Term 4 - Entry 1

At the beginning of this term we watched a short film called "7:35 De La Mañana" (7:35 in the Morning) and had to analyse it and writing the information on a timeline. The story is about a woman who goes to a cafe as part of her daily routine, but the usual atmosphere of the cafe is different. 

Unlike usually, everyone is quiet; and when she sits down with her food, people start glancing at her. Suddenly, a man starts singing and dancing and the rest of the customers join in, seemingly against their will.

We watched it bit by bit, analysing the setting, characters, mood and story. This took a few lessons, and right before we reached the end we had to make a prediction of what the ending will be like.

In the end, it turns out the man was a suicide bomber who wanted to confess his love to the woman. The police arrive on the scene, and the man goes outside with a bag of confetti and blows himself up. The camera cuts to the woman's shocked reaction, and the credits roll.

One thing to note about this movie is that it is in black and white. We discussed how the lack of colour adds to the mood, and the class agreed it helped make it feel like something unusual. There was also a lack of background music which, again, added to the mood.

Moving on from there, we later decided to start some work regarding the term 4 project. We formed groups and were allowed to choose between 3 different topics: Making a documentary of our choice, making a trailer for last term's Life in a Day, or making a tutorial for the Year 9s to promote the Film Studies subject. My group, me, Fajar and Min Kee, decided to create a trailer for our Life in a Day documentary. In our trailer, we also have to include a 'behind-the-scenes' clip where we interview some people involved in the creation of the documentary (aka our Film Studies classmates) and some of the audience who watched the finished documentary.

The questions we will be using for (most of) the interviews are:
- What do you think of the finished life in a day? 
- What inspired you to make your segment the way it was?
- What challenges did you face whilst making your segment? 
- What were you most proud of/what did you like the most of LiaD? 
- Would you have done it any other way? 
- What do you think life in a day means? 
- Rate it from 0-10 
- How would you describe it in one word?
- Why should people watch it?

A very basic sketch we used as a storyboard.

Our Timeline for the project:

Week 3 (April 18-24): Storyboarding and Planning

Week 4 (April 25-May 1): Test shots

Week 5 (May 2-8): Principle shooting of interviews

Week 5-6: Assembly editing

Week 6 (May 9-15): Re-shoots if needed, otherwise start post production

Week 7 (May 16-22): Post Production

Week 8 (May 23-29): Exams

Week 9 (May 30-June5): Post production

Week 10 (June 6-12): Final Edits, export movie then showing at Arts Assembly on June 10

We chose to make the trailer because we have learned the concepts on how documentaries are made and what role they play in the film industry. This allowed us to better understand what we want to do. Since we want to show our daily lives to other people, we want the trailer to show a smaller glimpse of that part of our lives. We chose not to make our own documentary because it feels too ambitious. We also chose not to do a tutorial because we thought it would be more interesting for us.

We started shooting on Tuesday, May 3. The location of our shoot was the News Production studio. We chose this place mostly because it is near to where the equipment is stored, it is isolated, and most importantly, it's a studio. Because the studio had a green screen, we decided to experiment with it.

However, one problem we faced was that the shadows and lighting were unbalanced and created visual artefacts in post production during our testing. Because of this, we decided to either leave the background green or change the colour, where the artefacts are less visible. Since we wanted to make the clip look like it was taken in a studio, we are considering leaving the green colour. This also explains why we left a redhead light and camera in the shot.

Despite this however, we are pleased with our current footage and we will continue shooting this week. We do realize we are running later than what we had intended in our timeline.