19/1

Today in class we didn't have anything else to do to our film until we got the music from Amelia who was working on re-composing her work. So after watching through our film, we checked on Amelia. Because she needed some time before she could finish the first section, we looked for Robin Hood songs on youtube that we could use for our credits. After a long time, we decided on two songs, one had a really good and classic Robin Hood feel, and the other was also funny as it was from the Disney Robin Hood animation. We ended up chosing the classic one. It was really funny watching videos of things that reminded us of cartoons we used to watch.

Then we checked on Amelia again and she had The first section (A) ready. This piece was just over 35 seconds so it was easy to place into our film. We just placed it at the begining of the scene and cut a small bit off the music which was silent anyways. After this we just continued to download the music we wantd for our credits. We then timed our credits and then cut the music to the amount we wanted. We found we wanted to include a few seconds more of music, so we cut at the place we wanted and added a small message to the audience to our credits. To add affect, we also faded it out a bit at the end.

Then we checked on Amelia again and found she had the next section (B). We downloaded it onto our own computer, the music was a little short, but we left it as it was still okay and there wasn't much we could do about it. Me and Rachel went back to see how Amelia was doing for section C, and realised she had nothing, unlike what we thought she had some re-composed. So we waited for about 10 minutes before she was done.

When me and Rachel came back, Tiara was finshing up some form of title for our film. We then downloaded it onto the computer as well and foud that there was a small problem with the music as the gong at the end was just after 35 seconds. So we decided to just let the gong continue into the last scne as it provided some form of transition. After giving Amelia back her USB, we saved the final copy of our film and exported it. Also our friend Marisa came to visit us and watched our film and liked it.

We were really glad today when we finally finished our film and were really happy that we created a really good film in just one week. So we were really happy when the pressure was relieved. Today I think I was balanced and reflective today.

18/1 - After School Editting

Today I stayed back with Tiara to do the last bit of editting. Tiara had already re-arranged all the needed clips. We had to cut out unnessary sections at the begining and endings of each cut to make it all fit into 35 seconds. We got our friend, Clare, who was staying after school to watch our film and see if she understood it, as our last film was confuesing as everything was fairly choppy. After watching it, she said she understood and we tested her, but there was the small matter of not knowing what Tiara stole, but it was a fairly minor detail compared to the whole storyline, and the same with Ms. Wong. So after the positive feedback me and Tiara quickly did up the credits before we had to leave.

Today I was a thinker, open-minded, and communicator.

17/1

Today we uploaded our cuts onto the computer. We started to watch our cuts and this took a long time as the cuts were a bit spread out on the tape as we were afraid we'd tape over something when filming (we had roughly 40 minutes of footage). We were quite relieved that we had finished filming so we enjoyed watching our acting, especially when we messed up during the filming or said something funny behind the camera.

Today our music director Amelia had a stroke of bad as her faulty computer crashed and she lost all her work, which consisted of complete sections A and B, as well as 40% of C. So unfortunately something has to worked out for her side of the project, and unfortunately we had to continue editing, assuming each section was 35 seconds long. Tiara stayed after school today so now all we have left to do is cut down footage so each section is only 35 seconds long.

I think today I was thinker, communicator and balanced.

15/1 - After School Filming

Today we filmed the last scene that we forgot to film the day before. Our luck continued with us as we continued to get the same good lighting. The filming itself didn't take long, but me and Tiara argued a bit about the type of angles we wanted and how it would flow. Afterwards we came to a sort of compromise about this. We did a straight on shot of her and also we tried to get a high angle and tracking shot (not bird's eye view). So today I had to climb up a tree and sit in it as Tiara passed me the camera. We chose a location where I would be safe and that I would be fairly steady, so not to drop the camera we had a location where I could hug a extremely sturdy branch.

Today I was a thinker, communicator and risk-taker.

14/1 - After School Filming

Today we continued to film the other scenes in the film. During school, we borrowed a jacket and policeman cap for Rachel's police(man) costume, and Tiara printed out (Robin Hood) wanted posters. After school we headed to Tiara's place, but when we got to the filming location, we realised that we had left the tape at school. So Rachel ran back to school and got the tape while we set up the equipment we had and scouted for locations for the rest of the scenes.

