Preliminary excercise

This is our preliminary film exercise, where we tested using a variety of film techniques.

click HERE to watch the video

Evaluation Question 1 - Forms and Conventions

Click HERE to view our question on forms and conventions

Evaluation Question 2 - Representation of Social Groups

Click HERE to view my evaluation question on social groups

Evaluation Question 3 - Distribution

This is my question on film distribution answered in a prezi.

Click HERE to view the prezi.

Evaluation Question 4 - Who is the target audience?

This is my audience profile for my film opening Titan's Hammer.

My actual audience will be a niche audience.

• The films subject and genre will no doubt turn some people away
• Unless the film went on to be a large success in which case it may gain a lot more credibility. This happened to the The Inbetweener's movie which became an unexpected box office success, despite being targeted at teenagers;
• It reached a mainstream audience and may well be followed by another series, according to the writers that we heard at a BFI study day.

The core audience will be the heavy metal community

• I am positive I could count on this group to see the film is the members of the heavy metal community.
• They would be immediately drawn to the film as it centers around a heavy metal band.
• They are even more likely to be attracted to the music that the film would feature which would consist of heavy metal riffs and short songs that would be written for the film.

Musicians are the second group of people who would see the film.

• Whether or not they like the style of music, there are few music films being made currently and a musician is very likely to want to see a film that is music oriented.
• Recent examples have included Nowhere boy about John Lennon and Walk the Line about Johnny Cash.
• However there have been a number of films about bands in the past such as The Blues Brothers.
• A small number of people who are not music lovers may be attracted to the more comedic side to the film.

The smallest audience sector would be the comedy lovers.

• There have been few music based comedies.
• Well known ones include This is Spinal Tap and Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny.
• These include many elements that are similar to ours, such as specially comissioned music, comedy based on rock culture and the stereotypes of rock stars.
• and the comedy fans who have seen these films are the most likely to want to see my film.

Finally I included some large manufacturers of music equipment, Gibson and Marshall.

• While these two are not technically an actual audience group, they can help draw new groups in and even create some. This is called product placement.
• Product placement has a large role in films because they are many situations in which companies can pay for actors to drive certain cars, drink certain drinks, eat in certain places, wear certain clothes etc.
• In a film that focuses on a band there will be conversations about music equipment, shots of equipment and the usage of equipment so there is huge potential for product placement, which is where companies like Gibson and Marshall come in.
• If large companies like this are used in the film it creates new business for them as well as possibly attracting people who use the equipment.

Evaluation Question 5 - Attracting and Addressing Audiences

Click HERE to view my question on attracting and addressing audiences

Evaluation Question 6 - New Technologies

I've used a lot of new technologies over the course of this project.

One prime example of this would be the technoliges involved to create the soundtrack. I managed to produce it on software that I hadn't used before and then uploaded it to a site called soundcloud.
Soundcloud functions similarly to youtube, people can observe your work and choose to follow your progress if they like it. This is a good way to build up a musical following.

Music

Click HERE to hear a demo I loaded to soundcloud

As we both worked on the sound track together we used a new technology to create the it. The program is called Riffworks. Unfortunately we did not have access to the full version which limited our use of the program as we were only given stock drum tracks and could only have a certain number of guitar parts.

Interface during the recording of the credit song.

This program is specifically made to record guitars plugged directly into the computer; so using a microphone was not an option. Instead, we utilised a handy piece of tech that Marcus had in his possession. It's called a Line 6 Podfarm UX2 (Pictured below).

This recording box allowed us to completely cut out any recording feedback that you'd get with just using a normal microphone. This helped us reach the highest sound quality we could achieve.

My current set-up

This was the setup we used to record all the music for the film. It was laid out for maximum recording quality and it took us about four days to write, record, cut and edit everything into proper pieces.


Animation.

I was completely new to animation when we started the project. We had initially wanted to use it as part of the film, but we found it was to time consuming and would not have fit in well with our film so we stuck with live action.

The whole concept of animation came from my partner as he had done flash animation in the past. He used quick animated story boards to demonstrate how it could look and to flesh out part of our initial script.

