Deep Learning Day

Hello!

Overview

Recently, I have had a Deep Learning Day in which the whole day was Media related. The activities that took place within the DLD day was for the benefit of all groups and to see what skills, as as team, that we needed to improve on.

We were given the task to either make a parody of a horror movie or to film clips from our trailers so we decided that we were going to film clips from our trailers because this would give us a better insight in what we would need to do in order to make the trailer successful and additionally heighten our camera skills. Working on clips of our trailer would have also helped us to realise what scenes within the trailer were possible and which scenes would take longer than others.

The first lesson of our DLD, we spent looking over our storyboard, wondering what scenes should go where and if we needed to add any more shots. After we were happy with the order of the trailer we then cut the pictures up and scanned them into the computer. This lesson was helpful because it gave us more time to evaluate our narrative and on the whole our trailer. Additionally it was helpful because we were then able to see what parts of the trailer did not seem to go well and it made us come togethere more as group as we were able to share our opinions whilst respecting the opinions of others.

[Picture of Lewis (one of my team members) sorting out the storyboard. Picture taken by Namibia McLean]

Short Horror Film [The presentation that our teacher showed us whilst talking and giving us tips in using cameras and talked about film itself.] The second lesson we had a master class with one our of teachers, exploring how to use a camera and a tripod properly. He also answered our questions when it came to what shots would be the most effective within horror trailers and he looked over our storyboards to see if we could actually film the scenes. This masterclass was helpful because now I am more familiar with the camera and camera settings and can easily locate if I needed to zoom in or zoom out, colour balance etc. Since I have used a tripod before, it was surprising to find out new information from it as I deemed I knew everything there was to the tripod. It was helpful to find out new ways to elongate the tripod because this would help my team with filming in tricky places.

From the third lesson till lunch we started filming clips from our horror trailer I found this more difficult than it thought. One of the problems that we had to face is that the locations were very far apart from one another and because we didn't have a lot of time to film and get the scenes back to convert it was very hard trying to fit everything in. Although, it was a great experience as we were able to see what shots we would have to change as they did not work when filmed and that was useful because on the whole I just want our trailer to be successful. We shot in four main locations we shot within the college, outside a church and in a park. Here are some pictures and clips of where we shot:

 

We felt that the park scene was perfect in setting a horror trailer because of the way the sky looked and how abandoned the setting was. For the main trailer, we do plan to film in a house like we orginially planned not within a college as we would have more time to film and a house would be more horror based setting than a college.

From lessons 5-6 we had to edit the footage we had and make it into a trailer. This was the most stressful part for me because I realised that we had many problems. For example, we realised that we did not have enough good footage to have a 30 seconds trailer in which this meant that footage would have to be reused and we also realised that it would have been better to edit on a PC rather than a MAC computer. This is because everytime we were getting somewhere with editing our trailer the MAC would crash resulting in us having to start the whole thing again. This even occured when we saved every four minutes in which we couldn't get the rest of the trailer back. We decided in the end to just go to a PC and this was much less stressful as I could edit the trailer without the risk of the trailer being lost. Here is our finished trailer:

The music we used definitely made our horror trailer scarier and I was very happy with this result. On the whole I wish we had filmed more scenes, especially in places that looked more like a horror setting because I realised some of the locations we used just looked too normal and we needed to have a scare factor. If I was to do the project again then I would definitely make sure I have enough footage to last us for when we edit, to make sure that the props don't show when we are filming and to also film in horror like places.

Summary

• Filmed clips from our horror trailers
• Masterclass in using the camera and tripod
• Sorted out our storyboard