When Rachel came back, we filmed the remainder of one of the scenes, as a part we added in to help the film's storyline flow better. The light was the same type as we had the day before. After that we filmed the scene where Yasmine's character reports Tiara to a police (Rachel) and Tiara is now being chased down. This required us to stick up the posters. I filmed the scenes with Tiara and Rachel in them.

Afterwards we ran out of time and thought we were done, but on the way back to Tiara's place where we had stored the rest of our things, we realised that we forgot the fourth scene. As only Tiara is in this scene, I offered to come and film the next day as with our busy schedules, that would be best.

Today I think I was a thinker, communicator, open-minded and balanced.

13/1 - After School Filming

Today my whole group headed to Tiara's place to start filming. As Amelia hadn't finished composing the music, we had to guess the duration of each scene. So following Amelia's instructions we tried to get roughly 35 seconds worth of footage per scene.

With Tiara's help, we quickly scouted out a location for our scene. Rachel filmed me and Tiara and we created ideas for shots along the way. At the time it was a sunset so there was really good light that we really liked. We then started to film Yasmine's scene on the bridge that goes across a pond in the garden. During this we realised that the camera was on the wrong setting (camera) so we had to refilm the scenes, also we had to wait for the lighting to be just right again as it came and went. We then did the last scene with me and Tiara, and left the last two scenes 'till tommorow film session as we were running out of time.

I think today I was thinker, communicator, open-minded and balanced.

11/1

Today we presented our film presentations. We only managed to get a few presentations in today but I still learnt a lot about Zhang YiMou's different styles. I found that another film also had split styles in the duration of the movie like our had, but this was mainly ro show the time period rather than emphesis on the location. Some of Zhang YiMou's styles were: black and white, grimy, and clear and sharp saturated colours.


Me and Tiara had trouble with our presentation as we had finished everything, but we had saved our powerpoint as a 2007-10 version as we didn't know that Ms Wong's laptop had powerpoint 2003. So we had trouble finding the best way to present our power point that messed up our slides the least and thought to use google docs, but it didn't load our file. So we settled on the old version of power oint and had to apologise to the audience and continue the best we could.


Today I was a thinker and communicator.

Analysis of Zhang Yi Mou-s Film

7/1

Today we continued to work on our film presentations. Me and Tiara found that we could use power point and work on the 7th floor at school so we could do the rest at home as Ms. Wong's laptop has power point. So we started to work on the power point for the first half of the lesson. We didn't get much done though as we took a lot of time working on the aesthetic of the power point, such as the background and agreeing on the font. As we knew we would have to do most of it at home we roughly split the work so that I would do all the notes needed to answer the even questions and Tiara the odd ones.

The second half of the lesson we started to talk of our second film. This is a Chinese film that follows the music created by one music student. We got into groups of 3's (except our group which is a group of 4) and went to listen to what the music students had created. The music students were to have started creating a piece of Chinese styled music in which we were to do a film to that. Their music follows a ABACA structure, in which the A's are happier and the B and C are for conflicts. My group (me, Tiara, Yasmine and Rachel) paired up with Amelia again as her music add components that we were looking for. Her music stuck mainly to the Chinese style and was romantic or violent but planned to be happy with conflicts. This was good for our group as we didn't want anything romantic (partially because we were an all girls group and finding others to act in our film would be hard) and weren't to keen on direct violence and wanted ours to be slightly comedic.

Together with Amelia we came up with an idea for our film. At first we were thinking of the Monkey King idea of how the Monkey steals the cakes from the humans but thought that the props and costumes would be way too hard to get and would take too long to put on. So from this idea I came up with the idea of a Chinese Robin Hood that was developed with the help of the others. The idea of the film would be that this Chinese Robin Hood steals from rich westerners and gives to the poor and is generally thief who escapes those who chase her down. We were not sure who would play who but we decided that Tiara would once again play the protagonist and that Rachel would be the min camera person. Having Tiara play the protagonist would be good as she already had a Robin Hood outfit.

