Hello and welcome to my blog. Together Rosie Stocking and I have made a short film called 'Mind Trap' which shows a dramatised look into scizophrenia and the effects it can have on the sufferer. This blog will cover all of the work which has been done from the start of the coursework, where initial ideas were created and research was conducted, till the end, where the final main and ancilary products are shown and evaluated.



Wednesday 26 January 2011

26th January 2011

We have now edited nearly 3 minutes of our film. But we have started to worry that our film won't be long enough and that it won't reach the recommened 5 minutes. However, if this is the case we know that it is going to be close. We have been told that 4 minutes 30 seconds will be an acceptbale time, which has calmed our worries but we still believe that some extra footage may be needed. At this point we have decided to keep editing as our worries my not become reality but we also know that we have the time to do extra filming if needed. Worries like these is one of the main reasons why we wanted to start editing as soon as we could, so we would have plenty of time to reshoot and film extra footage. Also we will have more time to recieve audience feedback and make any amendments we decided are needed as a result.

Wednesday 19 January 2011

19th January 2011

So far we have editied about one and half minutes of our film. We haven't got as much done as we first thought we would have by now but we are not concerned about time as we have all the footage we need and we are editing at a suitable pace, even if it isn't as fast as first thought. I have always known, from past experience, that editing is slow and time consuming process but due to the fact that neither of us have used Final cut or even an Apple Mac before we are having to get use to new things as we work, which is slowing down the process. We hope to finish the first edit in the next couple of weeks, at which point we will recieve audience feedback and change our film according to the feedback.

Wednesday 12 January 2011

12th January 2011

This week we continued with our first edit on Final Cut Pro. We are slowly becoming more use to the programme, as despite having previous experience editing we have never used this particular programme. We have found that it can be frustrating at times but we are able to use it in the way we need to. A screen cap of our progress is shown below:

We have also created a list of the things we need to do in the next few weeks: - Finish first edit - Make hallucinations black and white - Make Lucas' voice more spooky (experiment with sound FX on FCP) - Make Roxanne’s voice sound like a phone call (experiment with sound FX on FCP) - Reasearch into what is put into credits - Add transitions to film. - Find music for end credits (copyrighting is an issue) - Tighten up editing - Figure out how to fade black and white into colour when Lucy answers the phone - Dub a phone ringing over Lucy's ringtone? - Sort out sound (delete sound where we don’t need it, make sure sound is in sync with footage) - Export and audience feedback (film audience feedback)


We aim to ahcieve these goals in the next few weeks.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

5th January 2011

We have now finised both out poster and our radio advert and so it was time to start the first edit of out film. Our teacher decided that the best time to finsih the first edit was straight after half term. This deadline is easily achieveable as we have already started to eduiot out film due to the fact that when we were unable to use some of the equipment needed we started editing out film so not to waste time. We are using Final Cut Pro to edit our film and I have been given responsibility of being the main editor. This is because I have had editing experience through other programmes due to the vlogging I do in my spare time and due to the fact that I have made fan videos which have recieved over 46,000 views on youtube.

In terms of analysing full-lentgh feature films, we chose 'Donnie Darko' and 'Memento'.

'Donnie Darko' (2001)
This film applies to our film because it tells the story of Donnie Darko, a teenager who is plagued by Frank, a hallucination that takes the form of a demonic rabbit. Frank threatens everything in Donnie's life and, while no one seems to believe him; Gretchen is one of the few people Donnie can talk to abou this hallucinations. This is very similar to our film, but we have chosen to use a person to plague Lucy to make it easier for us to film and organize and we feel that using something like a rabbit would make the film more comedic and off topic.

'Memento' (2000)
One thing that we decided to take from this film is the use of black and white footage and colour and how they are used to distinguish between past events and present events throughout the movie. We thought that this was very effective and that it made the film easier to undersatand, so we decided to use this idea to show the difference between Lucy's hallucinations and reality. We also liked the way that the plot is jumbled up, but we didn't think that this would work in out film as we don't have the time scale to develop a complex plot.