we had landed on a genre and narrative quicker, we could have adapted our piece further and perhaps starting thinking about other things such as a location for our filming, or what equipment we would use. Having said this, the synopsis above is a good starting point, and we are all happy with the ideas we have.