We decided to go against this method of filming as the work would have been almost entirley exclusive as i would ahve only been able to lend my voice to the animation process. Also it was far to much work that would have required much more time than we had considering our group started out later than the others.

The animation did however prove useful in showing how we wanted to create our filming scenes.

These were some basic shots that were planned out using animated clips.

Shot can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERuXu-WMuf0

Shot two can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PgetYjXFUE

Editing.

We used the editing program Sony Vegas Pro 11 to edit our film together

This editing program is a lot more complex and in depth than iMovie which was what most people used. However it has a lot more features that allowed us to create a lot more effects and be more creative with our editing.

We were both fairly new to this editing program, but we decided to go ahead with it because we felt we could achieve more with a more complex program and also because iMovie had been causing us considerable problems with editing e.g. on several occasions the program kept crashing.

Evaluation question 7 - What have I learned about film making?

Look back at the beginning of the project, what do you feel you have learned since then?

Over the course of tehis project i have learned a variety of new skills regarding film making and production. Being an amateur film maker at the beginning of the year, I had a lot of new skills to learn in order to progress with our film.

One of the first new skills I needed to learn about was proper camera work and lighting. Here you can see us filming one of our very first shots for the film titles.

I very quickly picked up on camerawork and the use of dollies and tripods to create interesting angles and shots and learned about how to create atmosphere by simply positioning the camera in various ways. Camerwork is probably one of the most important things I learned about filming this year as it will carry over into my A2 production and it gives me more in depth knowledge of how to film scenes.

Lighting was another new thing that I needed to learn about. This would always come with camerawork so whenever I was learning about the camera, I was pretty much always learning about lighintg aswell. Here you can see us using a large spotlight to create the effect of light coming down on the guitar.

I learned a lot about lighting and how some of the most subtle changes can be a significant improvement to a scene, e.g. using a light to create brightness in one area, can create an atmosphere of darkness in another and really emphasise the mood of the film

Another thing I learned about was music creation and production when my and my partner decided to write and record our own music for the film. We used a program called Riffworks, which allowed us to create and mix guitar tracks. Writing the music for our film was a big part of our project as our film is created around music, so we were dtermined to write something ourselves because we knew exactly what would fit with the film. Riffworks was an integral part of our production and learning about how to use it not only taught me music production skills but also better songwriting skills.

The final things I learned about were production tools and programs, which I previously had little to no experience with. I primarily used the editing tools in iMovie, but I also used adobe after effect which I had never used before. This was the hardest thing I had to learn about as these editing programs are very precise and take a lot of practice to be able to use them well. We also had several technical issues when the programs would shut down unexpectedly, setting us back quite far and this happened on more than one occasion so we learned to save our files very regularly.

Although I by no means mastered the editors I did learn the basics and since I was not the one whose primary role it was to edit, I was able to do some smaller bits of editing without fear of ruining any footage.

Here you can see the two of us in the editing phase of production.

I was very pleased with how the project turned out and even though a lot of problems were encountered during the editing stage, we were able to overcome them and get the film finished.

A lot of the evaluatio technologies were new to me as well. Things like prezi, pinterest, soundcloud were all new to me, but these were quite easy things to learn about and I quickly became quite good at using them.



First script

Media-interview scene script

 

Throughout the scene we never see the faces of the two, only various close-up shots of eyes, hands and back shots, the interviewer will be seen but still minimally.

Interviewer: and here with us today we have the legendary Thor Hammeranstein III (mispronounces both names) and Olav Yewenvargen

Olav: it’s Yewenvargen

Thor: and Hammeranstein

Interviewer: Oh, sorry…

Interviewer: well let me be the first to say that it is an honour to have two of the greatest musicians in rock history in our studio, because while making up 2/4’s of one of the most amazing acts in entertainment history, for a large portion of your careers, you have been intensely private and released very little about your personal lives, so why now?

Thor: Ya well, we felt that the times was right to start talking about how awesomes it all was and let the world sees into whos we are a littles more.

