Unit 62 Reflective Learning Log

Unit 62 Reflective Learning Log

Date: 14/11/12

For our project we were asked to make a PE website for the PE department of Bluecoat Academy to promote sports in the school, in order to make a healthy lifestyle for the students. As a part of this project we were asked to produce a video about the sporting activities that happen within the school, while keeping in mind any legal and ethical considerations that may affect the production process. To produce the video I would have to meet up with the client to discuss my ideas and any questions I may have.

I went through the client’s project brief as stimulus and discovered that the PE department want to raise the profile of sport both within the school but more predominantly with the wider public. They also want to “showcase the good work and success that already goes on.” As well as that they want to “promote our (Bluecoat Academy) ethos and vision of Sport and PE for future generations.” The aim of the whole website is “to show the benefits of a healthy lifestyle and fall in line with the deliverance of the Olympic legacy of using sport as tool to improve social and moral attitudes as well as being fun.” In order to produce this video, it is important to carry out a lot of market research; this is so I know what kind of sports videos are out on the web and what the audience appeal to. I also need take into account the legal and ethical points into considerations. Legal, e.g. copywrite and libel and ethical, e.g. confidentiality, decency and representation, e.g. race, gender, religion, sexuality.

I have done some market research to see what kind of sporting videos are out on the web. There are not many professional looking sporting videos showing you how to play so I didn’t really find any of them. But I did find a lot of professional sporting adverts promoting big companies like Adidas and Nike, they is also promotional Lucozade sport advert in my research. I fund that all these promotional adverts look very professional, dramatic, have famous faces like David Beckham, they mostly have montages of clips instead of a storyline or narrative and all of them have logos showing at the end of the advert. I’ve also found a lot of Promotional adverts to do with the Olympics, which is very serious, dramatic, with dramatic music audio at the back, writing on top of the video, showing a lot of London land marks, shots of the Olympic Stadium , different events, it’s also very patriotic, montage of shots of the Paralympics, logos at the end. As well as that I found a very good video of the Plymstock School about the London 2012 Olympics, shows a famous face Mark Foster, with music at the back, it also has a narrative and the whole video looks very professional.

There are a few important stages of pre- production:

Risk assessments- This is when you go to the location you’re shooting at and look if there are any dangerous things around or anything that could harm the crew and actors. For example to make sure people don’t trip over wires, you have to tell them were all the risks are.

Recce (finding locations)- This is important because you need to look around for good locations to shoot your video, so you can get the best possible outcome of your video with the shots.

Looking at camera angles- This is important because you need to think about what kind of camera angles you want to use in your video.

Story board- This is important because you need to have a idea of what you’re going to do in your video frame by frame, so you never get stuck on stet trying to think of ideas, you just have to look at the storyboard to know what to do next. You can never be over planned when shooting and video.

Script- If you have a narrative in your video, you need to know when and where to say something and what exactly you have to say.

Shooting schedules- You need to keep on track on a time so you don’t over run time and you know where to be at the exact time.Booking the equipment- You need to book equipment to shoot a video.Shot quality- Focus, Lighting, Colour balance, Exposure and Depth of field you need to know about all of these things in order to get a good quality video.

20/11/2012

We have got into teams of 2, which will be our production team company called NiDA. Today we have been creating an email asking Mr Hutchinson when we can meet up and discuss both unit 62 and 19 at the same time. I have also been thinking of questions about what he wants in the video we are going to be creating. We have also sent the email to Mr Hutchinson and are now waiting for his reply.

21/11/2012

In the morning we were going out on a Reece  looking at locations to shoot in. We made tea in this lesson to see the exact order we do things in and then made a Gantt Chart, showing the orders, this was so we would know how to use the computer software properly and then made a Gantt Chart.

27/11/2012

Today miss told us what research to do for Wednesday’s lesson, because we don't have a lesson then because of insect day. We have to do research for all the important stages of per-production.

30/11/2012

Today we had our first meeting with Mr Hutchinson at 9:00am at the PE office, we asked most of our questions that we had prepared beforehand, we missed out some because Mr Hutchinson already answered some of them as he was speaking. Mr Hutchinson told us how he wants the video to look and that he wants it to be aimed at all age groups, so we would have to keep that in account as were filming and editing the video. I felt the meeting went very well and that we had asked all the questions that we needed to in order to do a good job with our project. I felt very confident, happy and pleased with how the meeting went. I felt that Mr Hutchinson thought our ideas and concepts were good and he was happy with what we had done so far with the project. He gave use very good answers to the questions we asked and his ideas and concepts about the video.

04/12/2012

Today Mrs Merrick was not here because she was ill. We were asked to do some work that she had set. We were to work together to share and talk about what I have written in last week’s homework task e.g. personnel, finance etc. and my consideration for these in this project. We were told to get into groups my group included Dieter, Josh, Deniz and myself. From my discussion I had to adjust, add and refine what I had writer beforehand. I then copied it up onto my blog. 

 

05/12/2012

Today Mrs Merrick was here. In our lesson Nicole and I were drawing our storyboards for our video throughout the four lessons we had today.we thought of how our video would look frame by frame, concepts/ ideas, every shot and what shot types we would use, we had to show the different shot types in the drawings. I found this task particularly difficulty because I do not consider myself a good drawer. But luckily my partner Nicole is a good drawer and our storyboard turned out very good. 

