Week 7 Wednesday 16th February

Today is SUBMISSION DAY/DEADLINE DAY or whatever you want to call it. All I have needed to do today is my questionnaires...and...well...that's pretty much it. I just need to finish typing up my questionnaire and ask people in class what they think. I set up the video, plugged some headphones in for people to use, put the pen and paper on the desk and asked people in class to fill it out. I wrote a summary about this.

The questions I asked were who they think is the target audience for the advert and why, if it would appeal to them and why, if the narrative is clear to understand, and to rate some of the elements out of 5 such as camera, sound/music, lighting, props, editing and the pack shot. I asked up to 15 people these questions and I received mixed reviews but generally some good feedback. Most of the feedback was generally positive. I additionally asked their age, gender, today’s date and to sign it so it proves that I did not just simply make up these answers myself.

The feedback that I received was a lot better than I could imagine because I felt that the target audience would not understand the meaning of the advert and what is going on. But they seemed to get it which was a relief. I wrote in the evaluation about how I plan to make a video production assignment next time as this was not 100% of what I imagined during the pre-production stage. In the question where I ask to rate the elements out of 5, I put an additional question which was “If you have rated any of these lower than a 3 then please state why you think this and how you think that it could be improved”. Only two individual people voted 2 out of 5 for one question, but a few other people wrote in that answer section some tips and ideas on where or how to improve, even though they didn’t rate any of them lower than three.

Week 6 Friday 11th February 2011

Today was the day that folder 1 needs to be submitted, so I spent the day writing up my evaluation and after doing that, I decided to print off a hard copy of my blog. Even though the blog isn't due in until some time next week. It feels good to be up to date with everything right now and all I will need to do next week is the questionairres and do the market research and ask people what they think of my advert.

Week 6 Wednesday 9th February 2011

Today, I brought in some photos that I had taken over the weekend of A 4 finger Kit Kat and a normal Kit Kat Chunky. I brought them in so then I could use them for the pack shot for my advert edit. I added more footage to the advert and I have now finished. I made the pack shot in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and used the images of the Kit Kat & Kit Kat Chunky. I added the slogan "Have a break, have a" then added the logo so it would say "Have a break, have a Kit Kat". The Kit Kat logo I used was also from the picture I took of the 4 finger Kit Kat, (Original photography).

Meanwhile, I also got a submission guide that says what needs to be submitted and it said that all the work needs to be submitted in 3 seperate folders. 2 of them are individual work and the other work is all the group work. I spent over half an hour printing out everything that I will need to submit and organised them and put them in my folders. The things I have not done yet is the final evaluation. (Which I will do at the end), print out a hard copy of my blog (Which I will do on submission day so I can put it all together and have the last blog update submitted. I also need to do a questionnaire which I will do for homework and ask people (my target audience).

Week 5 Friday 4th February 2011

Today, I started to edit my advert, I am so far half way through finishing editing the final advert. Meanwhile, Simon told us about Market Research Audience Sample Viewing, I took notes of what was said like producing a questionnaire. I think I'll probably get the ad done by Tuesday. For homework, I will take some pictures of some Kit Kat bars and probably also take a picture of Kit Kat Chunky to use for the pack shot. I believe it is a better idea to do some original photography for our final product even though we haven't been asked by the teachers we have to use original photography. Because this is what we all had to do for DVD menu's. It would look more professional if I get images for the pack shot myself instead of get them from Google Images.

Week 5 Wednesday February 2nd 2011

Today in the first two hour lesson, I completed my initial aims task which I was meant to do a while ago but didn't :S Don't ask! But I also continued with my journey document and I am half way through finishing that now. I also got a copy of all the rushes we filmed yesterday put onto my hard drive (The Hard Drive's that are in E21) and a copy onto my own personal external hard drive. I also own my own hard drive, it's a "My Passport" one.

As I was absent last Wednesday (Because of an epic college trip [lol, wierd how I say College trip instead of school trip now] to BBC TV Centre in London) I missed the lesson where there was a Adobe Premiere Tutorial Workshop. Although I know absolutely everything about Windows Movie Maker. We would still have to use Adobe Premiere. However, today in Harry's lesson, he did another workshop for the ones absent last week.

