Evaluation Question Seven

7.  Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When we started filming our preliminary task, I had never used a camera or tripod before, nor had I ever used any type of editing software. Between January, when we filmed and edited our preliminary task, and now in March, after filming and editing our final sequence, I can easily identify the aspects in which I have hugely improved. At first, even setting up the tripod and camera seemed an impossible task, whereas now I can do this quickly and effectively with no worry. When my group member and I first started editing we were absolutely clueless and were asking for help every five minutes, it took us about 4 hours in total to edit down a 30 second clip. This is an extremely long time, especially when the task had no effects, no credits, and very few shots. Obviously, for our final task we had to include all of these things, thus it did take longer to edit than 4 hours. However, we became so acclimatised to the editing software as we progressed, things that had seemed extremely difficult beforehand were now extremely simple. For example, getting rid of all sound. We had absolutely no idea how to do this before our final piece, and it is an extremely easy thing to do.

The preliminary task had certain shots we HAD to include, differing to our final task, as that was all shots of our choosing. The same applies to the plot, the preliminary task did not have a ‘plot’ really, but a certain story we had to follow. A character had to open a door, cross the room and sit down in a chair opposite another character. They had to exchange a few lines of dialogue, but the clip could only be 30 seconds so we had to show all of the shots required in a very short amount of time.

The shots we had to show were the ‘shot reverse shot’, ‘match on action’ and ‘180 degree rule’. This was to show we had a basic understanding of cinematography. Continuity proved to be a problem once we were in the editing suite, especially with sound, as we were not following the precise script we had made and the dialogue came out different every time. My partner and I were unsure whether or not to use sound in our final product, but recorded the sound anyway. Since we had used a digital camera to film, the sound was not very clear or audible. We watched the clip with merely tense, atmospheric music running over it and we felt it worked much better and created a sense of enigma. We WANT the audience to ask questions, we want them to wonder what is being said – and as the opening is all a flashback, if we were to make a 90-minute movie of ‘The Teacher’, we would probably flash back to that conversation to see what had been said.

The final sequence had many shots that we did not use for our preliminary task. For example an establishing shot, which was an exterior shot of the college building. This would be highly relatable to our target audience because of their ages; 15-25, most still being in education.

When filming our final sequence, we used a lot of extreme close ups, but not of people. We generally used extreme close ups on weapons, as show below. If the audience are presented with an extreme close up of something the detail will be clearer and more shocking. When filming our preliminary task we did not really put much thought into how to make the piece more effective.

Many of the weaponry shots we filmed were done so via the ‘handheld’ technique. We did this so as to get a more shaky effect, suggesting someone was looking at the weapons, these shots were also POV shots. We did not want these shots to be static as that would not have looked right so thought that by holding the camera we could perfectly capture the idea of a human looking at the weapons.

We also filmed some panning shots of the weaponry, starting at one side of the table and panning to the other side. We did this so that the shot suggested someone was looking at the weapons, deliberating over which weapon to use on her victims.

By using a high, canted angle we felt we could get the idea of disorientation and confusion across to the audience. In our preliminary task, obviously it was not a thriller so we did not do anything different or unconventional because we did not have the same aims.

One thing my partner and I found hard to recognize was when we broke the 180-degree rule. In the preliminary task it was simple not to break it as the two people were sitting directly across from each other. We merely filmed on one side of them and did not film on the other side. However, in our final sequence we did not realize we had broken the rule for our first draft. When Natacha ‘The Student/Victim’ enters the classroom, we are filming on her right side, then when she goes to sit down and interact with the teacher, and we are filming on her left side. In order to have kept that clip, we would have had to re-film the scene, showing us moving the camera in a tracking motion, so as the audience do not get confused about what they are seeing. Although disorientation was our goal, we wanted to get the audience hooked and thinking – not confused and wanting to stop watching. In the end we found that the shot was not actually necessary anyway.