I think today I was a thinker, a communicator, and open-minded.

16/12

Because today was the last class before christmas we were allowed to watch a movie. We watched 80's comedy/drama "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (originally released in 1986). As we were mainly watching the movie for fun I didn't really pay attention to the cinematography. I noticed that the movie used quite a lot of different angles and that the lighting was fairly medium and bringht, but not harsh. The movie also very colourful, I think this was supposed to help with the idea of making the movie funny and keep the seriousness light despite the amount of trouble Ferris gets himself into.

Today I think that I was being a bit balanced, open-minded and reflective.

14/12

Today we continued to work on our Zhang YiMo film presentation notes. We continued to tackle on the last of our notes and made the final decisions on what we thought the film's cinematography was like. We also stated to think of what we were going to do our presentation on at the end of the lesson as the computers at school (film room) use macs, where as both me and Tiara use windows and we know how things get messed up when going from microsoft powerpoint to an open-office program and didn't know what else to use.

Today I think I was a thinker and a communicator, and wss being open-minded.

8/12

Today we got to finally watch each others films. It was really great to watch others films but I was shy about my groups film so I was nervous for when ours got presented. Watching other groups we saw a lot of techniques that were really good. Such as in pretty much every other group they used a technique of filming the subject through a mirror. We found a lot of people had really good film techniques and I think in comparison our's looks rough and choppy as well as not really good quality filming. Though what I really found was that our seemed a lot more rushed, even though a lot of others went a lot over the time limit whereas ours only went a bit over the limit. I think that we could have taken a bit more time to slow things down and that way our film could flow better. An improvement I remembered that we learnt from the other groups was that we should watch our films a couple of times at the end without headphones to check sound quality.

When we finally watched our film, I felt even more embarrassed as other groups were really good. Watching our film on a bigger screen and being conscious of an audience from outside our group really helped us realise mistakes that we had previously foreseen. We realised that the light was even darker on the projector then on the computer. As a result of this, things were even harder to see. We learnt today we could actually borrow special lighting from the film department that we didn't know about before. We from other's comments we found that the biggest problem with our film was that no one fully understood our entire film. Ways we could have improved this were to maybe have a couple more scenes that helped explain the storyline more and to have slowed down the pace of things so the audience had more time to process things. Other things that we could have done to help the audience understand better would be to show more of the powers that Yasmine's character Nightshadow and Tiara's character Flick have and maybe made Tiara look like she was running even faster, and we could have also used the names more so it would be more understandable who was who.

Today I think that I was a thinker and a communicator and was being reflective, open-minded and balanced.

6/12

Today we continued to take notes on Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles and collaborated the music from Amelia with our final copy of our film. We had added extra things one lunch time to our credits (including a song called Your Fault) so we had to copy Amelia's composed music to the new edit and make sure everything was okay. Moving the music took little time, but when we listened to the music we realised it wasn't like we imagined it to be and there was a large part without music. I talked to Amelia after class and found there was a bit of confusion when we tried to explain to her what we wanted and should have been more certain and clear about what we wanted and that we had not realising it, asked her not to put music in some scenes which caused the pause in music.

After that me and Tiara continued to analyses our film. We were still a little slow on deciding on things but are getting more decisive and even more familiar with the cinematography of films, and particularly of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. We have gotten different examples we can use for our presentation now and are getting a better understanding of the film.

Today I was a thinker and a communicator and was knowledgeable, open-minded and reflective.

30/11

Today Tiara came back so we started to work on the problem of the two different looks in the film and filled her in with what I had found while she was away. Doing this we also re-watched what she missed so she would know the scenes as well. We continued to take down notes and tackled those that we weren't sure of. Though there were some that we still couldn't decide on. We managed to tackle most of the general questions. We also started to look at finding examples of different cinematography rules and categorizing the two different "looks" in the film and their characteristics. We catgorized these two looks in "scenes in Japan and emotional scenes" and "other scenes in China".



Today I think that I was a thinker and a communicator as well as open-minded.