Today in the Adobe premiere workshop, I learned a lot of things in Premiere. I learned about importing the audio along with markers and keyframes, I learned about how you do transitions from one clip to another clip, like dissolve, texturise etc. I learned about how to do split screens by putting one clip on top of another clip and making the sizes of the clip smaller adjusting it so there are 2 clips at once. (Moving frames, cropping, enlarging.

Make a I learned about how to do things in slow motion or speed up clips or even reverse the clips. Which I find fun :P I saw how to do colour grading, how to do freezeframes. In Windows Movie Maker, there is an easier way to do freezeframes but I don't care about that. I learned about PSD's and PNG's formats. I learned about having to create three folders in our ext. hard drives;

Images
Audio
Rushes
Project

I learned about making a packshot by using Adobe Photoshop. First, I must make a new document, set the preset to "Film & Video", set the size to "PAL DI/DV Widescreen Square Pixel", set width to 1024 and height to 576, the colour mode to RGB, the resolution must be 72 and the background content to "transparent". It is basically similar to when we created DVD menu's. Making the pack shot was pretty interesting in my opinion like when I imported it and saw it on Adobe Premiere above another video clip.

Week 5 Tuesday February 1st 2011

Today I arrived at College two hours early. On Tuesday's, we usually start college at 11:15 but we came in earlier because in my group, we called each other over the weekend to discuss when we could film but before we went home last Friday, we booked the camera for Tuesday 9:15, in the end when we contacted each other, we agreed to sticking to this time. The only problem I found out the day before I started filming was that one of the actors (My friend, Jason) who played as one of the bullies, could not make it to that time because that time clashes with his class. He does a public services course and has nothing to do with any media course. So we did a last minute re-cast. We got our classmate, Jonathon Ivall to take over Jason Watkin's role as one of the bullies. We may need to re-print some of the pre-production paperwork and change the names and contact details from Jason to Jonathon.

Today, we all gathered outside E21 to film for our advert. We went to Phil to collect our camera and tripod. We arrived at the vending machines in the hallway and decided to film the scenes of my character walking outside the college and on the way to the inside of the college where the vending machines are. This was because we wanted to wait for the place to die down because there were too many people walking through. After filming outside and through the hallways on the way to the vending machines, the problem we had was that a member of staff was at the vending machines refilling it with delicious, tasty items. We had to wait for about, if not, more than 5 minutes waiting for him to finish. We couldn't simply ask him to leave for a while, as we wanted to take our time filming this instead of rush it. So we simply sat at some high tables near the vending machines and waited patiently and gave ourselves a break...a KIT KAT BREAK! lolololol...wait, you know what, that wasn't funny. Forget I said that.

While we filmed at the vending machines, it was 10am and had 1 hour and 15 minutes until class started. But like I said, we took our time and didn't rush the advert. The only small problem we had was people walking past us, however, they were very respectful and either stood still and moved once we said they could or asked quietly if we can go. Although, it was a problem when people wanted to buy something from the vending machines. We just let them do it and wait until they were gone to start filming again. They thanked us for letting them use it quickly. I was expecting a bunch of immature people to walk past and mess up our work by shouting at the camera, standing in front of the camera on purpose etc. but everything there was fine.

After we finished filming, it was 10:50. So it took us an hour and a half to film something for 30 seconds. Although, it was worth it so we could do it perfectly, we returned the tripod to Phil and kept the camera on us for the afternoon lesson to upload the rushes on our computers. But when we had class in the afternoon. We converted our files to the right format so they can be imported into Adobe Premier or Windows Movie Maker. After watching though our rushes, we believed that the final scene we shot was not very good and decided to reshoot it. However, we had no tripod because we gave it back to Phil. Although we could of asked to use it again for a few minutes, I found it easier to borrow a classmates tripod, who weren't using it. I borrowed it from Jon Ivall (Who we asked to be in the advert at the last minute). Jonathon Ivall has been an excellent assistance in our work.

For homework, I have got to finish the initial aims and the journey document.