Continuity is possibly the most important aspect of editing. The audience will stop watching if they are confused about what is happening or if the scene does not appear to make sense and keeps jumping. Match on action is extremely important, in our preliminary task we had to do this. When I go to open the door in it, if the next shot was me sitting down the audience would be puzzled. We need to see me open the door, then cut to me coming through the door on the other side – this is a match on action. We also use this in our final task when I enter the classroom, we cut from me opening the door to me entering the classroom. However, we do have a cutaway in the middle to a shot of weaponry.

We also had to make sure that the eyelines of our characters matched each other. If both of them were looking in different directions and having a conversation then the audience would have a hard time knowing what was happening.

The whole of our piece was a cross cutting montage. We were inter-cutting between the daily life of a teacher to her sordid, dark private time. Some of the panning shots I filmed of the weapons on the table were very slow. We wanted our thriller to be suspenseful and tense so we needed to speed them up. Thankfully, Final Cut Pro can do pretty much anything so we were easily able to edit the shots and make them slightly faster to add pace.

When doing our preliminary task, neither my partner nor me knew how to change colours and put in filters etc. We learned all about this when we were doing our final sequence and were shocked at how easy it is. For our weaponry shots we decided to use a black and white filter placed over them so that those shots in particular stood out from the bring daytime shots and created enigma.

Adding titles was extremely easy also. We used a plain white ‘Tahoma’ font so as the text did not distract the audience from the movie too much. For our last credit – the title of the movie ‘The teacher’, we had the font a red colour, to connote blood, danger etc and it was gradually getting bigger from a pitch black screen, stopping when it was clear what the credit said. We decided to have our titles running over our footage to save on time. We would have loved to have cut to a black screen with the credits on; however we only had a certain amount of time to do the movie in so we had to let go of some of our artistic desires in order to get a short but overall effective piece.

We had many ideas for a soundtrack at first, but then were told the music had to be royalty-free. This was quite disappointing for us but there were many upsides to using an unknown soundtrack. If we were to use something famous or well known e.g, the ‘Jaws’ theme, it could mislead audiences and this disappoint them thoroughly. So in many ways we were thankful we did not get to use a well-known score.

Overall, I feel I have learned a lot from my media coursework. I know I’ll never be able to watch a movie again without thinking about all the hard work and effort that has went into it. I enjoyed the process, difficult though it was at times, and will definitely not forget any of the things I have learnt from the whole experience of making a two minute thriller opening.

Evaluation Question Six

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

Before this year, I have never even used a Mac computer before, let alone done any editing. Although I was not the ‘editor’ of our movie, as the director I felt it my duty to oversee the editing take place. We started by logging and capturing the footage, which was a lot easier for our final task than it was for our preliminary task. This was because we used a camera which needed a tape for the preliminary task, and so it took a long time to upload. For the real task we used a digital camera for ease of transporting etc, which was much easier as we just needed to put the SD card directly into the Mac computer and upload it. We learned a lot of different editorial techniques as the weeks went on, for example colour filters, which we used quite a lot in our video, and how to add credits, music etc. I feel that as a whole, I’ve learned a lot about the editing process and if I had to I could easily make edit my own sequence. That point brings me onto the subject of the camera and tripod, which again I had no former experience with. My group member and I both filmed for the opening, she shot all of the footage within the college, whereas I shot the weaponry images, as this had to be done at my house. I am glad I got the chance to use the camera and tripod for myself as it gave me more practice for next year when I may have to film a whole sequence by myself.

Online technologies we used:

Google Mail Account: In order to access Blogger, Youtube, Scribd and Bubbl.us, we first needed to create a ‘gmail’ account. Both my group member and I created our own individual account, but we also created a group account. This way we could both edit the blog when we needed to, as well as uploading anything to Youtube etc.

Blogger: It was compulsory to upload all of our work to a blog, this made it easier to complete group work as, along with our own individual blogs, we shared a blog which we could both update.

Youtube: Once completing our films, both our preliminary task and our final task, we uploaded the movies to Youtube. We found this to be a great help as we could send the link to people and they could look at the video and tell us what we could to do improve it or make it better. It also made sure the video was safe, if there were any technical problems with the computers at college, or if our video was deleted from the computer then we knew it was safely on Youtube.

