Leanne's Blog

Are we there yet?

leanne92 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:31:57 +0000

I am admitedly very happy to say this is proberbly the last blog entry to this site.
I am very happy with our finished sequence, it took a lot to get there, the journey was both a struggle and an experience but i do admit to having a little bit of fun

Hope you enjoy our opening sequence as much as we enjoyed making it- well hopefully more. Ciao x

: KL productions

Animatic adaptions

leanne92 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:16:47 +0000

http://uk.youtube.com/user/kingedmedia Our Opening sequence should be uploaded to here soon!! Hope you find it and enjoy watching.

Our final sequence has changed from our animatic, although i don’t think it’s changed too dramatically. Our animatic should also be uploaded onto YouTube so you can have a gander.

Orginally we were going to:

use Lola as the soundtrack throughout the sequence.
use more actors in the opening sequence, showing a montage of other characters,
mainly to associate typical gender stereotypes; such as tights for girls and lynx for males.
only show main chacter ‘Lola’ at the end of sequence at main title.

These ideas were then changed again:

To our main character being shown at the beginning getting ready
And chavs chasing and abusing him in the streets
This is the idea that is shown on our animatic!

Also we were orginally going to call it ‘The Story of Lola’.

The first changes were done as we had problems with our actors as they couldn’t all make it at the same time for filming; also we dicided we wanted more footage of our cross dresser. Our second ideas and animatic was changed because our cross dresser didn’t want to go outside dressed as a girl- as his masculinity would have been wounded.
Also we decided to change the name because ‘Lola’ alone was more effective, simple and too the point.
Lastly we added a score because it suited the sequence more for the fight scene as it was more upbeat and fast.
We also changed the sequence back to the first idea of saving the image of the cross dresser until the end and use suggestive and leading filming at the begining to suggest the character is a girl until the end.

Here are the characters we used in the end – we kept it to a minimal and we did include people who just provided audio:

Cross dresser:

Alex the drag

We call him the cross dresser or the drag throughout because we didn’t know whether Lola would be a name he called himself or if everyone would call him that, also it adds to audience curiosity; it’s similar to ‘Fight Club’ with the ‘narrator’ character.

Editing

leanne92 — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Me and Kirsty have been editing like mad men, I found it fun and very exciting seeing all our work finally coming together.
We have been spending lunch and free lessons working hard so our vivid imaginations could be transferred onto the screen and i’m proud and astonished that it’s completed and pretty good-if i do say so myself.

First we had to imress port all our filming into Final Express and organise them into the order we wanted them to appear. We had to cut down some clips and crop them to fit in with what we wanted to add to the film.
In Monday’s lesson on the 19th we made a lot of progress we arranged our clips in the final playing order, seperated audio and filming to rearrange them and deleated unwanted footage, added effects to both audio and film footage to make it echo and blurfor our fight scene. We also worked on our score for the filming so it fit with the arranged clips.

Our next editing session wasn’t quite as succesful as the footage we re-filmed – due to lack of continuity in the original filming – would not open as there was problems with the format. We didn’t accomplish much other than some work on Garageband with the score, which was very unhelpful. However, me and Kirsty had free lessons together later this week and this made me hopeful to meet our deadline, but we still had the problem with the footage format.
By Friday we had done all we could in terms of editing and all we needed to do was add the extra footage to the Mac’s, we went to the IT techs at our school to see if they could help with our problem and we spent Friday afternoon on a wild goose chase looking for a firewire converter which nobody could find; this put us in a difficult and frustrating situation. We were now behind on meeting our deadline. Stressfull or what!!

After school on Friday i went to PC world and they didn’t have any of the converters in stock, I asked an assistant if there was any other way i could resolve this and he suggested that i put it on a disc and then try opening it on the mac.