26/11

Today Tiara was away so I had to try and continue analysing the film. I started writing notes today but I found it hard as some things I couldn't decide and needed another opinion. An example of this is, the type of lighting or the film stoke and sharpness of the film. So I didn't manage to take down many notes but something I noted down to ask Tiara later when she comes back.

Today I was thinker and had to be quite open-minded.

22/11

Today we started our next project which we are doing in two's. In this project we look at the famous Chinese director called Zhang YiMou. At the moment what we are doing is analysing a movie of our choice that he directed. Me and my partner (Tiara) picked the movie Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. (Below)



Today me and Tiara started to watch the film and didn't really take any notes, but instead tired to get a feel of the film and try and pick up general things. These included looking at the feel and look of the film as well as the subject of the film so we just watched for the movie for a bit mentally noting down things and taking a few notes. We found a problem that held us back from taking some notes as there seemed to be two looks in the film.


Today I was a thinker and had to be open-minded and a communicator when I was sharing my ideas with Tiara.

18/11

Today we were focused on working on the credits and any final touches we found we needed to make. At the start of the class we watch through the film once so we could be sure of what we had to do during then lesson before starting the credits. At first we had practically no idea of how to do text in final cut pro, so we had to look up a step by step tutorial video for the version of final cut pro that we needed. We managed to find a video teaching us what we wanted to find out and soon learnt to use the text tool. When we started to work on the credits we all wanted to use a drippy looking font in the credits as it would suit well because of how the film's name is Substance X. But we were unable to find this so we soon decided on a fairly simple font that was easy to read so we could all accomadate each other's opinions. We chose a green that stood out against a blackbackground to make it to the described colour of the substance in the film.



Afterwards we had some time on our hands in which we did last minute tweaks and started to think of maybe putting in a couple of bloopers. We ended up deciding that we shouldn't have any bloopers at all, as we a) couldn't all decide on one or two that most of us thought were funny and b) somethings you had to be there working on the film for it to be funny. We ran through the film a few times and when we thought it was okay we exported it for Amelia to work on.



Today I was balanced, open-minded and knowledgable abnd acted like an inquirer, a communicator and a thinker.

16/11

Today me and Tiara stayed after school to find the missing cuts and to finish the last details of special effects and tweaks to our movie. Luckily to avoid mistakes like what had happened, we made several copies of our film at different stages so we still had our original cuts from when it was first uploaded. From there we sifted through the files to find the clips we wanted. But we also found that to transfer a clip from one file to another in final cut pro, was not as simple as copy and paste. When you open a second file in final cut pro, the clips in the first file appear to have the same clips as the second. This caused the both of us much frustration and stress that we may not have been able to recover the cuts, but the both of us persevered on. After much trying we found opening the second file and copying the file, and then closing both files, and later reopening the latest file and pasting it there works and all the saved clips are still the way they were supposed to be. After restoring all the needed clips, we looked at making sure everything was in place and all the over-voices and cuts were in the right position. Minor tweaks had to be made but otherwise it was fairly straight-forward. During this time we knew how serious the set back could effect us as we were only staying back until 4:30 that afternoon, so we were extremely concentrated. During this time we also found that the video clip from when we were recording Mr. E (Yasmine's dad's) over voice was blurring as the camera lens was pointed at the floor thinking at the time that the video would not be needed, could be used for the scene where NightShadow wakes up in jail.



Then we had pretty much just the special effects to portray Tiara's superhero power, super speed. We had a bit of trouble working out by ourselves how to adjust the speed, so we quickly searched a final cut pro guide to help with this. Once we found out how to do this, we managed to adjust the speeds quickly and found it was even easier than what we first thought it to be. Whilst trying to find out how to speed up cuts to make Tiara look like she was running at super speed, we also found other special effects, including a reversing tool which we learnt to use to reverse a cut so it looked more realistic and less choppy. We also used a fade out tool to make transitions, and to make it look like Yasmine's character had feinted.



Today I was definatly being a thinker, a communicator and an inquirer, and that I was also being both knowlegable and open-minded, as me and Tiara had to share our ideas to solve the obstacles that we had to overcome today.