The Finished Peice :D

Here is me and Robyn's film, Gunpowder:

I think we succeeded at what we needed to do. Allthough there was a few problems such as when you try and stop the camera filming at the end of a shot, it makes the camera wobble quite a lot. This happens a few times during the intro. Me and Robyn are happy with the results.

Editing Task.

Me and Robyn managed to upload the video without as much difficulty which we faced in the Prelim task which was nice... We were dreading it because of the fuss we had to make to do it before.

When editing we used iMovie (no-one else is using this programme now because it was removed from the other computers). Then first of all we started to cut the shots up into the appropriate parts and also when we cut halfway through an action we had to be precise and make it flow properly. After we had selected the best shots, we then made each individual shot Black and White (we couldn't figure out how to select all of the shots, and no Ctrl A didn't work either). We also turned up the exposure to make the shots seem more authentically Film Noir.

One problem we faced with using a dark room like we did for the shots inside, was that the picture came out quite grainy in some parts. Hopefully this makes it seem more like an aged piece of film but it might just make it look like the poor quality that it is. But we can't do anything about that.

After getting that alright, we put some credits on which come on at appropriate times and we thought it was quite good that the wording carries on over more than one shot.

The most difficult part of the task now though, is to find some suitable (free) music for it. Both me and Robyn spent an extra hour during a free period searching for some kind of music to put on, we could find some but it would cost us 79p and we didn't think we could pay for it at school. At home I found some music which hopefully will be okay. Now we have to choose where and how to put it on and maybe edit the shots a bit to fit with the music.

Now all we have to do is put some credits on at the end. Hopefully we'll finish next lesson. It's looking allright.

The Shooting.

Today we took all our shots. A day late but we stuck to the promised time of 7:30 and ended up very very cold (thank god the other half of the shots were indoors so we could have some tea.

Here's a picture to prove how cold it was:

Anyway, there were no hitches besides how cold it was. Me and Robyn took turns to both direct and take the shots. It worked out well most of the time because when one wasn't sure how to fabricate a certain ideal that we wanted to portray the other person was very able to do so.

So now hopefully we can get the tape onto the Macs without as much trouble as most people had when trying to upload the preliminary task.

So that's done.

Photographic Storyboard. (Curtosey of Matthew Foster)

This is basically a storyboard of every shot that we had pre planned and Matthew has included annotations which show what the shots are technically called.

Film Noir...

For our final peice/ main task, we (in pairs) have to create a short movie intro which is specific to a certain genre. My parner is Robyn Furtado. For our introduction we thought it would be best and easiest for us to do a film noir style movie. This is because in Art I had to study film noir to see how film directors create the gloomy and suggestive scenes and inticing story lines where suprise is allways added by the classic story twist.


A typical film noir set up. It includes many film noir indicators such as shadows and a death threat.

Also for complementary studies I took black and white film studies which lead me to realise that black and white film is a lot about the tone of both the pictures and the film itself. For example my class watched "The Lady Vanishes" (which Dr Ryan imensly enjoyed). Which has a sinister tone because of the story line; everyone in the train lies about how they didn't see this lady who was kidnapped and was going to be killed.

We weren't too sure how to create the unforgettable film noir style of shooting so we went onto youtube and found a very usefull video by Indymogul*:

*not sure if that worked if not here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J97VnLw7PM8