Facebook: Once we had finished our first draft of ‘The Teacher’ and we had uploaded it on Youtube, I put the video on my Facebook profile so that all of my friends could comment on it and say how I could improve, what they liked etc. This was a huge help as we still had time to go back into the editing room and change the film to suit our audiences’ needs.

Scribd: We uploaded some of our documents to Scribd, the largest social publishing website on the internet. We did this because, in most cases, we had used tables on word which we could not just copy and paste onto Blogger, so we needed to convert the file into a link we could save onto Blogger, and the tables would be shown. Scribd did this perfectly.

Final Cut Pro: This was the software we used to edit our preliminary task and thriller opening. Although at first we found it extremely confusing, the more we used Final Cut Pro the more we grew accustomed to it, and things that seemed extremely hard at first suddenly seemed very simple.

Bubbl.us: Since all of the work we were doing had to be done online, we felt that doing a brainstorm on paper would be pointless. This is where Bubbl.us helped out. Not only was it much easier to upload a brainstorm we had done online, but it was also much clearer than anything we could have done on paper.

Paint: Since I have very little experience in Photoshop, I decided to keep things simple and stick to using Microsoft Paint. On here, I created our company’s logo and a very simplistic theatrical poster.

Incompetech: The soundtrack for our opening had to be royalty free, which was quite disappointing as we had quite a few ideas for our soundtrack. However, after quite a while of searching ‘Incompetech’ for a fitting score, we found our piece.

Evaluation Question Five

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

Above is the annotated version of our film, which details how we attracted our audience.

The target audience for our sequence was the 15-25 year old range, so me and my group member had to figure out what these people wanted and how exactly we could give it to them.

We knew the sequence had to be full of tension and suspense, this is what everyone who answered my questionnaire expected to see in a thriller. Murders are generally popular among young people nowadays due to movies such as the ‘Saw’ series, which have completely desensitised viewers from anything gruesome. Therefore we felt that having cutaways to knives smothered in blood etc would generate interest from the audience.

We had to have a ‘protagonist’, but we decided to have a twist, though you do not find out in the opening it is heavily hinted at that the teacher is not in fact a ‘protagonist’, even though she is the main character. We wanted to do something slightly different and show the audience the point of view of who would usually be considered the ‘antagonist’. We aimed to do something diverse and, with the modern audience constantly looking for unique plots and interesting storylines, we knew we could not just do a conventional, step by step basic thriller. Our storyline had to stand out in order to attract audiences, and I feel we have done that.

Evaluation Question Four

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our movie would be aimed mostly towards the younger generation, aged between 16 and 25. This is because majority of the people I surveyed who were interested in thriller movies were aged between 16-25, and mostly students. Also, this being the case, I feel it would be safe to say that our movie would most appeal to people in the socio-economic group of ‘C2DE’.As I stated in one of my former questions, ‘The Teacher’ would be a crime/mystery/psychological thriller, which has been proven as a great ‘date movie’ genre. Therefore it would appeal to both male and female genders, but maybe more so towards a female audience as the main character of the movie is a woman. Men will generally rather watch a movie which has lots of fast paced action and if possible, a male protagonist. The movie would appeal to the younger generation as majority of the cast would be students, as are most of our audience members, and so they could easily relate to the characters.

My group member and I felt it important to do some research on the ‘British Board of Film Classification’ (BBFC) so that we could identify what age certificate would be most appropriate for our movie. We both agreed that the film would definitely be a ‘15’ certificate, as there would be a large deal of murder, blood, bad language and so on in it. This would not be suitable for a ‘12a’ audience clearly.

