SOUND EFFECTS + NON COPYRIGHTED MUSIC.

For our film, which is in the film noir styley, we will be including some music, typically jazz, and because we had a gunshot involved we will be including a gunshot scene, we will of course be needing a gunshot noise. Because of our lacking of a working gun or the ability to play the sax or piano, we needed the use of a special effects CD. From what I hear, an old student's father used to work at the BBC, in the editing department, and he gave a heck of special effects and non copyrighted CDs to the school. Thank you, good sir. After searching long and hard for the right music we chose a plinky plonky piano number - which is quite unsettling. To make it even more unsettling, we put this weird eery screeching noise underneath - it doesn't sound quite as weird as it...sounds. We also chose a gun noise - now I can't be certain if the shot noise if suited to our plastic gun, but hopefully noone will notice that. This brings me to the subject of foley artists - ie. the people who find the noise to suit the situation. Whilst on a media trip to New York, we were taught about these and I discovered that to make the noise of a foot step in the snow they put custard powder in a bag and squeeze it! The thought of that actually makes me quite queasy, but more interestingly, they showed us a clip from titanic where a barrell falls over mid ship sinking, and the sound for it is actually a lion's roar backwards! I wonder where they came up with the idea to use that? I couldn't find a clip of this (thanks, copyright), but here is a shot of the scene, and you can see the big barrell starting to tip.

BIGGER PICTURE RESEARCH

I have become quite addicted to blogging these past few days I'll have you know! So I finally went and had a look at the Bigger Picture Research website, a blog written by freelance writer and researcher specialising in film, and on it, there's pretty much everything about everything. Having looked at the quality and depth of his posts, I don't know when this man finds time to eat or sleep or go to the toilet. A post in particular that interested me was the UK Cinema Admissions 2009; which shows how many people have been going to the cinema in the past year, and as it turns out it has gone up by 5.6%, meaning it is the busiest year since 2002, and December saw the highest sales of tickets since 2005 - was this caused by blockbuster Avatar?

UPDATE - IT'S FINISHED.

Today, we are sorting the wheat from the chaff, and I think we have finished our film PRAISE JESUS. We have managed to get rid of what grinds my gears - see WHAT GRINDS MY GEARS post to find out what was bugging me about our film - we sorted out the hug (kind of, somethings just cannot be fixed), sorted out the gun shot, special effects issue by cutting pre-gunshot and moving the bang noise to the next shot. This also gave it a bit of mystery - did he actually get shot? We made the slow mo shot a bit less cheesey by getting rid of the scream - a special effects CD scream - because it sounded absolutely ridiculous. I feel a lot better about this now. Phew. We also removed some scenes from the walking around - minimising camera jiggle. We also removed one scene from where she is putting her make up on, and cut it down - I think the indoors scenes, where she is putting her make up on were too long, especially the part where she was putting her lipstick on - I often find myself waiting for this shot to end whilst I am watching it,although I have watched it more times than I have had hot dinners. Currently we are asking people for their feedback, in time to make any last changes, and my finished piece will soon be hitting my blog near you. AND ALSO, next week me and 11 other privileged members of my media are doing a short week long course with a local media pro, David Lloyd (who also helped out whilst I was doing Media BTEC to film a short animation piece that went on to win, among others from our BTEC group at a local animation festival), where we will be filming another short film - so keep your eyes peeled for when that features on my blog!

CONTINUITY TASK EVALUTATION

As you can see from my post before, featuring the continuity task IT IS FAR FROM PERFECT. The aim of the continuity task was to show and be able to film good continuity; which is when the shots 'blend together'; for example, if you had a shot of someone wearing a pink jumper in one shot and then in the next shot they were wearing a blue jumper that would be bad continuity. For example, have a look on this site: Movie Mistakes. Our task is good continuity-wise, but the content is NOT SO GOOD... well, it was only supposed to be a quick task to show we know how to use a camera. We had some technical issues, for example, the camera struggled to pick up the glamourous actresses voices, and we filmed without a camera, so it is kind of shaky - we can justify this by saying it is the point of view of her stalker, and the camera of life, or our point of view is shaky but we are used to it.

