Art, Media and Confusion

My name is Harry Martin and I am a young male in education who tries to work to a high standard, I am also quite quiet and like to skateboard along with other things. I have quite a cool collection of shoes and comic books is that enough for you?

The Three promises which I will try to keep for next would have to be, focusing more on the work and trying to make the most out of it so this will probably be in the planning of everything. I also think that the planning is the most important part of it so yeah this will be one of the key points.

Taking more time over the work, some of the people that I work with just want to get home which means that we can’t finish the work or if we do we compromise so much and the work turns out in a low standard.  I know next year that we have the chance to work more independently so this should mean that I can shine in my work, although I think if I was placed in a group where everyone was serious with their work then we could turn out something amazing. I would be more than happy to come into college out of hours to finish a piece of work or improve it because I like creating the best of my capability.

I cant really come up with a third promise I think the only one which I could take a shot at would be trying to not get distracted by others, this is a major issue for me and I think that I probably need to focus more on what I’m doing than being distracted by others or other stuff.

I would say in a week I would do about 3-5 hours’ work depending on how much work there is actually to do. I know that this isn’t actually that much and I could probably try put some time aside to doing some more and focusing on creating better work. I think one of the key things to being motivated to actually to do the work is doing it straight away, I know some times that my work builds up and I think about it and how much time it is going to take and don’t really create the best out of it. So next year hopefully when I get the work I will spend more time on it that way I will focus more and not worry about how much work has gathered up.

Generally when I get the work I wait until I get home to do it as I prefer doing it there and can’t be distracted by friends or anything else going on. At home I am free to do it in my own time and when I want so usually you won’t find me doing any of the work in college.

I think that my favorite video which we have been shown in the morning was the music video David Guetta - Titanium I think what I found most amazing about this video was the power it had over people. Okay yes I do have a lost for the supernatural as well and really interest me, but it was such a powerful video yet so simple. It didn’t seem too fancy just an empty school with paper all on the floors and some police uniforms. It was all about a little boy who was also in “Super 8” and has some sort of powers and what we can only presume was him destroying his school and running away from the police. I really like some of the effects that they have used in this video such as him riding his bike and it seeming really fast, as well as this there if a create lighting effect which is given off in the video and finishes on a question.   

I have been asked a lot by people for what I want to do next year, to be honest I has only really been in the past couple months when I have had a chance to have a go with everything that I have made my mind up. At first I was focused on getting into editing and yes okay I do still enjoy doing it and I still want to extend further into it so I can make short films but what I’m really wanting to do is screen play, I think that without a proper story then whatever film it is won’t be any good and won’t be to a high grade/performance. I personally feel that I can usually come up with a good story and given time I can over time develop and create a story that is well thought out, clever and bring in an audience. Producing is something else I am interested in. 

Over this first year of the course I have come up with any short film ideas and film ideas and have writ most of them down depending how good they were. Over this summer I hope to develop some more and create proper stories for them with all possible scenarios and also scripts, however I’m not too good with writing at the moment so might take more time or just not be good enough for them so other people might be able to compliment them more.   

I think my favorite task to do though-out the year was this latest one, I feel with this latest one that we were really set free to a degree, with this task we were allowed to come up with our own story and make it how we liked. This piece of work I was really happy with and I liked doing my own edit for it as well. However it would have been nice to not have all the traps which were set along the way such as no dialog.

I think that the most fun I had on a task though was with the main one that we ever did, the pixilation was a really fun task to do and I was really happy with the outcome. I think what made it so good was that it was the start of something new and coming out of a school where everything is so strict it was so different.   

One: Planning, this is the one thing which I really think needs to be done more in groups and individually. At the start of the year hardly any planning was done and coming up with a story was about the only thing which happened. I think coming up with scripts is a key and makes it much more dramatic and professional and will sound better than improv. Shot lists also help so everyone isn’t panicking around and trying to find the right angle.

Two: Technical equipment, although yes I have learnt a lot through-out the time that I have been in college with the cameras, lighting and sound I would like to further develop my skills in this and get a better understanding of it all and what I can do to make the best out of my work.

Three: Editing, this is something which I really like doing and makes all the difference to your work. Filming is only the half of it, when it comes down to it I think that the editing makes all the difference with the colour correction and brightness and can give off the right mood and the overall feel of the piece. I would like to go further into it and see how it all works and making the best out of my work, I would also like to use after effects as it adds special effects and can make more out of your work.

One: Equipment, before this course I had minimal use of equipment which is used in the industry. Okay yes I had obviously used a camera and generally knew how it worked and what to do with it but as far as editing goes I had barely any use of software, it was only about two months before the course that I started putting a skate video which I had made and was using a free editing software (Window Movie Maker) which was terrible. I have had time to use and experiment with camera’s which the college has let us use which is great, also with lighting which is really great to use and helps set the mood on set, also additional equipment like Tripods and Microphones.

