Monday, 9 November 2015

Life on Mars editing exercise

Reflecting on the Life On Mars

While filming the recreation of Life on Mars, I discovered ways to recreate shots through movement and placement over similarity of the subject. I also learned how to steady the camera more and keep it even on an uneven filming location, such as the sloping wood area that we filmed in in order to get the greenery shots. I also learned it's valuable to view alternate filming locations beforehand in order to get a good sense of how the area will be lit when filming, as this can give you alternate locations to film should an area be too bright or too dark, such as the car park area that we decided against filming in as it was too dark.

I learned how to add certain special effects to my video clips while editing, such as speeding up and slowing down the clip and adding transitions, such as the dissolve and fade into color. I learned how to synchronies a sound track to a video clip, as I took the audio from the Life on Mars clip and added it to the video clips. 


One particular problem I encountered was trying to change the speeds of two two clips with the dissolve transition as an error message would pop up. To rectify this issue, I deleted the clips and changed the speeds prior to adding the transition. I also accidently moved sections of the audio file when moving my clips around, I used the undo tool to get rid of this mistake and made sure that I only selected the video segment of the file, as opposed to both the video and audio segments.



This was a useful task in that it helped me to become better at navigating the affects menu and ordering my clips to avoid having to go back and redo some areas, as I found this made it incredibly difficult to make the audio and the video match up in time.

Friday, 6 November 2015

Genre choice

I decided to do a parody of the horror genre as I have noticed that in recent years many horror movies have lost many elements of originality and rely on cheap jump scares with an overbearing level of suspense that usually fails to meet with the expectations of the audience, such as in the Paranormal activity series that use convoluted story points and mystery to overshadow the terrible writing and over reliance on suspense and jump scares to produce a movie that people will see as they know that they can rely on the mystery aspect to draw people in so they can make money.


These are the worst elements of modern horror movies though whilst the lack of special effects tend to make dated movies laughable, the creative effort seems much richer.

I decided to parody the convention of suspense as that is usually the more horrific element of today's movies over any villain or monster, by having the stereotypical defenceless woman as the one who fights back in a ridiculous manner to show how over hyped the villains are usually, though I wanted the casual aspects to reflect how modern audiences are becoming resilient to similar tactics in horror movies, which is why I intend to have a casual character who is unaffected by the overused tropes of horror.