Tour of St Marks film

As A2 media studies course is introduced, my new topic is film studies. As a class we were told we would be creating and editing our own individual mini film. As an introductory task we were allocated into groups and assigned to design a tour of St Marks School based on a day of the life of a student.

As an overview there was not much knowledge ment of film from not jus myself but the class members in general. It was a task to show what we knew and what we needed to learn. There were 3 films created: Film A, Film B, Film C.

Film A

Film A based their film with a comical genre. This worked very well with the shots they selected. A strong point in their film was their zooming, this was done very effectively and looked interesting to watch. However the sound quality of this film was very poor. Dialogue that needed to be said were distant and echoed this can be improved by the use of change of location, using props such as umbrella’s to stop wind of the camera and tougher planning . Part of the scripting was generally low standard, although there was not a lot of time it was almost as if they made it up on the spot. Although having a good use of variety of shots some of the shots were shaky as the camera was not held steady. This can be improved by use of a tripod. Finally the actors, as common in all 3 films appeared to not take the film seriously by laughing or saying irreverent comments on screen, although only being a first attempt they now should be able to focus.

Film B

Film B based their film with a comical genre once again. They had a strong point in their media knowledge of using technical aspects such as canted angles and the rule of thirds. Although sometimes lacked of their framing. Once again actors laughing and irrelevant comments which did not look overly professionally and general lack of planning, they appeared to be going with “the flow” instead of careful, specific plans.

Film C

Film c took more of a serious approach instead of going with comical genre. Their strong point was their initial ideas which were
very catchy and unique development of their ideas would of lead to an extremely high standard of filming. The choice of location for filming at times were poor in various shots they could of decided on a more suitable place for filming. This was due to poor planning skills, something that must be improved. Out of all three films film 3 definitely had better planning that A & B film and greatly showed.

Overall I believe the first attempt of a practice mini film went good. The different camera shots and angles made the films look interesting and genuinely realistic. As a class the variation of all different shot types and movement is a very strong distinction, however planning these shot and camera movements proved to be a lot harder and showed that every group film needed to PLAN accurately to get good results!