This is Joe; he represents the target audience for my production. Joe is 20 and recently started a course in Film Studies at Queen Mary’s university. Nothing interests him more than movies and TV shows, and he is an avid cinema-goer. He represents the target audience for my production. Joe would be part of the ‘C2DE’ socio-economic category, as he is a non-working student, and comes from a humble background in Essex. Joe loves thriller movies, his favourite being ‘Memento’; however his favourite genre is comedy. He enjoys such movies as ‘Dumb and Dumber’ and ‘Something About Mary.’ The same goes for television shows; comedy shows keep his attention more. For example, he loves ‘Family Guy’ and ‘South Park’, but he’s also a huge fan of the crime/drama series ‘Dexter’. His music taste is vast as well, ranging from ‘Blue Oyster Cult’ to ‘Black Stone Cherry’, showing he is a man with widely differing interests. Joe is like any other normal young man; his most visited websites are ‘Youtube’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Amazon’. Since starting university, Joe does not have much time for video games, but he loves playing sports or war games on his Playstation 3, for example ‘FIFA’ and ‘Call Of Duty’. Joe obviously spends a lot of time on his laptop, his iPod and his phone, a ‘Samsung Galaxy S’. However he also loves reading film magazine ‘Empire’. He spends his weekends relaxing from his busy week, occasionally going out with friends to play football, but usually to go to the cinema to see a new movie. Joe spends most of his money on media related products. He has a ‘LoveFilm’ account so that he can keep up to date with all the movies he wants to see, the contract for his phone, cinema visits, film magazines and he occasionally buys songs from iTunes for his iPod. Joe may sound like he is obsessed with technology here, but all in all, Joe is like any average 16-25 year old, he’s constantly being shown media products, trailers for new upcoming movies, hearing new songs. Joe symbolizes the perfect target audience for our film because he is young, interested in movies, thrillers especially, and very media-savvy.

Evaluation Question Three

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?

A distribution company will disperse the film and spend money trying to make a name for the film, get people hyped about the movie through word of mouth. They do this for a percentage of the film’s profit, and sometimes they will buy the rights to a movie straight from the producers and rent the film to cinemas etc themselves. Ideally, 20^th Century Fox would be the perfect company to distribute our movie as they are such a well known, globally established corporation. According to IMDB, the company have distributed 159 movies in the UK since 1962. Although many are not British, they have distributed quite a few UK movies. For example, ‘Shallow Grave’ (1994), ‘Full Monty’ (1997) and ‘28 Days Later’ (2002). All three of these movies are of very different genres, showing how 20^th Century Fox are a company who distribute movies of all different sorts, but also because they distribute very independent movies. ‘28 Days Later’ was a very cheap movie to make, with a mere budget of 8 million – it made more than ten times this amount in gross profit. Our movie would be a lot cheaper to produce and film, and has some of the same codes and conventions as ’28 Days Later’, so could do quite well gross-wise as well.

There have not been very many movies like ours, but if I had to compare it to a film, I would compare it to ‘The Faculty’ (1998) which was distributed by Dimension Films mostly. Dimension Films have distributed many horror and thriller movies including ‘The Crow’ (1994) ‘Scream’ (1996) and ‘Grindhouse’ (2007). This makes me feel that, although a far lesser known company, Dimension Films would probably be perfect for distributing our movie as they seem to thrive off movies based around the horror and thriller genre. The main reason I compare ‘The Teacher’ to ‘The Faculty’ is because both movies deal with teachers losing control of themselves and murdering their students. However, the teacher in our movie is merely suffering a mental breakdown and commits the murders as she gets fed up of the harsh treatment she receives and dwindles into madness. The teachers in ‘The Faculty’ have been possessed by aliens, which makes them go on a murderous spree. Our movie is more of a realistic thriller, which the audience will probably find quite believable, whereas ‘The Faculty’ is a science fiction horror and so the audience will be more sceptical of the storyline.

However, my point still stands that I believe our movie would be a perfect film for Dimension Films as it seems to be the type of genre they generally represent. This being the case, they probably know a lot about the genre and how to distribute the film in a way that people will be attracted to it. Although, I still also believe that 20^th Century Fox would also be a perfect candidate to represent our movie, just because it is such a famous, household name.