There we were this morning and still the footge is not working and we were – Freaking Out – Kirsty finished the score in her free and added Lola to audio to ensure it would all fit, but still we just couldn’t go into our media lesson with our incomplete opening sequence.
This meant me and Kirsty were on a mission, it felt like mission impossible. We power walked to PC world in our free and spoke to a the apple mac’s specialist, we explained our problem and he looked at the camera —- with the suspense building he tried putting the footage into imovie, and then exporting into Final Cut and Oh My God it worked! However, i still had doubts and an extreme lack of faith in the school computers. We get to school and ten minutes later- The Footage is working, after all that it worked!!!
By the end of lunch we had finished editing – all footage, editing, transitions, effects and audio was complete and we were two extremely happy bunnies.

Currently we are waiting for our opening sequence to be uploaded onto YouTube, if your lucky we’ll put up a link

:)

leanne92 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:22:43 +0000

We finished our filming over the christmas holidays. A lot of the footage we did had good audio that fits perfectly with what we were hoping for, however due to lighting we found that some of our footage couldn’t be used which was really unhelpful and meant that we had to redo that section of clips. We have been going back and forth from changing ideas that have differed from our original storyboard ideas.
Another problem we experienced was that some of our actors didn’t take it as serious as we were hoping for; and our main actor, understandably couldn’t stop laughing at some points during our filming.
We did have a lot of fun filming and it, our actors were not surprisingly eager to act as chavs for us and shout abuse at our drag character and as they all worked together there was a good atmosphere which made it easier for them to help us and not be so embarrassed.
As we did experience problems and our filming was at times not as we had hoped it would be we will need to edit quite a lot and will need to change some of our original ideas; which i thought we would have to do anyway.

finally

leanne92 — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:22:59 +0000

We have finally found willing volunteers. All are uni student that work with my parents and are enthusiastic about their roles.
We are also using a friends flat for part of our filming.
We are doing our filming on tuesday afternoon as this is when all our actors are available. As most of them are working in bury there should be no problems this time around.

Title

leanne92 — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:25:20 +0000

Me and Kirsty have always been fixed on calling it :

The story of
LOLA

I was looking at some fonts online and I found one that would really work well, however I can’t upload it currently as my word documents aren’t working, but hopefully when i get to school tomorrow i can load on then.
I think at the moment we’re are with the idea that the font will be white and bold on a black background, at the end of our opening scene.

Music

leanne92 — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 13:27:37 +0000

As mentioned earlier we are using the song ‘Lola’ to began our opening sequence and our own score for the majority of the rest of the opening sequence.
Our score consists of a build up in music creating the atmosphere of tension and fear; this is because it shows our main character running away from the group of chavs.
At the end of our opening sequence we were thinking of going back to ‘Lola’ as it fades to black.
All this will become clearer when we upload our animatic to our blog.

Filming schedule

leanne92 — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:06:55 +0000

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday
Period one	Kirsty		Kirsty
Period two	Kirsty	Leanne	Leanne
Lunch	Both	Both	Both
Period 3	Both		Leanne
Evening	Both	Both	both

Pictures

leanne92 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:07:24 +0000

Here are some pictures of the room which we want to use for the main characters room. It has a nice soft lighting that we wanted to use for the room and it is feminine so suits the main character. Its extremely lucky that we have this room for our character.

We used Springlands housing estate sudbury for our location, unfortunatly i cannot upload the pictures now, we used it as it suits the Social Realist conventions, it has grafitti on the walls and has a rough look which we need to give the effect that the character lives on this estate.

Costumes AND props

leanne92 — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:42:22 +0000

Costumes

main character:
High heels,
Skinny jeans,
Girls flowy top,
Red lipstick,
Handbag,
Jewelery (jangly brcelets, necklaces, rings)
Mascara and Eyeshadow.
Possably a skirt and tights not jeans, undecided.

Chav Group:
Tracksuits,
white trainers,
hoodies,
Baseball caps,
burberry

random helper:
Black high heels

Props:

Mirror,
Ipod speakers,
Cider,
Lambrini bottles,
mobiles,
beer cans,
empty crisp packets and wrappers to throw at him, litter.