My job within the group was Art Director/manager, Within my role i have to sort out all the different props needed for the specific scenes that we are shooting. As well as looking for locations that we as a group need to be involved within our film piece.

One of the main scnes that we used more than once on our film piece was the classroom scene,

Prps needed for this piece as followed

• educational posters
• notice boards
• pencil holder, for desk of main character
• white board (aready provided in classroom)

Additional props for classroom scenes

• condoms (for sex ed scene)
• banana (for sex ed scene)
• test papers
• register
• calculator

The main extras within the classroom scenes are the pupils who are going to be used, the main problem that we had when coming to the classroom scenes was the booking of the room. basically the only rooms tht were mainly availble to us for use were university clasrooms and the same classroom ws never availble to us which made the filming more difficult as we were always on a tight schedule as rooms were only avalible f or a maximum of 2 hours at a time and those two hours were the only time we needed extras to be our students. and it ws unbeliveable to how many people wernt availble for usage due to the timing. The props that i got for te classroom scenes were all bought from poundland apart from the condoms which ended up as a bit of a coinsedence. as we got into university to start filming our classroom pieces we needed a vast supply of condoms for the sex ed scene and we didnt have enough to cover the amount needed, however there was a 'sexucational' stand at the top of the stairs giving out free condoms and so they gave us free condoms if we entered there competition. this was great as w got what we needed and possibly got a chance of wining highstreet vouchers aswell!! woop woop!

14th dec tutorial and editing

Annie kindly offered to come back in for our piece to so we could show her more footage, Josh got an early start on neatening up the rough cuts... he was still doing this late last night. I feel bad for Josh at the moment, we had the footage... in parts to give him to edit, but having other group work on the go, essays and so forth he hasn't been able to do as much as he had liked. I came in yesturday...(14th dec) to offer support, I dont feel very confident editing so I was observing offering suggestions and asking him to cut or keep in verious scenes, I was also trying to sort out a group folder and mine and Marks piece so I wasn't always in the editing room, I was a bit disappointed that when Annie came to see it we only really had a sequence: beginning, middle and an end, I wanted to have an editing beginning at least!! we also got confused AGAIN about the midpoint when Annie questioned us about this we all look quite confused, I dont know why that happened... we HAVE a mid-point we just need to the audio to go with it but that had not been put it place at this time.
Later on Mark was able to give Josh his hardrive, which althought enabled Josh to edit further footage left Mark without resources to complete sound on any of this Marks work, in our group and others, So there was a bit of frustration in the group, HOPEFULLY when we are all together later on today, Josh will be able to work with mark, Ill be able to construct the group folder, and everything will come together!!! FINGER CROSSED!!!

friday 11th

ROCKY START we didnt have anything new to show Annie so came to the tutorial empty handed.
we didnt start filming till late because people weren't that organised.
We managed to film the shots we needed, the parents evening bit could have been a bit longer, I felt abit unconfortable climbing over a desk to get to josh and we needed to speedthings up for Jamie who was playing Shaun, he had to go. It got a bit stressful, because we were doing all the scenes out of sequence we had to keep looking back at where we were in the script and because we hadn't stuck to the script in parts... it made life a little harder,
we ended up with the ending and all of the scenes, we didt have full use of the room we started off in but we got the shots we needed, we really just want to get this edited a.s.a.p so Mark can get on with his sounds!

8th dec 2nd proper day of filming

we have managed to find a room that is more approprite for what the classroom scenes, we found it to be a little do big But Sam suggested we use the camera cleverly to diguise this fact. He said we could take shots from certain angles so that we could only see where the pupils were sat and disregard the rest of the room, - having watched the footage the following day I agree that it worked well and that we had captured the scenes to the best of our abilities.
I t was a lot of fun but I had to keep ouching the group on from different scenes because different extras had to go at different times.
But apart from that we were on schedule, Josh ahd to adlib his lines a few times and we had to change words in the script so it would be more suiting in situations, but I think it went well, we are having to film the final scenes on friday. - the "daydream" -parents evening and the ending... its just the editing I'm worried about, we havent got much else to show Annie if we dont sort out the footage.
p.s we used lights today to illuminte Nicole as she came throught the door it looked brilliant, she waved her hair about and look directly into the camera, the lights look amazing, big thanks to Sam for thinking on the day and we also managed to "borrow" a fan so we got get a proper effect! it looked great!

