Cinematography tips I had learnt

Being the cinematographer I wanted to make sure that the filming I had done was perfect, in order for this to happen I had to do my research. I learnt that hand held filming is okay but in our case wasn't a option as we wanted still shots, in order for this to happen a tripod was the best option. another shot we used was a angled ariel shot, this was hard as the only way to do it was handheld but as i said before we wanted still shots and handheld wasn't always the best as it can be shaky.  A tripod wasn't the best choice as the camera needed to be lifted from the ground at a angle and the tripod doesn't do so. So I used a steady cam, this is we're the camera is screwed on top of a chunk of metal which has a flat piece at the bottom, this flat piece enables you to rest it on our body so it's not being filmed hand held and the camera is not shaky. This steady cam allows a clean shot to be made as it's resting on something. Another tip I learnt with the steady cam is that if you breath in when using it the camera becomes even more still, because if you heavily breath when the steady cam is balanced on your chest you lungs are going to slightly move it, so by breathing in the camera will say still.

Text inside the book

Because our title sequence was set in a American high school when shopping for acsesserios for inside the book we did find it hard due us living in Britain and we don't have shops like America does. So when tryed to find things that relate to a American high school it was difficult however we did vist more than one shop to find as much American looking features for our book. After looking in a couple of shops we did end up finding something which was a huge part to the book, this was the text to spell out words inside the book. This text we found was bright red, bold, school font letters, when we saw this we bought them straight away because it helped the audience idently it was a American high school book and we knew it would look great in the book. This text was used throughout the book spelling out the pages of who it was directed by, who edited it, who the cinematographer was and so on. Many pages had this text on and a one point we did run out of letters so we then had to make another journey to the shop to buy some more.

Making the book

As a group we made the yearbook together, we went to a local craft shop and grabbed the supplies we needed. We originally was going to make the book ourselves by buying different coloured paper and card to make the pages and book cover, however when we visualised it in the shop we knew it wouldn't look as good as we thought it would of. So we looked around the shop and we found a all ready made plain book, we all agreed straight away that it would be the book we used. After we had found the book we then went on to buying accesserious for the pages inside. We had already made our story board and planned out the pages inside the book so we then had to find stickers and pictures that would relate to each page to make them stand out.
Geek page- pens&pencil stickers, number stickers, school related stickers. (Orange and green paper for the boardeds of the character video)
Freak page- skulls and scary gothic stickers and pictures
Elite page- pink girly stickers such as lover hearts and make up, also text saying girly words such as "OMG" "FABULOUS" and "BOYS" (pink paper for the border of the videos)
Jock page- sports stickers such as trophies, a basketball, (red and blue coloured paper to border the videos, we chose these colours because they match the school logo)

Update on the freaks scene

As I previously said about the bad lighting in the toilet for the freak scene which made the footage grainy, we've thought of ideas and ways in order to make it look better. Such as different lights, holding the book in different positions and moving locations to another bathroom but they don't look any better. So we decided to pick the best clip from all the footage we had from the blue bathroom and played around with the contrast and brightness, we did this because we had already filmed the freak walking into the blue barthooms and the passing the book scene to the other character. It looks better than original videos we took but could be slightly better, however when we fitted the clip in amgost the others it looked good.

Cinematography

Cinematography was the most important aspect to this project, because otherwise we would have no title sequence. i was the cinematographer and from a personal point of view i found it very challenging, i experienced new type of camera equipment such as a steady cam and a track. we wanted clean crisp camera shots and with the use of the equipment we was able to achieve great camera shots.

For example when the characters were walking with the book we used a track to get a smooth video of them walking because doing it handheld was a huge fail and using a tripod and pan the camera as they moved didn't look good. i said we needed a camera shot that followed the book along side it, we asked the media teachers about this and they suggested the track. we tried it out and it looked great, we then used the track multiply times after that.

At times being the cinematographer was hard because looking onto the scene where your filming through the camera isn't as good as you think it is in your head. for example the toilet scene for the freek, in my head we thought it would look so good with the toilet seat and the dirty floors in the background. however when actual filming it the footage was grainy their wasn't enough light in the toilet and when we applied more light it looked too much. plus having to re-shoot scenes in school was a mission at times, this was because we filmed during the school day so we interrupted with the change over of lessons and other students using our filming locations.

Editing

Editing the whole title sequence itself was one of hardest aspects to this project, its a huge part to the final cut and it needed full attention and commitment due to the effects and ideas we had in mind in order for this to be a success.

Our idea was for the characters individual yearbook pictures to come to life with them then doing a moving pose to the camera when the book had been turned to their page. for example the main jock photo of him was him with a basket pall on his finger, he then came to life an walked into the shot and span the ball facing the camera.

A problem we had with these videos was that when we placed the character video on top of the video footage of the book turning the character video began to move and made it look very messy. we
needed to find a away for them to stop moving. this was a problem we found when we showed our final cut to the class, they agreed that we needed to find away to fix it so on our last week went back and fixed the problems. however due to family matters our editor Brittany was unable to attend school for a few days which left us in a situation, me and Bronte then took on the role of editor while she was not present.

Together we found a tool that fixed the moving video problem and applied that tool to all the character clips and it made a huge improvement, we also added some small effects which made it a lot better. for example when the book reached the next page of characters we added a flash which gave the video that effect of a picture being taken and then they characters came to life.

Other things we had to work on was the font styles and colors, in our feedback session we was told too look into other fonts because they believed they didn't work with that particular page style, we also needed to add the sticker tool to the fonts as they also moved around the page due to the video footage it was layered on top of.

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