Update

We've been working hard recently to try and get as much practice making movies as possible, we have been set three practical tasks. One was a public announcment attempting to tackle the problem of underage drinking, the second were film trailers the class had to suede, and the third which has only recently been completed was a music video. I believe this was a good selection of projects, as they all correspond to a possible video we might make for our final project. E.g. The public announcement video is similar to a short film, and obviously the music video and film trailer correspond to the music video or film trailer we might choose to make as our final project.
When possible I will post the videos to the blog, however they have been saved on seperate laptops and are difficult to access, but I will upload them as soon as possible.
Briefs
Public Service Announcement - We were told we had to make a 3 - 10 minute long film, that's primary aim was to show the dangers of drinking alcohol underage. The film had to cover some of the following aspects of underage drinking:
-Peer Pressure -Violence -Long Term Health Problems -Binge Drinking -Truancy -ASBOs
We were told the film would be marked on it's strength of message and how well it engages the target audiences (13 year olds.)
After we were set this brief we were told to go off and do research to find some statistics about underage drinking, this was a pretty simple task and it looked good adding in facts throughout our movie.

Film trailer - We were taught bout 'sweding' trailers and how this concept of copying famous movies or trailers comes from the movie 'Be Kind, Rewind.' After the concept of sweding was explained fully and we had seen some examples we were told to make our own movie based on a film trailer of our choice, our group decided to swede the trailer for Human Traffic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0kPAPNahU.

Music Video - This was the most straight forward task, we were told to make a music video for songs that our teacher gave us.

Evaluation
Public Service Announcement - I believe we made a good movie, with good misenscene and some good edits, however we did have a lot of things that could have been improved such as lighting in some of the last shots, and some of the shots nearer to the end of the film were too long and needed to be cut down so it wasn't such a long cut, this was difficult however as there was a problem with filming equipment. I also believe we made filming difficult for ourselves due to the narrative we created, as we wanted one of the underage drinkers to be hit by a car whilst walking home. We filmed some good shots but the whole concept was difficult to edit and perfect, I believe it is for this reason that our final scene looked un-professional.

Movie Trailer - I believe we completed this task rather well considering the big crowds involved in making the actual trailer. We were able to get rid of the problem of using big crowds by using a canted shot which seemed to make the numbers we had look more vast. I also believe our trailer is very true to the original trailer, this was due to the vast amount of notes that were made on the original trailer. I do believe we were weak in some areas, such as the fact there were many shots in the original trailer we did not even attempt as they looked too complicated and difficult, this meant our trailer missed parts from the original. Also the fact imovie doesn't have a similar title screen as the one used in the original trailer meant our's looked cheaper and more unprofessional than the original, however this is understandable as ours was cheaper and less professional.

Music Video - The music video we created had some good points and some bad points. I believe the strongest part of the video was the editing, as we made the shots look sharper and made our shots more relevant to the song (I got you babe - Sonny and Cher) with softening effects. I believe our video could have been improved greatly as well however, as a number of problems arose we found we didn't have enough film to cover the length of the song, so we had to use some generic shots, and we even had to re-use a clip, this looked poor and some of the shots we took to fill time let the rest of the precise filming and editing down. Lip syncing was also a big problem, and there are a couple of times in the video when we are off, if we were to do a music video as our final task we would have to practice lip syncing somehow, or find a way to make the process easier to master.