Tuesday 15th December 2009 - The day before the deadline

Yesterday we had a tutorial with Annie where we showed her our film – and I have to say I was shocked at how little of our film we have edited. This is by no means Josh’s fault, he has had little time to edit the piece and has deadlines just like the rest of us. However, I do feel that if we had been organised and prepared throughout the whole production process, then there would have been plenty of time left for editing. It is also really hard for Mark as he has to wait for Josh to edit the footage before he can edit the sound – it looks like Mark will have to edit the sound tomorrow, the morning of the deadline, which isn’t great.

I have every confidence that we will get it done but I would really like to look at the piece before the hand in time. I’m concerned that we aren’t going to get the plot points sorted, there has been a lot of confusion over them and yesterday we realised that we didn’t have a mid point.

I just want to confirm the plot points for myself and the rest of the group:
• Inciting incident – parents evening
• Plot point one – Sean’s sabotage
• Mid point – Jack realizes that he doesn’t have to sabotage Sean to get closer to Nicole, and plucks up the courage to ask her on a date
• Plot point two – Sean’s moved school
• Ending – Jack sees Nicole and asks her on a date, and she says yes!

It’s so so important that we get these plot points in there, it is been marked in terms of them and we will have not met the brief if they aren’t evident in the piece.

For the mid point we were going to use an interal monologue of Jack saying ‘wait, I don’t have to do this…’ etc as he’s about to set Sean up again. Because we don’t have this shot, maybe we should just use any shot we have of Jack sat thinking/staring and put the voiceover over it. I spoke to Sam about it yesterday and he said the same thing. Please have a look at the link I posted below of the opening of the first episode of The Inbetweeners. It is a good example of an internal monologue and is also very funny. There is frequent use of the internal monologue in all episodes so check out any of them on YouTube as well.

Josh I’m coming in later on so I’ll call in and have a look at how it’s coming along and let you know what I think about the editing/shots used – don’t get annoyed with me though!
See you all later or tomorrow

Sound Recording 11th December

After all the problems I had had throughout the project doing sound, I went back to an old tried and tested set-up. One rifle mic, no mixer, straight into the camera/Marantz.

Out of all the shoots, this is the one I was most pleased with sound-wise. Voices were clear with very little feedback off the boom. The whole floor was quiet and didn't give us much disturbance at all. Sure I still fell back in to the routine of leaning in too close with the boom and getting it in shot but thats something I will just have to remember for the next project (If I ever do on set recording again, which I hope not to do).

It feels great to finish filming the whole piece. Its taken us a long time, too long, but many of the reasons for this were totally out of our hands.

Now comes the editing, something I believe I need as much time to do as possible. The sound edit isn't just for me, its for the whole group. If I don't get enough time, then it reflects badly on the piece. Not good.

Sound Recording 8th December

After the problems with the previous shoots, I thought I may go a little different with this shoot. As I'm also working with stereo sound in my sound piece, I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and use the short stereo microphone which I had acquired from stores.

Now the problem with a stereo microphone is that with double the sound comes double the cables. This is especially unhelpful when you dont have a cable basher to be in control of where your wires are constantly. Another problem with the microphone is that it didn't seem to be as sensitive as the regular rifle mic that we use. (Maybe it was just me again, like many of the sound problems...) This lead to me leaning the extra little bit closer to get the sound and sometimes causing the boom to be in shot.

On that note, after looking at the footage which is currently being edited, the feedback that I'm getting from Josh (editor) is that the boom appears in shot A LOT and sadly wrecks a few good bits. In my head I've been waiting for the camera operator (Amy) to tell me if its in, but looking back I've been a bit selfish on this. With such a small crew and no monitor hooked up to the camera, it would be one more small job for her. I should have been asking at every new set-up where the edge-of-frame was, so I can concede that its totally my fault.

On the plus side to the mic, it does take a stereo sound and this is helpful in the classroom scenes where theres more than one person talking at once.

