Lesson 15 And 16

Lesson 15 mostly helped our group with its storyboard as we was given feedback regarding what we had drawn so far. The criticisms about our storyboard were that there weren't many shots and that there had to be more title communicated through the storyboard as we had only 7 when we drew it for the first time. This lesson helped us a lot as it gave us a chance to make those necessary changes to the storyboard in order to correct that feedback we was given in order to make it the best and most detailed storyboard possible. We as a group thought that doing a photo animatic of our title sequence would be the best idea for us but as we couldn't get to our setting at that point, we had to do the photos in a different setting with different props and costumes . The animatic did not go well and so we decided to get rid of the idea of doing an animatic as it wouldn't work unless we had all the props and the setting and costume that is required for our storyboard. Instead i think we shall just photocopy the whole storyboard and transfer it to our blogs so that we have a version of it on here and i also think we should attempt to perhaps do an animatic but instead of taking pictures of our real life character, i think we should go back to the original idea of photographing the storyboard and adding the soundtrack that we are going to make in behind it to get an idea of what our title sequence will look like. The reason we didn't do this type of animatic before is because our storyboard didn't have enough detail and shots in it before but now we have drawn the more detailed one we can photograph this and possible make the animatic.

In lesson 16 i re-drew the storyboard for our group with more shots and more detail, including 4 extra titles on top of the titles that we had already made. I used the comments that we got back on our storyboard as positives as i thought that not many comments were given about the storyboard lack of quality or the idea in fact and so i used that as a good point and made the needed corrections to the title sequence storyboard. This lesson helped me very much as it gave me a chance to make those vital corrections to the storyboard and finish the storyboard in that lesson so that we are ready to film our title sequence. We then made a Gmail calendar which helped out a lot with organising our work and making sure that we all know the deadline dates for specific pieces of work so that we never get behind. The calendar helped out with many different aspects for example, it helps by get the group organsied and having a deadline date for pieces of work, makes the work get completed that all more bit faster. Also have deadline dates set shows me if the group is doing the work and if they are concentrating on the tasks that are due in. Finally with this calendar it shows you who is making creating the events and deadlines on it so we can see who is contributing to the work and who is not.

Re-Drawing Storyboard And Making A Gmail Calendar For Deadlines And Other Important Dates

In this lesson we re-drew the storyboard that had corrections to make it look more neater and professional. Re-drawing the storyboard didn't take long as we already had a version of it with corrections on it, so when i was drawing it this time all i had to do was include the corrections that needed to be made and then that would be our final storyboard ready so that when we had dealt with all the other aspects of a title sequence we could then go out and start filming our title sequence wherever it needed to be filmed.

In this lesson we also looked at how to make a Gmail calendar for our title sequence group. A Gmail calendar is an online calendar that each member of the group have access too and are able to change any dates as they please. The reason why we are going to use the Gmail calendar is so we can record our deadline dates in the calendar if ever we get some and then we can use this to stick by so that we do not get behind with the work and so that we meet the deadline date that is set for this title sequence.

The idea that we had for our Gmail calendar was to call it JaMiDo Productions after the company and logo that we created. I then thought in order to tell apart which deadlines we had each added to the calendar i thought we should colour code it and so each deadline that person had added it to the calendar, they would change the colour so that the group could see who added what and then we can see that everyone is participating in the groups work and taking this title sequence coursework seriously. Mike is the colour red, Dom is the colour Grey/Blue and i am the colour green on our Gmail calendar (JaMiDo Productions).

Editing And Making Corrections To Storyboard And Possibly Doing A Photo Animatic

In this lesson our group was given feedback on the storyboard that we had drawn for our pre title sequence. The feedback that we was given was that there had to be more shots included in the storyboard and that there had to be more titles communicated in the storyboard to the audience. So as a group, in this lesson, we went back to the drawing board and made the neccessary corrections to our storyboard so that the feedback that we was given had been altered in order to make it better.

In this lesson we was also given the task of possibly preparing an animatic version of our title sequence idea in order to show it to the class to see what they thought of our title sequence idea and to see if it fit in with our film. An animatic is a photogrpahed version of your storyboard that runs from on frame (shot) to another and the time that you have at the bottom of that shot determines how long that shot is on the screen and then you add any dialogue or music that you plan to have in your title sequence to the animatic so it is like a drawn version of your title sequence. You would usually do an animatic to see if your storyboard idea works and it also gives others a chance to review your idea and give you any feedback on how to improve it.

