Future Opportunities

One of the Future Opportunities that I have coming up is the 2015 Sunderland International Airshow. Myself and the rest of the team from Cram Media will be heading to the event to film live coverage and post it to our Youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/user/CramMedia

We filmed this event last year and found it was a success and we will continue to film this event in the years to come. I find this is relevant as this is the kind of production that I wish to continue through out this course and beyond.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwWnZJl7WkXNRCdI83BWEj_Am5byTv64n

Customs House Teenage Cancer Trust

I recently filmed a charity concert at the Customs House in South Shields in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust. Overall the night was a complete success with lots of money raised and the organiser looking into making it a yearly event. We are very happy with the outcome of the video as it includes a lot of interesting shots from a number of different angles and this made the video more interesting.

We only really encountered one main problem during the production and that was that we had a lot less space in front of the stage than what we were hoping for as we originally planned to use the tracks so that we could get some nice smooth tracking shots and pans, however the day before the shoot we went for a final meeting and found that seats had been put where we thought we would have free roam. we worked around this by having a free roaming camera with an operator and basher.

Lord David Putnam

In march I had the opportunity to attend a talk hosted by Lord David Putnam at college. This was a very informative talk in which he discussed his life both on and off screen. He talked about his role as producer in the Hollywood Blockbuster film Chariots of Fire as well as producing Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express. He was CEO of Columbia Pictures from 1987 to 1988, and after this went back to producing films with Enigma Productions. In 1998 he retired from film production to concentrate more on his work in education and the environment.

I found this talk very informative and interesting as has had an illustrious career in Hollywood and talked about what it was like to work with certain actor in the films and thought he was very inspiring to me and the rest of the people that were present.

Intro to Factual

I have recently finished my Intro to Factual module and found it to be very interesting. I found it interesting as I like filming real people not characters and covering true stories. This is what I am looking to choose on level 5 and beyond as a career.

I was happy with the way that the product turned out as there were a few problems. There are a number of things that I would change if I was to do this production again.
Firstly I would film more cutaways as the ones that we have didn't seem to be very relevant to what Paul was talking about in the video. This would have allowed us to include more relevant footage in the edit and make it a better production.
Secondly I would have shortened some of the Interview as the video does become boring in places as Paul talks for too long and starts to go off topic. Also we had run out of cutaways to use at this point and this meant that we had to leave the interview on screen for long periods of time. If we had changed these point it would have made it a better production as we would have been able to disguise the cuts more in the edit and cut down on the time Paul was onscreen.
Lastly I would have spent more time on the sound. The sound that we had captured was not the best as we did not record any sound externally on the other shoots which meant that we could only include the sound from the interview as well as an ambient track to disguise the cuts in the audio. However we could not have captured sound on the penshaw location as it was far too windy.

The finished Product can be found on my YouTube channel.

Intro to Factual Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H49gc0vPERU

Digital Skills Task 3

I have just completed my final Digital Skills task. This task involved creating a video using the technique of the Parallax Effect. To achieve this effect I first had to take a number of photographs of people/objects and a few that would be good backgrounds. I then took the images of the people into Photoshop and Cut around them. This left me with just the people in a PNG image. I then imported these files into After effects and layered them on top of the background, scaled them to the appropriate size and then added movement.

I found this task very interesting as I had never used After Effects or Photoshop before this task. I have now learned how to use this software and I can now use it in future projects. I feel that this Task has benefited me immensely as I now have more knowledge and understanding of the uses and how to use these two pieces of software.

Task 3 - http://youtu.be/2v5nIq0455I

Practise Enrichment Tasks 2 and 3

I have just finished my Task 2 and 3 for my Practise Enrichment Module. I feel that I did not complete these tasks to the best of my ability as I left Task 3 until quite late and this meant that I ended up rushing the filming and making mistakes. Saying that however, I do feel that I did the best I could in the time I had left.

Task 2 - Interview.

I feel that this was one of the better productions that I had made for my practise enrichment. I asked Victoria to be the interviewee for my interview and the production went well, I got the length that I wanted and on the whole I think the video turned out ok except for there being a bit of grain in the image.

Task 3 - 60 Second Task

In this task I have made a few mistakes as I had left this task until quite close to the deadline and therefore the mistakes that I made I did not have time to fix by reshooting. One of the mistakes I made was where I had positioned the lights. I positioned them in a way where they are reflecting off the kettle and ruining the shot.

One of the things that worked quite well in my opinion was the slow motion mixing of the tea and the milk. I achieved this by filming at 720p and 50FPS and then slowing it down in post. I feel that this was one of the best shots in the video and may have made it look more professional after the errors I made.

Interview - http://youtu.be/jDQf1V6kSnM

60 Second Clip - http://youtu.be/-oghM8_o6Gw

Practise Enrichment Task 1

My first task for my practise enrichment module was to create a sheet of Shot styles that we could then go on to refer to within the rest of our productions. I asked mark to be in my task so that I could exhibit the different shot types such as; Long shot, mid shot, close up and extreme close up etc. I thought that I completed this task quite well and correctly showed the different styles.