Finally, one last problem for the day, which is yet another fault of mine. A big fault this time, that lead me in to trouble outside of the group. We had been running a little late in the classroom scenes and were all a little stressed. I had a copious amount of equipment and once it came the time for us all to pack up and leave, I didn't run through and do an equipment count. Once I got home and started work on more sound work I found that I had actually left behind the standard microphone which is given out with all the Marantzs. Ouch.

I had to tell stores on Friday, they were... unimpressed.

8th December 2009 - Filming Day and Influences for scenes

Ok so today we planned to film the classroom scenes and parents evening. I was disappointed that people were late so I’d wasted my time writing a rehearsal schedule (annoying as I stayed up late to get it done)! Josh had also forgot his script and had half of Nicola’s at his place, which made it difficult as we only had one script to work with between our entire cast and crew. I had printed a schedule for Nicola, Mark and myself (thought it would be useful for Mark to know where he’s as with the sound too) which I think was helpful when it came to filming, although Mark hadn’t brought his storyboards which slowed us down a little – not entirely Mark’s fault as he thought that I would have been picking them up (explained in previous post).

Despite the negatives listed above, I think we did a fairly good job today. We had a huge classroom with only 5 extras, but worked around it by blocking the back half of the classroom off with boards and ensuring that the left hand side of the classroom was entirely out of shot at all times. Our extras were great and were understanding when there was some confusion between our group about what scene/shots we were doing. They did everything asked of them and also gave us some input in to how they thought something should be said, etc, which I think was very useful – their age group are our target audience after all!

We did get all of the classroom scenes filmed today, which is great, but I am still disappointed that we didn’t get the parents evening scene completed as well. There was no reason at all why we couldn’t have finished all of the filming today – I had done a realistic schedule and, had it been stuck to strictly, we could have done it. In my opinion, yes we don’t want a negative atmosphere when on a shoot, but it isn’t negative to push to get things done when we’re working to a deadline. I think that everyone needs to take shoots seriously and act professionally, rather than making the main aim of the shoot to have fool around and have a laugh. I know I sound so miserable and I’m all for having fun, BUT when there’s time for it!

Anyway, we have made a decision to film the parents evening scene on Friday. I cannot attend the shoot due to hospital appointments which cannot be missed, but Sam has volunteered to take my role of Camera Operator for the day. Sam has worked along side me wherever possible and has also completed some of the storyboards, and I trust him completely to film this scene on my behalf. Having said that, I still don’t like that I’m not going to be there – I like to know what’s going on and have my say!

Guys here are a few links that I think you should check out:

· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqr8yPipfJ8

This is the opening scene to the first ever episode of The Inbetweeners. I think that the voiceover used here throws the audience straight in to familiarising themselves with Will, the protagonist, and it may be interesting to try a similar thing for the opening of our film. Josh, I know you’re really up for this and I’ve not been so sure, but I think that if it’s made to me humorous like this one it could be great. It will have to be scripted and acted very well though!

· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYr9Vg9Uj0

This could be good as it’s a conversation between Simon and Carly, but Jay keeps coming in to it. It would be interesting to look at the camera work here as we will be having a conversation between Jack and Nicola, with Sean having a little bit of dialogue every now and again (the parents evening scene). Simon also really likes Carly so it might be good to look at what techniques are used here that we may be able to use to demonstrate how Jack really likes Nicole. An interesting one that I noticed is how Simon is sitting and is a little lost for words, whilst Carly is standing confidently above him. It’s almost as though he’s looking up to her. Furthermore, it’s as though she is above him, too good for him, and he cannot have her – we could use a similar thing in our film to show how Jack feels around Nicole, and to emphasise how he cannot have her whilst he is a pathetic teacher (at the beginning of the film). We could use camera/actor positioning to signify his confidence growing throughout the film (i.e. Low angle shot of Nicole above him/high angle of Nicole looking down on him to begin with then, as his character progresses and he becomes more confident, this changes so that they are on the same level).

· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htyf5wnC96w&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6gva6Sz67A&feature=related

These are a couple of clips from Mean Girls, I know it isn’t like our film but it’s useful to look at the shots they use in the classroom – plus we need to look at film styles rather than sitcom styles