When it came to preparing to do an animatic for our title sequence idea, there was a problem as our title sequence was just one shot which was a 360 degree angle of the main character sitting on a couch with his feet up, this was a probelm for us as the storyboard that we had drawn up didn't have the qualities that would be need for an animatic so we resolved this problem by deciding to do a photo version of this animatic. So instead of taking pictures of our storyboard we would take pictures of the actual scene with a person acting like our storyboard states. Once again we encountered another problem as at first we thought of having the titles appear on actual paper in the scene, meaning that the titles were propps in our title sequence but after doing a mock up of these titles it turned out that doing them on paper looked very cheap and you couldnt quite see what they said. Also as our title sequence would be shot in a living room of a home, it didnt quite look right being shot in a school without the propps that we needed and so the animatic didnt quite look right and when this happened we decided not to do the animatic any more as it was hard for us to accomplish this.

Typograghy, Music/Sound, Film Production Company Logo And Film Production Company Decisions

The Final decision on our typography was between our group (the three of us) and we based it on our opinions of the typography as well as what the class thought of the questionnaire that Mike put together. The questionnaire had about 10 different types of typography on the piece of paper and we printed enough out for the rest of the class so that they could tick which one they thought best suited our title sequence and the aspect that we are trying to communicate to the audience. As you can see in my previous blog post there was one specific title that everyone took a liking to and with a debate between our group about the different titles and which would look best in our title sequence and which would communicate the theme of comedy to our audience, we decided that the one the class liked best would be the one that we would use in our title sequence as we agreed that this title fitted with our idea for our film and what we were trying to communicate. There was no difficulty in the lead up to finding which titles to use and there was also no problems with the final decision of which title to use. The only difficulties that we may have encountered was the fact that we had to make sure we did a thorough search of the website we used (Dafont) to make sure that we had not missed any styles of font that we could have possibly used as the final decision for our title sequence but this difficulty that we came across was more of a good thing to under go as it made sure that we had found the best style of font to fit our title sequence and that we was happy with what we had found and what we are going to use. As you can see below this is the font style we will be using for our films titles.

For our music/sound we encountered quite a few problems with this aspect of our title sequence as we were unsure whether to use copyright free music or to make a music track of our own. As a group in the end we decided to make a music track of our own as it shows we have put more effort in to making this title sequence but as a back up if making the track of music falls through we will use a copyright free piece of music from a website.

The sort of music that we will be using for our title sequence will be an upbeat american rock theme of music. It wont be hard rock that we use but it will have drums and electric guitars as the main instruments in the peice of music. The music will not have not have any lyrics and so will be instrumental, we have chosen to do it this way as we feel that having lyrics to the music may make him seem like a guy whos into music and perhaps has a career in music and this isnt what we want to communicate. What we are trying to communicate through this use of instrumental american rock music is that this guy is like the stereotypical lazy american who just plays xbox all day whilst eating non stop and listening to rock music. In my opnion i think that the making of the music will fall through as i think that there will be a disagreement over what the soundtrack should sound like and so that is why i have come up with a back up plan so that if plan A goes wrong, then we can go to plan B which is get a copy right free piece of music that sounds how we want it to and that matches in with the title sequence video that we are trying to create for our film. Below, from 23 seconds on, this is the sort of music that we will be trying to create, this is a bad exmaple as we would be looking to have more drums and a little less electric guitar so that it evened out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w6gMgZeb9c

Creating our own film production company and logo would be one of the funnest tasks that we have done so far as it we each had fun attempting to create one that looked like a proffesional film company. There were no difficulties in doing this apart from deciding on the font to use and making it look proffesional enough for it to be considered as a film company. The reason why we struggled so much with deciding on the font was because we had to search for a different font other than the font that we had already used and the font that we had to find had to suggest that we were a company that dealt in American comedy films but was owned by three british people and so myself and Mike came up with the idea to once again look on Dafont (font website) and find a font that we liked and then we would change the colours of the writing to red white and blue much like the American flag but can also be seen as the British flag and so in doing this we changed the colours of the logo to match the plan that we had come up with and then we decided to add a cartoon comedy feel to the logo by putting louds around our title of the film production coompany that we had come up with. The name of our film production company was mostly thought up by all of us as we decided to use the first two letter of each of our names to come up with 'JaMiDo' and we all agreed at the same time that this was a good idea and that we should follow up on this idea by creating a logo with the name on the image somewhere. Below this our film production company logo that we have created.

