Video Blog

George, Ramtin and myself all had a free period on Friday afternoon, so we thought it would be a good idea to meet up in a quiet area and give you a brief run through on what we've been getting up to for the past month during the production process of Black Out.

Here's a short video blog..

2nd Draft Complete!

All of the clips we shot yesterday were brilliant and worked really well with the genre. The new added parts to the storyline seemed to fit in nicely with the overall plot and make the opening a lot more exciting for the viewer to watch. We managed to get all of the clips edited today, with the help of Ramtin, and have now produced the second draft to Black Out on our Youtube account. Some of the cuts still need sharpening, and music needs to be added to the second half along with the first half, but you'll be able to see the new shots we've included.

Enjoy...

Re-Shooting and New Location!

We wanted to make the blog as interactive as possible for our viewer to find out how we made Black Out and what we got up to during the filming process behind the scenes. As you saw in the last post, there was a short video that we quickly put together on Final Cut Express in our spare time of all of our out takes, here is another video that we made to show you the change of location for the toilet scenes of our film. Sam  done a quick POV shot of the area in the station with some other footage along the way..

Hope you enjoy it!

Re-Shooting

After going over our first draft of Black Out as a group and suggesting the idea of re-shooting the second half of the film with our teacher, we thought it would be best to get it done as soon as possible whilst the cameras and tripods were available for us. With this in mind, we emailed South West Trains on Tuesday asking them for permission to film at the station today (Thursday 31st March) which they said was absolutely fine! As a group we all went down the station and managed to film all of the shots we wanted, including our newly added mobile phone shot and a new ending to make it a bit more interesting as you'll see in the second draft which will be posted tomorrow!

Here is a short out takes video of what we got up to today, and our location..

1st Draft Of Black Out

This is our first rough cut of Black Out. We still need to sort out the sound and add music to the second half as its a bit bland at the moment. After speaking to Mr Titheridge about our first draft, we've decided to re-shoot the second half of it at the station again, using the South West Trains toilets instead of the school ones, as the light in there is much better and we will be able to achieve the camera angles and continuity of the whole piece much better. The story was also suggested to be changed by our teacher as well, as there seemed to be too many unanswered questions at the end of the 2 minutes...

The storyboards are coming out, and we're re-thinking the shots we are going to include.

Editing, editing, and more editing!

All of the clips are now slowly coming together and the final outcome is looking good. We managed to get the time lapse how we wanted it producing a great effect to the opening of the film. George and Ramtin are currently in the process of making an on screen tutorial of how they managed to do the time lapse so we can upload it to the blog to show you! Editing is such a long process, but day by day we can see the 2 minutes slowly forming together, making it quite exciting to see what the end product is going to be like. We're slightly worried about the toilet scene we filmed, as we used the school toilets with a different colour door breaking the continuity of the whole second half, however we'll have to see whats said in the marking of our first draft.

Editing Black Out

As Ramtin and George are both very experienced when it comes to editing due to them producing videos on Youtube in they're spare time outside of school we decided it would be best to let them lead us through the editing process. As a group we thought it would be better to use Sony Vegas on George's laptop instead of Final Cut Express on the school Mac systems. It would save us time having to get to know the software and we have all the plug-ins we need on Vegas to make sure we get the best opening possible for our target audience. All of the clips were transferred off the camera on to George's laptop allowing other groups to take the camera and tripod whilst we started editing. The time lapse we're finding quite difficult to do, as we want to make sure it looks as good as possible, however once complete we will upload a short tutorial on how we did it! :)

Slowly but surely we're working our way to the final outcome!