WELCOME MODERATOR

NATHAN FOSTER

CANDIDATE NUMBER 1623

CLAREMONT FAN COURT SCHOOL

Welcome to my blog!

I worked with MAX RAGAN 1636 and CHARLES GORDON 1626

Our brief was to create a short film, accompanied by a film wesbite. The title of our short film is 'Down and Out' and the genre is horror. The main blog roll includes my construction, planning and research work. The pages at the top of my blog are to navigate to other areas of my work. My work will appear in reverse order (most recent post first etc). To present my work creatively, I have used a wide variety of platforms and tools. These include; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Adobe after effects, Scoopit!, Piktochart, Final Cut Pro X, Slideshare, Canva, Prezi and Visme.

Editing

When it came to editing I did not as big a role as others. Although having previous experience with Final Cut Pro I was assigned with finding the best sound effects and music to use. Following conventions of a horror film it was essential we had lots of intricate sounds to enhance the effect, one function that proved useful was sound scapes, where sound builds rapidly to create tension.

Directing

When it comes to directing, we split this role up depending on what we were doing in order to utilise our specialities. However, for me, I had a heavy influence of the directing within filming and editing. For the main part, I took control over constructing the perfect shot: from the right angle, height and time. This allowed us to collate lots of quality footage making the editing process relatively easy.

Camerawork

Closely related to directing, camerawork was extremely important to consider, especially due to the fact that we were creating a horror short. The use of close ups and interesting angles which are not typically scene in other films such as worm's eye view are important as they add to the quirkiness of the horror. As a team we came together to think of the best camerawork possible, therefore this role was shared among all of us.

CONSTRUCTION: MY SHORT FILM

CONSTRUCTION: FILMING

I decided that using a Panasonic GH5 camera was the perfect camera to film with. This is because of it many different features including image stabilisation. This camera was also accompanied by a 12-60mm lens which left our images with a crisp 4K image, allowing each shot to be extremely detailed and precise. This lense was especially good with mid shots and closeups with its image tracking.

In order to get steady shots i used a Manfrotto 055XPROB, this allowed us to keep the image steady and upright. I bubbled the tripod before filming and extended the legs to get great looking Long-shots.

In terms of lighting we used a softbox light for the shots that were indoors in order to achieve a naturalistic lighting, and we used a Neewer SL-12 that attached to the camera in order to light up the shots that we took outside at night.

                                                     

CONSTRUCTION: SOCIAL MEDIA

Matt Smith from the FDA website stated that the 'spend on digital has increased enormously.' he explains that social media has become a large chunk of marketing and advertising and effort of publicity can now be online as well as digital. The reasoning for this is because as technology has evolved the number of people who spend a vast majority of time on social media has also increased, meaning that this is the best platform to target audiences in order to promote films. 

I created social media pages for my short film in order to fulfil consumer needs online. Social media pages are useful for films as they draw attention to upcoming films by releasing trailers, important updates and general posts to build up hype around the film.

I created an Instagram and twitter page for our short film, 'Down and Out'

CONSTRUCTION: COMPANY IDENT

A production company ident creates a brand image for a company and is found at the start of a production. In less than 10 seconds, it offers a brand's visual identity to the world. As a group, we decided that a simplistic, fast ident was effective as it clearly presents our production company with little confusion. This was matched with the two simple 'whoosh' sound effects which I used to give the ident some audio effect. The 'whoosh' sound effects are in time with movements of the text and shapes.

For our production, we decided to create our own production company ident. In order to do so, we sourced a template off youtube which we thought fit our film opening well. After downloading the template, we downloaded the software Blender so we could edit the text to display our own production company "Silverline Studios".

Here is the final ident:

CONSTRUCTION: FILM POSTCARD

Postcards are created to help raise awareness of a film, a film postcard shows the viewer what type of film it is and whether it is a suitable film for you, it is challenging as the demographic profile of the film must all fit into one image. I have created my own film postcard in order to promote my film:

CONSTRUCTION: BBFC CLASSIFICATION

We researched how film is regulated in the UK, in order to decide the correct rating for our film, by studying the BBFC website https://bbfc.co.uk/about-us/who-we-are

All UK films are given an age rating by the BBFC.
The BBFC's focus is on helping children and families choose well by providing them with the guidance they need to help them choose what’s right for them and avoid what’s not.
The BBFC’s classification standards reflect people’s current views and expectations and their decisions give due weight to what people find acceptable for each age rating.

When these consultations find significant changes in people’s expectations, they adjust their standards and criteria accordingly.
Their standards are published in the BBFC’s Classification Guidelines.These give details of what’s acceptable in each age category from U to R18, and explain the laws and principles that govern our work.
The BBC has two over-riding principles, which are as follows:

• To protect children and vulnerable adults from potentially harmful or otherwise unsuitable content

• To help children and families choose what’s right for them and avoid what’s not

We used a template and edited it to reflect our film, DOWN AND OUT.

In order to create this image, I downloaded a template BBFC certificate screen and used Photoshop to change the title of the film, president, director and the reason for why it is a 15 rated film ("infrequent strong violence, strong language").