Evaluation Question Two

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

A range of social groups would be represented throughout our movie – the main one being the tired, depressed teacher. Although the same cannot be said for all teachers, majority have to put up with a lot of bad behaviour and students who are unwilling to work. Our movie, if it were to last around 90 minutes, would tackle the many issues that teachers have to deal with, in a perhaps very extreme scenario. We would have a series of flashbacks throughout the movie showing what exactly pushed our main character over the edge and what forced her to start killing off her pupils, including abusive students, pay cuts and all around stress. We chose to film with a female teacher as we wanted to be different, in most thrillers the killer ends up being male – we wanted to give our movie a twist. Therefore we are representing males and females as being very similar in the respect that BOTH genders are very capable of murder. However, the movie would not be biased. We would show her victims, the students, points of view also. The students would be represented in a variety of different ways, we would cover many of the modern stereotypes, for example the ‘chavs’, ‘popular girls’, ‘emos’ and so on. The film as a whole would tackle a wide spectrum of social groups.

I would compare the character of ‘the teacher’ to that of the knife-welding, mask wearing maniac from the horror movie ‘Scream’, directed by Wes Craven in 1996. The images below show our character, on the left, and the masked murderer from ‘Scream’, on the right. Although our character does not wear a mask, they do wear a dark hooded jacket like the character from ‘Scream’ so as to hide their identity. We could have put a mask on; however we thought that we would instead use camera angles that made it impossible to see the hooded figure’s face. In our film, the murderer acts as the main star, whereas whilst the film ‘Scream’ does mainly revolve around the murderer, he is not the protagonist. The characters body language is also very similar, they are both very composed and poised, standing confidently – people who are proud of what they are doing. The images above also show how similar the deadly instruments are that our characters used, the large butcher knives. However, the two characters actual motives for murdering are completely different. The murderer in ‘Scream’ turns out to be two of the main characters from the film, just two teenage boys. One has his own vendetta against the movies protagonist, the other is just ‘tagging along’, but neither of them have any real reason to kill off all of the people they slay. This differs to our character, who is killing her pupils because of  the trouble and anguish they have caused her, thus she has quite a valid reason for committing the murders.

By making the murderer the central focus of the film, we did not intend to glorify murder or suggest it is in any way good, we merely wanted to show things from the murderers point of view. Or even, the teacher’s point of view. We wanted to portray how unfairly some teachers are treated and how one day; they might even go over the edge.

Evaluation Question One

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

Our thriller opening uses many of the same codes and conventions which real thriller openings use. We had a choice between shooting the opening of a horror movie, or a thriller movie.  We toyed with the idea of doing a horror opening; however I am far more interested in the thriller genre and so was my group member, Nafisat. Therefore it just made sense to do a thriller, as well as being easier to film than a horror. My group member and I each did our own individual research on all the different types of thriller movies and realised we had a broad selection of sub-genres to choose from. Our final product could be put into many of the sub-genres. I feel that ‘The Teacher’ is a crime/mystery/psychological thriller as a whole.

My group member and I took a long time deciding on the title of our movie, whilst we did not want to make the title too obvious, we wanted the audience to know the movie was a thriller. The main character of the movie is a teacher, so we eventually decided to make the title simple – ‘The Teacher’. We felt that, by having a short, snappy title, it would be both easy for an audience to remember, but also that it would have more of an impact. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of thrillers, did this quite regularly, some examples are ‘Psycho’ ‘Rebecca’ ‘Vertigo’. I gave out a questionnaire to ten people, and six of them agreed that the title ‘The Teacher ’was befitting of the ‘thriller’ genre. The other four people felt the title could apply to a different genre, for example comedy or drama, thus the title did not make it clear that our movie was a thriller. I took this into consideration and spoke to my group member; we both decided that in order for out movie to clearly be a thriller, we’d have to make a theatrical poster so as the genre was clear.