Deciding on which Film Production Company to use was not hard as we had each done reasearch on several different film studios and companies so we was able to select out of the three studios we had researched into which one best suited our film. Once we had looked at all of the studios we found that infact the film studio that i had done research into was the one that best suited our film. Paramount Vantage (the one we chose) linked in best with our film as in its past it had dealt with many low budget American comedies and so our film fitted perfectly into the film productions companies criteria and so with this in mind we as have group decided to use Paramount Vantage as our distributor as well as our Producer and we will include their logo at the beginning of our Title sequence as i have stated in my previous posts. This is the logo of Paramout Vantage which will be at the beginning of our title sequence.

Film Studio Research And Who Will Produce/Distribute Our Film

Paramount vantage

One of the main reasons why we have chosen Paramount Vantage as our film production company is because of the types of films that this studio deals with and we as a group feel that when looking at the history of Paramount Vantage and the films that they have dealt with in the past, we can clearly see that this production company would best suit our film as this studio has both produced and distributed films of the same genre as our film which is comedy.

We as a group have decided to use Paramount Vantage as our producers and distrbiutors of our film for the main reasons that this studio deals with our films genre and also looking back at previous budgets that this studio has dealt with, we can clearly see that our film would suit best in this production company.

Now that we have chosen the distributor and producer of our film, we will now make sure to include Paramount Vantage in some way in our title sequence video. We as a group have decided to include it at the beginning of title sequence and we have included this in the first shot as the production company will shown on a black screen like it is above and then will fade away to the second shot of the back of Andrew Anderson's head, with him sitting on the couch watching tv.

Film Production Company Logo

This is our Logo that we have created to indicate to our audience that the title sequence was created by us three; Mike, Jason and Dom. We will include this logo in our pre title sequence video as it is our trademark logo that we have made this piece of filming.

Mike made this piece of work by himself with input from me and dom. The reason why Mike made it instead of me or Dom is because mike is one of the best at photoshoping and so we felt that if we gave him ideas then he could put them ideas into place with possible changes of his own added to the process. We all came up with the idea for this logo as we were throwing a few ideas together and we first though of 'DMJ' for the first three letters of our name but then we decided that this wouldn't really look like the kind of logo that we each had in our heads, so then one member of our group suggested we use different parts of our names to try and piece together this logo and that is where we came up for the idea of 'JaMiDo'. 'Ja' for my name Jason, 'Mi' for Michael and 'Do' for Dom. The reason why we put capital letters at the beginning of each name in our production company logo is because it is the beginning of each of our names so we thought that it would be best to justify our title sequence even more by putting capital letter where we needed to in order to indicate to people that those are our names and that this is our logo.


The reason we used this typography and the clouds around the image is because it looked unique and we new straight away when we did it that it looked like a real logo for a serious film production company. The specific reason that we used this typography was because when we first saw it we all pointed it out at the same time as it looks like a comedy sort of writing in the way that it is styled and thats what we believe we are, a comedy company and so we need a comedy logo. The colours in the writing also suggest that we could be a British company even though we are making an American film and this could be as that but the way that we see it is that the American flag also has the colours so i think that we could show through the colours of the title that we are possibly British people who make American films and that is where the colours come from. There was no particular idea for the clouds, i said to Mike that we need to have some image either behind it or underneath or perhaps around it and thats when he found the clouds on the internet and though that they looked like cartoon clouds and stuck it around the logo and when we saw what he had done, we agreed that it did in actual fact look quite good and so that is how we came up with the image at the top of the page and this is how we come up with the film production company logo 'JaMiDo'.

Sound/Music Research And Final Track Decision

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w6gMgZeb9c

From 23 seconds onwards in this music video, is the sort of music that we will be making in Garage band for our pre title sequence video. We have currently made the piece of music yet but will in fact be making it next week after school one day. This is the sort of music that we will be using in our pre title sequence, but our will be with more of a balance of electric guitar and drums as then the music will be synchronised and will mix in with the visuals that will be displayed in the film. The reason why we are using this piece of music is because the film is set in America and this piece of music used in the title sequence will indicate to the audience just what type of film Andrew Anderson is and what the audience should expect when it comes to watching this film.

It was not hard to make a decision over the music within our group as the three of us new specifically what type of music would suit best for our title sequence and which piece of music would communicate to the audience best, the different themes of the film. Also we as a group chose the piece of music mainly because when we film it will fit in with the idea of the titles as well as the actions that are happening on screen which we will be filming.

We have chosen to use a sooundtrack within our title sequence video as we as a group think that it will fit in within our title sequence and whole aspect of where it starts and where it ends. The sound track will play throughout the title sequence but as it gets to the end it will cut out as dialougue from the main character will come in and when this happens the music will cut off automatically.