Olav: Ya the fans have beens buggings us for years to do a serious interviews, they were all like “Oh you guys you gots to tells us everythings abouts your personals stuffs” and we were all “NO’S…Gets out of here”

Interviewer: uuum, yes… now despite your privacy you were known for some of the most wild antics of any celebrity, Thor it was recorded you went into rehab 8 times!?

Thor: Ya, I was quite prouds of that (if a mouth shot is present give smirk.)

Olav: HA that’s nothings, I’ve been in 14 times and I nevers stopped drinking once.

Thor: Ya but you hads already been in like twice befores we met. Which was interestings cause you must have been like 13 the first times.

Olav: uh ya something like that.

Interviewer: that really is an incredible feat, of course most of your fans will remember your numerous trips to rehabilitation.

Olav: Ya, ya good times. (directed at interviewer) you should have seen him the first time we made him go, he was about to destroy the band froms the insides, so we told him we was goins for a beer run but then we secretly drove to the rehab centre and just dumped him there.

Thor: oh ya, that was probably the angriest I’ve ever beens in my wholes life haha

Olav: Ya, he actually tried to kill me when he gots out haha, I’ve still gots the scar.

Interviewer:…yeeeees well anyway. Now you two have known each other since you were 16-17 am I right.

Thor: Ya, we were both elected most likelys to die before age 30 in school.

Olav: Showed thems.

Interviewer: So you two really are an exemplar of long term friendship, could you describe what the early days were like for you two.

Thor: Well, let me thinks…

Flashback sequence

Quick succession of images shows the young Thor and Olav being horrifically drunk and disorderly.

Thor: hmm, well I can’t really remembers the early days to well…its all a little blurrys

Olav: ya we must be gettins old.

Thor: For me it really started goings when we started working with Derek.

Olav: Ya that’s when our musics started to really gos in the directions we wanted.

Interviewer: So could you give us a little insight into what those days where like? When you where just starting out, before you were discovered even?

Thor: well, lets see….

Play flashback of large build up, band playing great music but it’s a tiny gig and theres only about three people, by this point the film opening will have ended but it will leave a good inclination of where the story will go, with the fictional bands climb to worldwide fame and success.

This was our first treatment. After writing it and attempting to create some of the scenes, we realised that we were being incredilby ambitious to try to recreate this exact script, being only amateur film makers. We then went back to the drawing board to refine the script.

Music creations

These are the final pieces of music that we wrote. It took us a long time as we were forever trying to perfect aspects of one piece or scrapping parts of it. We are very happy with our results and a selection of these final pieces will be in our film.

We each uploaded different clips to our SoundCloud accounts

These are the pieces that we will consider using. Not all of them will make an appearance in the film but we felt that these were the best ones.

Simple transition riff HERE
Build up sequence HERE
Backing track HERE

Music writing update

This was were we wrote all our film music. We wrote it at Marcus' because we were able to construct a crude home studio and this was perfect for us because we did not have money to for anything else and the equipment that we possessed was enough to write what we needed.

 

This was our primary set up. We hooked a recording amp to the computer and played through a program that recorded us and allowed other effects to be placed in e.g. drums and guitar overlays.

 

 This is the Line6 UX2. The primary piece of recording equipment, this allowed us to record everything we played and gives us maximum control over our songs. The UX2 is set up for the best quality recording we could get and it really showed in our final products.

 

 

This is the program riffworks that we used to edit all the music we recorded. We recorded quite a lot of music that we could potentially use in our film and we will put them on our blogs when they are completely done.  

Writing our own music

As me and Marcus decided to make a film on something we know a lot about, we felt it would make sense to write our own music. Not only did this give us the freedom of creativity, but it was much easier than trying to find a piece of music or a song to just fit with the film. Writing our own music we could create something that we felt would match the scen well or would add someting ot aour film as well as being able to put it in when we wanted.We also knew what sound we wanted to achieve and what would be appealing to our main audiences-primarily people of the metal community.

                           
                                Me and Marcus during the creative process.
                               Click HERE and/or HERE to see our progress

This was the early stages of the writing and we had not come up with any actual songs. We were experimenting to see what we could create that would fit in our film.