Production and Post Production

Production Journal –

Week 1 – This week we learnt all about our upcoming new unit, ‘Drama Production’ We started by making our new tabs on WordPress, once these were done we could get down into starting the unit. We were told that we had to make a montage on one of the following themes: Happiness, Freedom, Loneliness, Anxiety, Love, Anger, Dreams, Reflections, Distortion, Time. I decided to choose ‘Love’ as that’s the one i feel i will be able to talk the most about and do a montage on something i really love. To really understand what a montage is and how we could make one we watched some for research we also made notes on our ‘Montage Research’ tab and watched at least two montages. Here we considered the mood, theme, visuals, editing and
types of shots used as well as the audio. I used two different montages to compare, a favorite of mine from Doctor Who Series 9 Episode 11 ‘Heaven Sent’ that portrays time in a very meaningful way that also helps to progress the story further and ultimately end it with this 11 minute montage and the other was from the Disney Pixar film ‘Up’ this montage called ‘Marriage Life’ featured at the start of the film showed us again how time was portrayed in a montage but also showed us Love and this made me realize that i wanted my theme to be love so i begun to brainstorm ideas. This ended Week 1.

Week 2 – This week I did some more development to my Theme Analysis and Research Portfolio sections of my blog. After doing this I made a mood board and put down things to do with love and what it means to me, i put down things i loved, and love related pictures. This helped to generate ideas in my head of what i could do my montage on. I then made a mind-map of things associated with love. very similar to the mood board but this time with words and not pictures, still explaining what love is and how i could implement it in a montage. I then sat and really begun to think of what to make my montage on and couldn’t get the idea of doing my dog as my main subject out my head. So, i decided to go with it as he is the one thing i love the most and could really show how much i love him and make a fun interesting montage with him taking center stage (because, who doesn’t love dogs!) This then ended Week 2.

Week 3 – This week we started to plan what our production will be, We made the story board of rough ideas and sketches of what we will feature in our montage. We also brainstormed our shots that we will use. This helped a lot because it also helped me to determine what lens i should rent out when i book out my camera and other utensils. I came to the conclusion that it should be mainly medium shots with a couple establishing shots to begin and end it, so, with this i made my story board. This will be the thing i follow the closest because it outlines what my production will look like. After this the next thing to do was to make a risk assessment. With this i had to go through all the possible risks of making my production and how it could impact filming. This was vital as i had to consider everything that could go wrong while filming. I also considered location’s and took some photos of where it will be shot this week, this is usually called location scouting. Because i was to be filming at my house i had to take photos to put in my blog. once again this helped a lot to know where i could film. I ended the week by booking out my equipment to film the next week.

Week 4 – On the Sunday i begun filming my montage and started filming the first day of two. This was the day i recorded the Peep Show recreation of the title sequence with my dog. Originally this wasn’t going to happen, but when i happen to catch a shot of my dog sat watching my TV when i had Peep Show on in the background i decided it was too good not to incorporate some way so i recorded it and set it as a bit to play at the beginning before the montage begins. This was totally improvised but came out the best off all the shots in my opinion. I recorded him watching the show and had the theme tune (Flagpole Sitta, which is also the song of choice for my montage) play straight into my montage. The next day i recorded all scenes for my montage, the second half of my drama production, The shots recorded in day two were all of my dog that were as close to the ones i imagines in my story board as possible, i got a lot of footage by just letting the camera just run raw and get as much footage as possible, meaning my dog got comfy with the camera being around and was happy with it being there. This meant that i got all the best footage from towards the end of the footage. The rest of the week was spent beginning my editing.

Week 5 – This week was mainly focused on editing and getting the best possible version of my production as i could. I made a rough edit that i didn’t like that much so i remade it and changed the shots around, This was a bit of a risk as i didn’t know what it could do to my production, it could either save it or ruin it even more. But that was the risk i took and it worked for the better, the shots timed in much better with the music and i decided to scrap the final establishing shot as i loved the shot of Charlie sniffing the camera too much as when he does it goes dark from his fur covering the lens, i feel this is the perfect end shots to leave the video on. I played around with some effects and transitions throughout the whole editing process to make it look as good as possible, even adding some color correctness to it to make it look that little bit better. As from watching some behind the scenes on ‘Doctor Who’ i learnt that for the recent series’ they had color corrected the whole series to make it pop that little bit more and to make the colors more appealing to the eye so after discovering what effects they use, i applied the same ones and realized it looked so much better.

Week 6 – This, the final week was at least for me used for completing little jobs i still had outstanding that i hadn’t managed to finish yet. This included my production journal, last bits of editing and evaluation. We also watched our productions this week, everyone showed theirs off and we wrote our reviews for them. We gave constructive criticism about everyone’s including thoughts on editing, shots, music everything, I got some great comments on mine, people gave some really good constructive criticism on my video and i really took it on board and will put it to use the next time i make a production of any kind, I also did my evaluation this week, this rounded everything up and finished off my Unit 6 work, i made sure to go into as much detail as possible with the little time we had left until the deadline. This is it, that was Unit 6, Drama production and all the details on everything that we did.

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Here is my finished montage that i edited on Adobe premiere pro, i put together all my shots according to my story board and edited it with the music to make the best possible montage i could. The opening is a little transition that i came up with while i happened to be messing round with the camera getting my settings right and caught the opening shot and came up with the idea of getting my dog to watch peep show. This then leads nicely into the montage due to the song being not only the theme to peep show but my choice of song for my montage.