We decided to film most of our opening sequence in our college, not only because it was the easiest and most convenient place to shoot, but also because it just made sense as the title character of our movie was a teacher. We filmed in various areas of the college, starting off just outside of ‘H’ block and following our character as she eventually enters a classroom. We chose to film in this particular block because it was very brightly coloured, and we wanted to make a contrast between this and our other settings. For the latter part of our sequence, we filmed in ‘B’ block, this is because ‘B’ block has a colder, more metallic feel to it and we thought it would suit perfectly with the scenes. The ‘weaponry’ cutaway shots were filmed inside of my house; obviously we had to do this as we wanted to show knives, axes, hammers etc. Clearly we could not take these objects to college as it would have been dangerously unsafe, but also illegal. Therefore filming these shots inside of a house was a must.

Mise-en-scene plays a huge importance in all thriller movies, as it did in ours. I had to dress smart for our opening shots as I was playing a teacher, so I had to wear a blazer, shirt, skirt etc. I also had to wear my makeup in a more mature manner, so that I could actually pass for being older than 17. The props we used were also quite important in these early shots, for example when I enter the classroom and take out some notepads and a red pen, suggesting I’m about to mark some work. My co-star, Natacha, also had to dress the part and look like a student, which obviously was not hard for her as she was a student. For the latter scenes in the sequence, I had to dress in all black so that we could achieve the dark atmosphere we were going for, so I had to wear a hooded black jacket, black jeans and black shoes. The most important props for the sequence were, in my opinion, the weaponry laid out on the dining table. Without the cutaway shots to the knives etc, I don’t think there would have been as big a sense of tension and confusion for the audience. I laid the weapons out on newspaper purely because of the mess I was going to make using the watered down ketchup as blood, and I did not want them to stain the table. But I also felt that, since we were going to be using a black and white filter over these shots anyway, the black and white newspapers would merely act as a hardly noticeable prop in the background in comparison to the weapons.

We wanted to have a variety of different shots in our sequence to portray that we know all the different types. The first shots of our movie are quote slow and long, the cutaways are much quicker. As the sequence goes on, the shots get quicker and the movie has much more pace. We edited it this way on purpose, we wanted the audience to feel more and more tense as the sequence went on. Starting slow at the beginning suggests that something is coming, and we follow through on this, having the main event take place right at the end.

We chose to use quite regular font styles for our sequence, Tahoma, mostly because we had the credits running over our shots and didn’t want the audience to be distracted by obtrusive text instead of watching the sequence. I created our ‘logo’ in paint, as I felt it’d be easier to use paint rather than photoshop, which I have very little experience with. We used a red font for our logo so that it would stand out, and we used white coloured font for the rest of the credits, apart from our last credit which was the title itself. For this, we had white block capitals in Tahoma, but it had a black background instead of running over the shots.

Our movie would follow a teacher as she gradually descends into insanity, tired of her work and students. The opening presents us with this idea already, when her student comes in asking for help and our character suddenly gets very annoyed and slams her pen down on the table, exclaiming she cannot help the student with anything. Obviously, a normal teacher would never do this. Therefore we can easily say there is something wrong with this teacher – the constant cutting to knives etc suggests something is not right as well.

There are only two characters in our sequence, and it is clear who our main character is – I would say protagonist, but the person is not a ‘hero’. The main character is the young female, ‘the teacher’, who is given the most screen time – the edit. The secondary character is ‘the student’, who plays a very small part in the film, and is killed off very quickly. This is conventional to most thriller openings; they start off with a death.

Our thriller has quite short, quick cuts and we have included some black and white shots, we have done this partly so that those specific shots stand out, but also to pay homage to older thrillers, e.g ‘Pyscho’ directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film was made in 1960, and Hitchcock could have easily filmed it in colour, but he chose not to, and it gave the movie a very eerie effect – just as we wanted our film to have.

