The First Reflective Main Exercise Blog Entry

When we were first given the brief for the main exercise I was a bit nervous as it seemed like a bigger task than the preliminary exercise. However I thought that an opening sequence would be fun as we can be more creative unlike the preliminary exercise when we had a specific outline. I was happy to work with Sadie Lynham and Charlie Edwards again as we were in the same group for the preliminary exercise and we get on well, however it can be difficult as sometimes members can be absent which makes it more difficult to plan ideas. I hope that there won’t be many absences and we will be able to get on with the work and not become behind on work. When I looked through the log book,
I didn’t realise how much information was needed for planning before filming, but as we have started planning we have checked through and keep notes so we know what to do next and what we have accomplished already. When deciding on the genre and what the audience would be for our product was difficult. Our first idea was a thriller when a girl got kidnapped and then woke up from a dream with bruises. We tried to find some research but couldn’t think of any certain films and opening sequences we could research. Charlie then came up with a romance theme and I really liked this idea as we will easily be able to research and find great examples to look on. This new idea involves a couple on a beach mainly keeping with the point of view of the girl as this would be the girl’s dream. The girl would then wake up on that beach so the main opening sequence would be her dream with her partner. We looked at the examples of an opening sequence, studied and took notes on the camera, editing, sound and mise en scene which would help with our product. We looked at the 'My Sister's Keeper' Beach Scene. This scene really helped us because the emotional music really represents the feel of the product and as a group we want our product to use this technique.




We also looked at 'Grease' the opening sequence and the 'The Notebook' Beach scene .

When completing the SWOT analysis the main stumbling point for me was that when filming on the beach I would not be able to get on the beach because I’m in a wheelchair, so when deciding roles our group took this into account so I would be editing and wouldn’t have to do much practical work like camera work when filming. I also didn’t want to do camera work again because I did it in the preliminary exercise. I enjoyed doing it but I feel that I wasn’t happy with the result. So I am happy with my role of editing. Another weakness would be relying on the weather, as we are filming outside it would be bad if it was raining as we would not be able to film. So we will have to set may be a few provisional dates for filming and check the weather forecasts for those dates. Also relying on our actors would be an issue, we hope that they will be free to film and we hope not to have a repeat of the preliminary exercise when we had problems with the actors turning up. After completing the SWOT analysis we created our storyboards and a detailed script.

To improve my performance for the main exercise I would like to be more organised and more motivated with the planning work, as last time our group didn’t manage to get everything in the planning paper work like the rece’s. This time for the main exercise I will try and do more work outside of lessons, during frees and learning gateway sessions to do some planning paper work.
We then followed through the log book step by step so we could keep up to date with paperwork and planning.
Before we started filming we had to complete a risk assesment (page 1 & page 2), and assesing most of the points we discovered in the SWOT analysis.