The First Reflective Main Exercise Blog Entry

Last week we got given the brief for the main exercise. It was 'create an opening sequence to a new fiction film'. I was happy to be working with the same people, as we got on well for the preliminary exercise and worked well as a team. At the start i was very confident that our group would produce a successful opening sequence, but since we have been doing pre-production tasks it's been a lot harder than the preliminary exercise. For the main exercise it's basically the same tasks with a lot more detail.

On the first lesson we had to think of initial ideas such as audience and genre. This was really hard because we didn't want to do something to challenging but still make it look really good. We decided to have an audience of 12-24 year old women and a genre which was chick flick/romantic comedy. When we was doing the research it was a lot harder than doing it for the preliminary exercise because we could basically do anything that contained two people sitting opposite each other and exchanges a few lines of dialogue but for this we have had to watch opening sequences, see why it appeals to our audience, see if we could produce something as well as some of the films but at the same time it has to be a new idea. I think the hardest part was choosing an genre and what our sequence was going to be. Finding a location was harder this time because we could do it in college but it wouldn't look very realistic. Sarah said we could use her house but only on a Wednesday afternoon so we all had to make sure we was free then and be ready to film. Andy did some research on genre and the how 'chick flick' is under the category of romantic comedy but is aimed at females but romantic comedy is aimed at both male and female.

We have done our SWOT for the main exercise and i think our 'stumbling' points will be time management as i have already mentioned. We all need to be available for the Wednesday and meet with our group at the time we agree on. Absences could be another risk because i was unwell for the filming of the preliminary exercise and Andy was away for the editing. We wanted it to be nice weather for the day but we obviously can't guarantee that so we will have to organise lighting for the day. Another 'stumbling' point would be the actors not turning up on the day. This happened in the preliminary exercise so we have to make sure the characters will be there on the day or it will be a big issue.

After we decided on our audience and genre we made a pre production schedule to follow each lesson so we're more organised. Once we did this we decided on roles. I said that i wanted to do a different role in the main exercise to get more knowledge and understanding, but we all chose to have the same roles because we knew what we was doing and had practice from the preliminary exercise. Even though we have these roles we all said we would help eachother. We all agreed and said Sarah's house would be the best place to film for our first location, so in the lesson we went to Sarah's and did a rough location recce and took photographs of all the rooms we needed.

When we came back to college we all decided to each do recce of a room to make it more detailed and neater. Me, Naomi and Sarah made a start on the draft script and we decided we was going to have two girls both doing a morning routine and when we edited we would cut back and fourth between each shot. We needed to include the titles in our film so we researched films such as 'The Devil Wears Prada' and 'The Lizzie Mcguire Movie' to help us with how we should include the titles. We decided to do something similar to these successful movies by including the titles on objects such as a hairbrush, mirror, school books ect...

In the next lesson Naomi done the storyboards to show our shots in more detail, after we done the call sheet for our first location which was Sarah's house. Next i done the final script and made sure it was all clear enough to follow whilst filming on the Wednesday. In this lesson we decided to get music from the library to include throughout our opening sequence. We wanted happy and outgoing music. We looked at a few cd's and found a song which fitted with everything. We produced a call sheet and risk assessment for Sarah's house and our risks would be falling from height, impact with objects and self drive car. We needed to find another location to film at and Naomi Said we could use her house if we wanted. We decided to film there on Wednesday 17th March. We produced a call sheet and risk assessment for Naomi's house and the risks came out to be similar.

I want to improve on first of all my input to the filming of the main exercise. I was ill for the filming of the preliminary exercise and this time would like to get involved as i couldn't last time. I would also like to improve on learning how to use 'Windows Movie Maker' to edit. I watched the group members do some editing last time because i didn't know how to use it. As i was watching them i got an idea of how it works and would like to give it a try during the main exercise.