CONTINUITY TASK

HELLO THIS IS OUR CONTINUITY TASK.

WHAT TO CALL OUR FILM?

We struggled with what to name our film noir. They are normally quite elusive - i.e. you haven't got a clue what the film is about, apart from the fact that I have informed you they are famous 'film noir' films. For example, The Blue Dahlia - what springs to mind? I'll be honest, not much, apart from the question what exactly is a Dahlia? Maybe I will find out in the film...so now you have people hooked in. Like all the great film noir before us we decided to also have an elusive name. We were informed by Miss Moore, that film noir titles including a main character of a femme fatale, often have one very feminine word mixed with a very dark, contrasting word - par exemple, Angels with Dirty Faces, which after IMDBing it doesn't sound like such a great film, but is a good example of a title. Miss Moore suggested we get on t'thesaurus and find alternative words for words like women; which was the worst search we did, as the results were poor, such as 'seawoman'. Not exactly film noir material. We also searched the word violence which came up with a much more successful search - and stealing inspiration from  Touch of Evilvoted number 4 on IMDB's top 50 film noir titles, we came up with the title Touch Of Vehemence, meaning a touch of violence.

UPDATE. WHAT REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS ABOUT OUR FILM.

In this post I will be telling you pretty much how our project is going so far. So far, it is going alright. We have finished filming, and neearly finished editing and the titles are on the film. I think the film just needs some polishing - for example, at the end of the film we have a shot where the gun drops to the floor in slow mo. I am not too keen on this shot as it just looks cheesy as hell, and is also bad quality - and the gun broke on the first attempt so we could not attempt to film it again. Also there is a part where we shoot the man in question, and because we are slightly lacking in the special effects department the gun goes bang and nothing happens. I think we could before the trigger is completely pulled and let the bang go in the next shot.  I think there are some errors that detract from the quality of the film - for example, we used a tripod for the reshoot of our film, but we didnae use one for the first shot. This makes it annoying as hell to watch - one minute it is shaky and then the next it is not. I don't know if I notice this more than the examiner will because I have watched the film going on a million times. I don't think there is much to do about this other than a full blown remix and frankly we are running out of time. I think we can sort out the errors such as the cheesiness and I will get on that.

RESHOOT - HOW SHOULD I SAY HELLO?

We recently decided to reshoot our media following feedback from members of our media class ( you can see this feedback on Lydia's blog, who you can find at http://lydiaearlasmedia.blogspot.com/), so we went out and reshot again, adding on our extra bit, which you can see your 'storyboard' for in my previous post. We had previously tried to film another evening but it was just too rainy so there was noooooo way. One part we struggled with for our film was how there were to greet eachother when they met - all of our hugs were just looking a bit too matey. If you do not know what a matey hug looks like, please see the picture on the right. If our femme fatale was trying to kill this man, I do not think she would be that pleased to see him. Anyway, as a rule a femme fatale should be alluring and aloof. We then asked her to not hug back when he hugged her - this just looked ridiculous, frankly. We then suggested they peck each other on the cheek - this looked even more ridiculous as they kept having an awkward 'WHICH CHEEK AM I KISSING?' moment. We then suggested she shoot him on sight. This also looked daft. So we were brought right back to square one qand decided to go with a hug, but cut it so it looked a bit more lingering, and alluring, rather than full-on and friendly.

RESHOOT 1

We discovered we had a number of problems with our footage; the footage was too dark, it was wobbly and we even had my other teaaaaaaam members in the background.
We also decided to add some new shots - a scene where our femme fatale meets her prey, I won't reveal tooooo much now.

Here are some pictures we took as a storyboard for our new scene.

This is our first shot from our new sequence - This shows the character of the femme fatale walking towards the man.

This next shot is of the femme fatale approaching the man she is going to meet - she goes in for a greeting embrace.

This next image is of the femme fatale arming herself with her 'weapon', which in our film will be a gun, instead of a screwdriver, whilst still embracing her gentleman.

This next image is a shot of the femme fatale going to stab the man she met that evening - this is where we will end our film.