15th February media lesson - what we learned

During this session was our second day of filming at Bentley Road. On this day we made sure we were extra careful when it came to what time we had to be back at college and we re-took several shots on this day to make sure that we had most of the shots we needed to maintain continuity effectively throughout the thriller. There was one particular scene in our thriller where, if the ketchup wasn't already there, we would've struggled to take shots for it and that was the scene where Alex and Jolyon are on the floor dead and this shot wouldn't have worked without the ketchup because it wouldn't have looked shocking enough to be in our thriller. Basically if there was no ketchup in the fridge on that day it would've made us unable to film these shots, so what we learned from this is that it is important to make sure that you have all the things you need when you are trying to film a particular scene in a film because your film may not relate to its genre quite so well if you don't use them.

8th February media lesson - what we learned

During this lesson, there were two things we had to finish in preparation for our filming session the following week which were the mind map and the shooting schedule. Although a shooting schedule had already been done we still needed to improve it and create a mind map showing all the conventions of typical thrillers, the sort of soundtrack we wanted to use and the location itself as well as other factors that would contribute to our film planning which are all mentioned on our mind map post.
From this lesson, we learned that it helps to finish your planning stages for your project as soon as possible so that you can do other posts that could get you extra marks for your thriller planning; otherwise you can end up losing time that you could've had to do these. That said however, we did manage to put up a post mentioning what we learned from Amar's presentation, which is mentioned on another post titled "What We Learned From Amar", so we actually did manage to get an extra post on the blogger, but even then we could've finished our planning stages sooner so we could've done more of these.

10th February media lesson - what we learned

During this lesson we went over to Bentley Road to start filming for our thriller project, and we took a lot of footage on this particular day so that we would have a lot of different shots to use in our thriller.
However, when you are doing a lot of filming in one day it is easy to get too ambitious and try to finish every shot right up to the end of the thriller for the sake of getting as much as you can get finished, so it is very important to make sure that when you actually do your filming for that day that you've actually saved enough time for you and your group to get back to college in time and carefully consider what shots you might need to take during your next filming session if there are any that you've missed.
All in all, from this filming session we learned that it is important not to go overboard trying to film a ridiculously large amount of footage if the group puts itself at risk of getting back to college to upload the footage, as this can make the whole group suffer as a result.

17th February media lesson - what we learned

Since we took lots of footage for our thriller two days before this date we thought it would be a good idea to start uploading our footage and editing it. From doing this, we noticed that some of our shots weren't as good as we would've liked or didn't flow very well, so we thought it would be best to work with the footage we'd already taken and take some more footage the next day at Bentley Road to ensure that our film maintained continuity with each shot. From this lesson, we learned that when we are editing our footage it is important to remember to check for any extra shots you could add or change to improve the thriller in certain aspects so that it actually fits with the codes and conventions of typical thriller films.

18th February media lesson - what we learned

During this lesson, we went over for one last trip to Bentley Road for our final day of filming in that location.
Although we already had most of our footage, we felt that it would be good to retake some of the shots and add a few extra ones to make sure that we had all the shots we needed to maintain continuity in our film and that the shots we took of the characters' actions were actually good enough to be used in our film.
Once again, we saved ourself a 30 minute time slot so that we could finish all the shots ahead of time and get back to college in time to upload our footage. This plan worked to an extent because our group actually managed to get back to the media classroom in time. However, there wasn't really enough time to upload the footage, but since we made it back in time anyway, we agreed to do this next lesson. From this filming session we learned the importance of making sure that we have all the shots we need to maintain continuity in our film and that there is no extra background noise when we are filming, as this can obviously confuse the viewing audience and make them wonder where the sound actually came from. There was no actual background noise interfering with our filming to begin with, but obviously if there was something like a fire engine/police car noise, etc and as we were filming and acting, this would clearly mess up our shots for the thriller and this was something we had realised from our filming session.

1st March media lesson - what we learned

Since all of our filming at Bentley Road was finished, we figured that this lesson would be a good time to start uploading our footage and editing it. While doing this, we noticed there were a lot of retakes of some of the shots we did, so we needed to pick the best shots out of the ones we had and put them together in the film so that there was good continuity. This was also a lesson where the soundtrack had to be worked on, so we divided the responsibilities between us, with Aaron and Alex working on the soundtrack and Jolyon and Hope working on the actual editing. This worked well because we all took to our responsibilities and made sure we did the work we were supposed to do. However, when we were putting the shots together we realised that because we were workig with shots that had been taken on different days, we had to make sure there was nothing in any of the shots that would mess up the continuity of the film eg costume changes, changes in actors' appearances, objects, etc. Because of this, it became clear to us that what we learned from this lesson is that it's important to make sure that you try to keep your location as similar as possible to how it was the last time you filmed there, because if you don't this can make some of your shots useless. Thankfully we were able to maintain continuity with most of our shots anyway, but from the work we did, this is what we realised.

3rd March media lesson - what we learned

During this lesson we continued with our editing and got to the point where our film had very good continuity and the shots fitted together effectively. We also had Amar look at our film and give us some feedback. We managed to take down some useful notes from what he said and uploaded them onto the blogger. This was the feedback for rough cut 1, and everything that we learned from this lesson is mentioned in another blog post titled "Rough Cut 1 - Amar's Feedback". All in all, the lesson was very productive and lots of editing was done. However, aside from what we learned from Amar's feedback, we also learned that when we are editing a film, we have to make sure that the responsibilites that come with it, eg: soundtrack, editing, credits etc is all divided evenly between the members of our group, because seeing as we only have two weeks left, it makes sense to organise ourselves in this way so that everything is finished in time and our film has a decent soundtrack as well as the decent continuity it already has.