Welcome

Dear Examiner, I hope you enjoy reading my blog and following in my footsteps of how we created Somnium. I feel like I have learnt A lot since starting the course and I hope this is evident from my blog, which I have used labels on, to help you find everything you are looking for. Please watch our sequence located below:

Question 2: how does your media product represent a particular social group?

Our Media product is representing a young girl. The way we portray this young girl is innocent and sweet but also dark on the inside. I was the actor who played the young girl in our opening sequence and in order to make myself look the way needed i had to wear pyjamas with small animals on them and I had to plait my hair as a young girl would. in the opening sequence we do not see much of the girls troubled mind but what we do have is the nightmare scene in which she is pulled into darkness. We tried to portray as scared but not terrified, almost as though she is looking for a way out of the dream. As im not as young as the character I had to think of the night when I had nightmares as a young child, how it made me feel and then I applied that to the character.

Question 3: what media institution might distribute your project and why?

Question 4: Who would the target audience be for your film?

For this question I set up a poll and analysed the results. Unfortunately I could not link the poll. but the results were:

1 vote for under 16
4 votes for 18+
0 votes for 60+

Even though not  many people voted on the poll, its is still very obvious which age they think it is most appropriate for and who our target audience is. this poll reflect what we wanted it to and we also believe that our audience is young adults. Our audience needs to be over 18 as that is the rating it would have if it were to be judged by the BBFC because of the imagery that it contains. We were aiming to cater to theses audiences by using stronger language and elements of fear that come older people may not appreciate.

Question 5: how did you attract/address your audience

To answer this question I created a powerpoint that goes through each of the techniques I used to atract and address our audience.

Somnium Powerpoint 

Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

For this question I have created a website using Weebly. Weebly allows users to create websites, blogs and even retail sites but i have used it to create a website solely for the purpose of answering this question.
Please visit my website to see my answer to this question: http://katiesasevaluation.weebly.com/

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?

For this question I will be doing a directors commentary as I feel this would be the most appropriate way of answering a question about how our product uses and challenges conventions of horror. I will be speaking over the sequence and inputting why we did the things that we did in order to follow or challenge horror conventions.

Question 7: looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in progression from it to the main task?

To answer this question, we sat as a panel and gave our thoughts on what we think we have learned from the process and what skills we have developed since our preliminary task. you can watch the video here:On Youtube

Lighting

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of our production as it sets the mood for the film and also because it is supposed to be happening at night it needed to look dark. the problem with filming in actual darkness is that the camera will not pick up very much and it will be very hard to edit, so we had to find another way,
We needed to find some very bright lights that could be altered in terms of how much light they give off rather than just a simple on off. We located some halogen lights as described in a previous post, that I had in my house and we used two of them  one of which is picture below along with another desk lamp with a blue filter on it.
We quickly discovered that the lighting was not going to be as easy as just turning the lights on as we discovered that it created very big and unwanted shadows that wouldn't be there if it was really in darkness as there would be no light to cause them. This meant that we had to place each lamp carefully around the room with each different shot as each shot required a different angle which create a shadow. the upward facing nature of the lamp was quite useful in over coming this but it did not completely eliminate them. Once we had filmed everything, Joel used After Effects to turn down the brightness and add more blue hues to the piece so as to make it look more like night-time. I think some of the shots were still to dark in the end as they appear hard to see once the blue hues were added. If I was to do it again, i would make it much brighter without fear of making it look to bright as I know the capabilities of the editing software can eliminate it completely.

Creating a poster

To create the poster, I used Microsoft Word because it is a program that I am familiar with and know how to use. I began by looking ta royalty free pictures that suited the effect I was going for and something that could represent the film as whole rather than reflecting just our opening sequence as this is how it would be if we created a whole film. I didn't use a picture from our piece as I didn't think any of them would be effective enough and also didn't bring the right message.
After choosing a picture for a background I then added the name in a similar font that we used for the titles in the opening sequence as I beleive this was more effective than using any other font as it had more correlation to the piece.
The smoke used to symbolise dreams in the opening sequence was also pictured as the hand was holding it as though it was mastering the dream/nightmare realm.
It took me a long time to find the perfect photo as I wanted it to mean something to the sequence.

End Title

Joel has been working very hard on the End Title of our opening sequence whilst I have been editing the original sequence.
Our idea for the for the Titles was originally to have them form out of smoke, but it was proving very difficult so we decided that we would save the effect for the main title and to do something different with the normal ones.
To create the end title, Joel used adobe after-effects and followed online tutorials that guided him through the process. It took a long time but was worth it in the end for the efefct that it has on the whole sequence.
The other titles took us longer to decide on as our original idea was to have all the titles appear as smoke, but this was too ambitious and would have taken too long to do. We looked through various fonts but many of them looked too friendly once we put them against the sequence. Eventually we settled on one that looked like old style writing, which was elegant but gave it a sense of creepiness as it is old and not practised anymore. We kept the colour to a greyish off white colour in keeping with the smoke theme so they did not look out of place.

Set design

The design of our set appeared straight forward at first but creating it was more difficult than we first thought.. our set was little girls bedroom that was filled with toys. We wanted an attic spaced room for the low ceiling because it creates a 'trapped' effect more than an open room. we show this in our production pitch when we were describing the kind or room we wanted. My room fit the requirements so we decided to use it as our set but before it could be used, it had to be altered and things had to be moved around so that it looked like a young girls room. the first thing that we did was take everything irrelevant   out of shot and out of the room if it fit. Things like my TV, games consoles, armchair and other various large object were moved behind my bedroom door and out of shot indicated by the red arrow.

The next thing we did was place relevant objects in the room such as stuffed toys and placing children's books on the bookshelf. we then placed our most important object which was the music box. It had to be placed perfectly in order to get the right shot and it took quite a few takes to get it right. the other shot we had a problem with is the shot that view the young girls face from the side. this is because there was very little room down the side of the bed and so it had to moved for that shot and then moved back in the establishing shots. A lot of planning went into the design of the set. we organised where everything would be and how it would be relevant in the shot. if it wasn't relevant is was removed.

In my next post I will talk about how we got the correct lighting for the room.

Minutes of the meeting

Today's meeting was the last before we start the filming process. Today we discussed exactly we will do when we reach the set where we will film. The equipment is already on location so we didn't need to worry about that. As im the only actor I am the only one who needs costume and I have that organised and ready to go. The location is at my house and is the scene is being filmed in my room so I have had to set it up and remove a lot of my everyday objects in order to suit the character. We changed some shots last minute and then decided on what sound we were going to need to go with each shot and we also discussed how we were going to put the titles in and what they will say. We also put some hard thought into where we will have to be to get the shots that we want and have organised a ladder to get our birds-eye view shot.