We had thoughts about doing a horror opening at first, but we decided to go with the thriller genre. Generally, a horror movie has to scare you quite early on. We knew this would be hard to achieve, and by doing a thriller we would not have this pressure. However, there are obviously typicalities that a thriller opening must have. It has to thrill the audience, make them wonder what is going to happen next and fill them with questions. I feel we achieved this in our opening thriller. We open with a shot in a dark room of an unknown person looking over the body of an unconscious, possibly dead, girl on the ground. We cut to a character walking and entering a classroom then. Already the audience are wondering ‘how are these two stories linked?’ All throughout the video we are cutting to shots of weapons, again making the audience question what they are seeing. Our last shot shows the same shot we showed at the beginning, but in reverse. This makes the audience aware that what they have just seen was a flashback. They are still filled with questions though, and we hoped that, by the end, they would realize that this hooded character is the teacher. However, that could just be their assumption – they haven’t been told this yet, so nothing is sure. This is what we feel the opening of a thriller should do; confuse and hook the audience.

The picture below shows 9 images which I feel sum up our opening sequence perfectly:

Evaluation Questions

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

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your product and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

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

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Production Journal

18/1/2011: This was the first day we met as a group, during our two hour lesson we made a plan for our preliminary task then filmed it. One of our group members was not present, so we filmed the task with a classmate who's group members had already filmed theirs.

21/1/2011: In this two hour lesson, we logged and captured our preliminary task and spent the rest of the lesson familiaring ourselves with the editing software so that when we did edit, both for the preliminary task and for the real task, we'd find it easier.

25/1/2011: In this lesson we started editing our preliminary task, it took quite a while as we were still not yet properly acclamatised with the software.

26/1/2011: This was our evening session, in which we finished editing, added our final touches and uploaded the finished product of the preliminary task to the blog.

1/2/2011: On this day, I studied our preliminary task and took note of all the different shots we used, aswell as describing what is shown in them.

4/2/2011: In this lesson I wrote the treatment for the opening of our two minute thriller opening.

9/2/2011: On this day, I drew up the storyboards - nobody in the group was very good at art, but the rough storyboards combined with the shot list gave us a good idea of what we wanted to film.

11/2/2011: One of our group members was not present this day, but two of us decided to assign the roles and responsibilities this day - we had talked of what we had each wanted to do before so we knew it would not be unfair doing it without one of our group members.

23/2/2011: Before we came up with our final idea, we had various other thoughts on what to do. In this lesson, we made a brainstorm on 'bubbl.us' to illustrate the other story ideas we originally had.

4/3/2011: During this lesson we filled in the 'production brief' form, whilst I filled out our 'call sheet', 'props/resources list' and our production schedule, as we knew we had to film the following week.

8/3/2011: This was the first day of filming, we spent our two hour lesson filming our daytime shots in and around college.

9/3/2011: We continued to film in our 3 hour night session, shooting the "dark side" of our opening sequence.

10/3/2011: This day, I took the camera home and filmed the finishing shots which would have been impossible to film outside of a house. The shots involved weapons etc, obviously not appropriate to have been taken to college.

11/3/2011: As we had finished filming, we were able to log and capture our footage on the computer and were ready to start editing. The problems with editing are that we always have to use the same computer we captured our footage on, and sometimes that computer is not available as someone else is using it and so on. This proves to be a huge problem as we have a lot of work to do, and not much time, ideally we need to be editing in our daytime sessions aswell as evening sessions, but the editing suites are always booked out for other classes.

15/3/2011 - 25/3/2011: All of this time, we were editing our opening sequence. By the 25th we had finished our first draft, however we were not yet able to upload it to youtube and so will do this on Monday. However, we already know the changes we need to make and our second draft will be a lot shorter than our first, and more suited to the thriller genre.

28/3/2011: Uploaded our first draft of 'The Teacher' to youtube.


29/3/2011 - 5/4/2011: On the 5th April we had finished our final product, with a sountract, credits and the editing was finally complete. We uploaded our video to youtube, and for our remaining days worked on completing our 'Evaluation' questions.

5/4/2011 - 8/4/2011: Completing and uploading evaluation questions.

8/4/2011: This was the final deadline and everything was handed in on time.