Evalutation-PART 8

In my preliminary exercise I felt good parts of my work were;

The use of music throughout the piece which makes certain scenes calm and relaxed while other scenes more energetic and fast paced.

The smoothness of the camera movement in the present dialogue scenes worked really well while the flashbacks give more energy and adrenaline with the speed of the pans and match on action.

The use of pop culture and video game references/sound effects I think played well with the flashbacks and hopefully allowed certain audience members to connote that in our hero's flashbacks he imagines those noises as a way of inputting parts of his subconscious for example: he felt his stair fall was like a "Street Fighter" K.O. (Yes a very deep meaning behind what people may see as a few cheap gags.)

The use of the 180 degree rule.

The chase scene (,although short,) i felt gave a quick energy bump in the story.

In addition to these points that I had previously made now looking back I think that our organisation was very good because we were able to film all of our scenes that we had wanted to film and we had enough time to spare that we were able to re film segments of the piece with ease, not feeling stressed that we didn't have time to finish. I think the editing was very good because the piece flowed well and didn't feel like there were any drastic cuts. I also think we used our equipment well and creatively with our long tracking shot of our actor.

The less successful aspects of that exercise I would say were the acting which I felt let the piece down  and limited us to being able to show the characters exchanging dialogue. The sound also let the scene down but it did allow us to give the piece some more creativity by replacing certain parts with video game sound effects and other pop culture references.

I improved on the areas of acting by during the casting process, getting actors who were like their characters and either had experience in acting or had experiences in what the characters are supposed to do such as boxing, refereeing. I believe that putting greater interest and effort in the casting gave more believable acting and added realism to the entire piece especially with the dialogue scenes. In my British Social Realist film I believe that my editing had been improved drastically creatively but had fallen flat on the execution, for example I used much more interesting editing techniques but they were not done to the standard that they should have or could have been done to. Due to my knowledge of my technology (like the mini DV camera) I was able to film scenes at a faster rate and to a better standard then I had once been able to, for instance the long tracking shot in "The Register" was not as steady and took longer to film than the long tracking shot in "Queen Khan".  I also found that during the filming of the end of my opening when the music begins to play due to the fact I had already had experience editing footage to music I was able to edit at a nice fast speed that was much quicker than I would have been able to when doing "The Register", also I didn't have to go out and re film shots for the scenes with music because I had learnt to film more footage than I might need because there may come a point when my original footage doesn't last long enough.

Evalutation-Part 7

Key decisions I made during pre-production and carried on through to my production were that when it came to equipment and the technology I would use I knew I would only film with a Mini DV camera and would not go HD because I wanted my footage have a amateur,documentary like cinematography to make the audience feel like they're a part of the experience while also echoing the documentary that my opening was inspired by. I decided to make the audience feel like a spectator in the film that I would use a tripod in very few shots to maintain the feeling that the audience is a spectator however during production I felt that the lack of steady shots made the opening feel too amateur and not how I had originally imagined so I used less handheld camera work then I had originally planned to but to keep the feeling of the audience being spectators I would often balance the camera on things in the environment or just leave it on the floor because my shots were still steady, they still gave off the documentary feel I wanted and still managed to make the audience feel as if they were a spectator. I used the Mini DV Panasonic camera throughout my production when filming but only used my tripod for a shot where Noor Khan skips and the camera is at an extreme close up , a shot where Noor is skipping and the camera is positioned just out of the room in which she skips, shots of our actress Ellie King sparring and most of the extreme close ups on characters in the gym. I used the tripod for these shots because it allowed the camera to focus on the actors without the camera shaking and it the sound quality was better because you didn't hear the sound of my fingers muffling the mic on the camera. Other than my tripod and Mini DV Panasonic camera I used a handheld Steady cam rig so I could get a nice smooth long tracking shot of Noor and Hashaem walking. I used this over doing it handheld because when it was handheld the camera movement was unsteady and didn't look like professional enough where as the steady cam had the right balance between amateur/documentary while still looking professional.

In my post production I experimented with Garage Band to create an appropriate soundtrack but after feedback from my colleagues and target audience I decided to follow what they requested and got in touch with a British Asian teenager who goes by the stage name "Fly" to put a song together which had to be in fashion with popular music today that would interest my target audience, I believe this proved much more effective and saved me time on having to create my own music which wasn't as good as the music Fly composed. For editing I used Imovie throughout post-production because I already had experience with it from doing my preliminary exercise.

Areas of my production with technology that were less successful were my use of the mic on my Mini DV Panasonic camera which constantly had my sound quality jumping in post production because I hadn't used a proper microphone to go out and record a wild track so I had to resort to using unused footage and trying to form a wild track from it. From this experience I have learnt to have a microphone on hand when filming to pick up dialogue better but also to create wild tracks in production so in post I have a variety of audio tracks to use when editing my work.

Evaluation-Part 6

Evaluation-Part 4

Evaluation- Part 3

Evaulation Media Part 3

Evaluation-Part 2

Evaluation Of "Queen Khan" Opening

THE BRIEF


The brief I was working towards was as follows "You have been approached by Film 4 to make a new British Social Realist film aimed at British 16-24 year old."


We chose the title "Queen Khan" because it would instantly attract our target audience because of it's relation to the boxer Amir Khan who's nickname is "King Khan" which also lets the audience connote aspects of boxing. We also felt this title worked well because it consisted of the main characters name while also being traditional to British Social Films because it was short like titles such as "Trainspotting" and "Harry Brown".

In addition to the meaning of the title we also chose the title after getting feedback from our target audience who preferred that title over our other working title "The Girl Boxer" which we considered using because of it has connections to the true story of Ambreen Sadiq which was inspiration for our film.


Our opening sequence opened the character of Noor Khan preparing herself to face off against a rival boxer for a chance at an ABA fight. We decided to not use the stylised approach of the opening occurring in reverse order because although interesting and engaging it didn't give the audience enough time to see Hashaem and hear him speak to Noor. That opening gave little time for the two characters to engage and show how much of an importance Hashaem is where as the opening we did use gave him a larger presence in the opening.

Our opening has a non-linear narrative with scenes occuring after the majority of the film because we wanted to get our audience asking questions about how the characters have ended up where they are,what's the importance of this fight, what is the relationship between to the characters. The non-linear was useful because with the addition of the editing style it gave the feeling of how Noor and Hashaem were in their mind sets, with more erratic jump cuts used with Noor while Hashaem had close ups and long shots to show his focus and intensity.

My opening explored themes of British Social Realist films by immediately making the theme of aspiration present with the Muhammed Ali quote being played over the character Noor Khan training, the thheme of dysfunctional families was also put into play with the dialogue exchange between Noor and Hashaem before she gets into the ring; during this exchange it should also be noted that to conform to British Social Realist films the characters use Urdu phrases to add realism.