Two: Problem solving, this has come up a lot recently with our work especially from the latest task “Gesalt” the lecturers for this just seemed to love hitting them our way. The first was introducing an object which wasn’t really a problem and just set the story for us. The second was in the atmosphere scene where we weren’t allowed dialog, this literally made me crazy. As I was in charge of this scene the week before I had visualized it as being heavy dialog so that it could give a bit of background to what was going on in the story, however this was the whole point of what they had done and wanted us to “solutionate” it. There were various other things to solve in this task such as people waking up on the grass which didn’t help at all and making the ending out of 20 shots.

Three: Working with other people, this had been a problem at time but ties back into the problem solving. People are always going to want their own ways with what they are doing as obviously they have thought it out. However when people clash it can be bad and make people have a grudge against each other. But usually all it takes is talking it out with the other person or group and tell them your idea and usually you can take the best points of both and make a new, or just go with one or the other idea.

Equipment list - Hardware

·         LED light with stand and power pack.

·         Manfrotto Tripod.

·         Canon EOS 550D.

Software:

·         Adobe Premier Pro.

Props:

·         Black Replica Gun.

·         Black Box.

·         Umbrella.

Actors:

·         Harry.

·         Ben.

·         Alice.

The fourth and final instalment of Gesalt focuses on the ending of course, in this final segment we see how it all fits together and what finally happens.

Harry is waiting in a car park on the top floor waiting to hear from his boss, his boss arrives out of the rain and under the cover to talk about what happened. Harry turns around in anger and tells him how his partner got killed (originally girlfriend but it wasn’t too obvious so we changed it to fit the story better) and talk over about the whole thing. His boss goes on about how he has failed as an agent and that it is not acceptable, Harry seeing what is coming tells him how it won’t solve anything of what has happened. It ends with Harry telling him his and the boss taking the gun out his back pocket and shooting him there and then. He then walks away from the scene as if nothing has happened. We also see the person who has stolen the box cautiously opening the box whilst this is happening in some dark room.

Gestalt Part Four:

Shot No.           Shot Type              Description                              Int/Ext
1.               Establishing shot         Car park, floor 6                                 Int
2.               Panning shot              Busy street, then harry turning             Int
3.               OTS                          Harry and Ben talking                          Int
4.               Close up                    Flickering light                                   Int
5.               Medium shot               Harry side on talking                           Int
6.               Long shot                  Ben and Harry either side of screen        Int
7.               Close up                    Ben takes out gun                              Int
8.               OTS                         Gun pointing at Harry                           Int
9.               Close up                    Ben’s finger on trigger                          Int
10.              Medium shot              Harry dead on floor, Ben walks away      Int
11.              Close up                   ‘No Exit’ sign moving in the wind             Int
12.              Medium shot              Dark room, package gets put on table     Int
13.              OTS                        Box gets opened to find Black box inside   Int
14.              Exm close up             Hands open box and hold up a key          Int

For this third instalment in the Gesalt story we literally had no treatment/planning for what we were going to do for our third day of filming. Okay yes we had already slightly planned out what we were going to be doing for the story overall but along the way we had all changed things which we wanted to create in the story, as well to make it even harder we went to a new location just out of Plymouth called Mount Edgcumbe, however we did manage to come up with a story for the third part of it nonetheless.

The girl wakes up asleep on the grass in the middle of nowhere not knowing what she doing there or what’s going on, her boyfriend in the mean time is running across what looks like the same location to where she is trying to get to her before she is killed, she wakes up only to be carried away by her kidnapper to this small stone house. Her boyfriend however is still running through all these gardens and jumping hedges to get to her, at last, he catches glimpse of her and runs as fast as he can towards her. He gets in the small house where she is on the floor with a gun pointed at her at point blank range, the kidnapper smacks her in the head with the gun and runs out of the house leaving her on the floor in pain; her boyfriend chases after his man but he turns around and point the gun at him and talks to him briefly telling him that they found the box in his house whilst drawing it out his pocket and aims the gun at him, the girl runs out the house screaming for them to stop but the kidnapper points the gun at her and shoots, she falls to the ground already dead.

Gestalt Part Three:

Shot No.           Shot Type              Description                              Int/Ext
1.                Establishing shot River and grassy bank                          Ext
2.                Long shot                Harry running to camera                       Ext
3.                Long shot                Harry running past camera                    Ext
4.                Exm Long shot          harry running through field                    Ext
5.                Panning shot            Alice on the grass asleep                      Ext
6.                Med/long shot          Harry running through path                   Ext
7.                Long shot                Harry running through garden                Ext
8.                Close up                  Alice eyes open                                  Ext
9.                Tracking shot           Harry jumping over obstacles                  Ext
10.              Close up                 Harry mid jumps                                    Ext
11.              Medium shot             Bad guy pulling Alice out of shot             Ext
12.              Long shot                 Bad guy carrying Alice off                     Ext
13.               Tracking shot           Harry running out of hedge                    Ext
14.               Long shot                Harry running down side of hedge           Ext
15.               Long shot               Bad guy pulling Alice into house               Ext
16.               Medium shot            Bad guy hit Alice, Harry runs in               Int
17.               Long shot                Harry runs after Bad guy                       Int
18.               OTS                       Bad guy faces Harry, shows black box     Ext
19.               OTS                       Gun faces Harry, Alice gets shot             Ext
20.               Dolly Zoom              Harry’s face                                         Ext