Narratives: Short Film 005

Filming Take 3

This, our final day of filming and another person behind the camera, this time it was Jennie's turn. Just the last scene to be filmed, but the most complicated as the same 3 second piece of film has to shot from a dozen different angles. After thinking about the continuity aspect of switching between angles it was very hard to remember which foot to start and to finish on!

Now, on with the editing!

Narratives: Short Film 004

Filming Take 2

With this, our second day at filming came a different person behind the camera. Owais offerered to film the shots for today, but after 30minutes of waiting I decided to film and act myself, which proved more difficult then I imagined. When he turned up we changed location and finished off the last few scenes. As we had already done some filming I had previously thought about the different angles for each shot so that we wasted as little time/tape as possible.

Narratives: Short Film 003

Filming Take 1

So, we shot our first piece of footage today! Granted it wasn't alot, but we got what was necessary. Me and Artis filmed the sequences in his flat where the male actor [played by me] would be seen getting frustrated and upset for an unknown reason. We had to set the scene and decided to create carnage in his living room, whilist trying each of the shots from multiple angles.

So thats half a dozen scenes finished, just another 3000[ish] to go....

Narratives: YouTube Video Blog 002

After much thinking and speaking to Deborah to clarify the requirements of the task, I chose to respond to the Lostprophets music video. Although the video is on YouTube itself [found by searching Lostprophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy] I thought it would be a good idea to upload the video myself, incase the link I use on this blog breaks. Click here to view that video.

I then went about filimg a Video response. Not as easy as I first thought. After about 20 takes I finally got a 30 second snippet that I was [moderately] happy with. So, please don't judge me purely on this video...

SPP1: Interactive Narrative 002

My initial idea was to take a picture of my room and convert it to black and white [Using Photoshop] and create links for different areas of the image, so that when you hovered over them they changed from black and white to colour. Then, after you clicked on that specific area it would take you to a bigger image and a piece of information on that object. Below are some of those images.





This is when I started to hit some problems; the images I was producing had to be a specific size (800 x 350 pixels) which meant there were limitations in some of my shots, having to crop them and loosing some, if not most, of the image. I realised that this wasn't the best of ideas to complete so I gave it some thought and changed to the following idea...

My second and chosen idea is to follow a girl through the centre of town. And you [the user] being able to interact and decide their route to a specific detination (in this case their place of work). It was a little more work in what shots to take and how to take them to reduce the amount lost through cropping. But it was fun making up a story. Here are some of the images I will be using in this piece.





Thanks to Steph for helping me...

Now that I have all my images I shall be putting them in a logical order and creating a nice story with many directions.

SPP1: Interactive Narrative 001

By using JavaScript we have been given a task to produce an Interactive Narrative. For this my idea is to create a single [main] image, which then has different hotspots, which when clicked on show a piece of information and a larger picture of the object!

Narratives: YouTube Video Blog 001

So, we were given a task a few weeks ago of producing a video in response to a video that we like from popular site YouTube.

I had given some thought into what video I was going to respond to, after much thought I chose the music video 'A Town Called Hypocrisy' by welsh band 'Lostprophets'. I've loved this band from day one, so thought it was the perfect video to respond to. I particulary like the meaning behind the video and the song itself. The song is about how everyone is a hypocrite in todays world and the video shows that there is always two sides to every action/story.

But, I hit a major flaw in my idea. According to the specification you have to respond to a video blog that someone has posted on YouTube, which is nice, even after been given a link [for people who didn't know what video to use] to a music video by band OkGo. Also another major flaw in my way to stardom; if I upload the bands video myself I will be infringing their copyright, but I also run the risk of the link becoming invalid if the user takes the video off YouTube.

What to do?! I shall ponder with the idea of responding to the Lostprophets video, at the end of the day I'm still going to be posting a video response to someone elses video, yes?

Narratives: Image Meaning & Composition

Object Chosen: Computer.
Location: Desk
Currently Viewing: Scrubs [what else?]

Functionality: This object has many different functions. I use it to mainly fill my entertainment needs and to communicate with friends and family via the internet. Also it plays all sorts of different media, which is nice.

Aesthetic Beauty: There isn't much 'beauty' in this object, really [unless you class the fact its all black and silver]. Well, in saying that its beauty is one of the reasons I purchased it in the first place. I liked the fact it was sleek and stylish and that everything was one of two colours.

Communication: Well, where do I start, there's a hell of a lot of [capable] communication within this machine. Basically I use it to talk with friends and family back home or at university via IM and email. Its amazing that yet they're are so far away but seem like they're sat next to you.

Entertainment Value: Again, where do I start, there's endless amounts of entertainment that it has to offer. I listen to all of my music on here and constantly use it to watch episodes of Scrubs and Family Guy, and ocasionally I do some work on it too :]

I'm hoping I've fulfilled the criteria for this piece of work. I chose my PC as the object because it means something to me, and has a lot of things contained within it that I'm interested in.

Narratives: Short Film 002

So, today we presented our short film idea to propestive 'clients' [aka Deborah Tuck, Andy Love and Narrative Groups 10, 11 & 12] .

Let's back track for a second......

Since our first meeting a few weeks ago, we've stabilised our idea, come up with a plot and style for our film, oh, and found our 5th and final member, Emily. All in a days work etc. After much debating within the group we came up with the following idea.

The Plot [Take II]

For our 2 minute short film we have decided to depict the life, or moreso, the day of a man [played by Ben] with a problem. We will be using flashbacks, to portray 'happier' times, and there will be a dark style to give the feeling of sadness/depression.

Our main aim within the film is to mislead the audience, by telling the story of how and why he is depressed but the story can be 'read' in more than one way. The final scene will show the audience what is really was bothering the man. The flashbacks will show him being happy with his girlfriend and will be edited to be very colourful unlike the main scenes, to emphasise happier times to when his life wasn't so grim. We will be using some stills within the film to gain the effect that we would like.

We have also chosen to have no dialogue in this film, we will be using original music which will be produced by Owais specailly for the film and sound effects for the flashbacks.


Back to today, after we presented our idea to the clients we were given both positive and negative feedback on both our idea and our presentation/presenting skills, which was duely noted.

Our next task as a group is to meet up and write the script and storyboard. Till Then.

Tea, Toast and TV

It seems that I may be getting a little sidetracked from what I'm actually paying £3000 for...After working all summer it's finally nice to have some 'free' time to do nothing, drink cups of tea, and watch Deal Or No Deal, because that's what University is about right?

Ahem...