11/12/2012

Today's lesson was a chance for me to catch up with all of my work, finish off my hand drawn storyboard and improve on this reflective learning log. 

12/12/2012

Today we went out and about around taking pictures of locations that we would use in our video to put on our storyboard, we did this because our drawing skills aren't very good to say the least. Firstly we went outside the school grounds, across the road to take a picture of the whole school, this would be for our opening establishing shoot for our video. We had a bit of a difficulty to get all of the school into one picture and cars kept on coming into frame, so we had to wait until there were no cars in the way and we had to do our best to try and get as much of the school into shot as possible. We eventually got the picture we needed. We then took a picture showing a point of view shot from the gates of the school. In the video the camera would do a point of view shot going all the way to the PE department but we could not do that in a storyboard. So we just took a picture at the front gates, one at student reception and one of the sign of the sports hall to show we are in the PE department. Fortunately the sports all was not in use, so we could use it for the next picture we needed for our storyboard. We took a picture of people playing badminton. To do this we had to, set up the badminton net and get the equipment to play it, we then had to get some others students in my class to play badminton but fortunately all 8 people in my class were in the Sports  hall to pictures as well so we all helped each other to take pictures for the storyboards. Nicole then got in position to pretentious to be a teacher doing an interview in front of the people playing badminton. We then took pictures of people playing football in the sports hall, but we had to put out some goal posts to make it look like they are actually playing football. The other students also helped in this picture as well. Nicole then got in position to pretentious to be a teacher doing an interview in front of the people playing football. We then had to take pictures of people getting ready for a race at the starting line, one of them racing and one of them finishing the race. All these shots were long shots. We had to get a few of our class mates to help use take these pictures, but we had to be carful that we didn't slip because the grass was full of ice. We then uploaded the pictures onto the computer, renamed them all and them uploaded them onto the storyboard on Celtex. In the afternoon we took more pictures of people playing football, we were hoping to get some pictures of a PE class playing football, but unfortunately they had already finished. So we borrowed a ball from the PE department and started playing football on the grass. We did this to hopefully get better shots than before, but unfortunately we didn't.   All the students in my class including me helped each other out in taking pictures for our storyboards because we needed more than one person in the pictures.

18/12/2012

Today we had a video tutorial about how to make a script on Celtex showing us all the ways to use it. I then spent the rest of the lesson writing my script for my video, for my pre-production work, I also completed my storyboard on Celtex.

19/12/2012 

In the first part of today's lesson we had to answer some questions about risk assessments, this was to understand what it is and to be able to put it into practice for our own project. I answered the following questions:

-What is a risk assessment?A risk assessment is vital in a production, it is required in the industry in every production. A risk assessment requires the assessment of risk to the health and safety to anyone who may by you're activities, yourself  you're co-workers or even the general public. Risk assessment is therefore standard practice throughout the media production industry.

-How are risk assessments used in the media production industry?Ideally you should complete the assessment as part of your location recce. Your tutor will then discuss the assessment with you and sign it. You must have a signed Risk Assessment form to collect equipment for use off-campus.The regulations say that that your assessment must be "adequate" or "suitable and sufficient". This means that you should keep it simple and use your common sense. Assess whether the hazards are significant and if they are, whether you have taken satisfactory precautions. You do not need to indicate hazards that are trivial or insignificant. Identify the hazards using the tick list onPart A of the Risk Assessment form. If you identify additional hazards that are not on this list then you must list them separately. On Part B of the form, provide details of each hazard; what could cause harm, likelihood of it happening, who could be harmed and how badly. Decide how to manage the risk. Your priorities should be:

1. Eliminate the hazard altogether2. Reduce the scale of the hazard or substitute it with something non-hazardous3. Isolate the hazard4. Control the hazard5. Use personal protective equipmentReview your assessment and revise it if and when necessary.I found all this information on http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/art_and_design/studios/media_centre/documents/RISK%20ASSESSMENT%20GUIDLINES.pdf 

7/01/2013

Unfortunately Mr Zafar not here because he had got injured, so for the remainder of the time that he is recovering we are going to be doing all of unit 62. Today's task is to make a video demonstrating my understandings of the following shot types, angles and movements:Extreme Long Shot, Long Shot, Mid Shot, Medium Long Shot, Close Up, Extreme Close Up, Low Angle Shot, High Angle Shot, Overhead Shot, Pan, Track, Dolly, Zoom, Tilt, Point of View, Over the shoulder, Two Shot

But before we did this we were told to watch a video that was made by some other students doing the same task. we were to make our own version of this video in our production teams. We completed this task within the lesson and uploaded the clips onto a PC.   

8/01/2013 

We had a change of equipment in our room form normal PC to Macs, this was so we would be working on a much more probational level with Macs. We firstly got to know how to use them, we set up the mouse so it would operate like a mouse on any other computer, this was to make it easier to use. We then tried to find cretin documents up on the Mac and how to get apps and in general just find our way around. In Celtex we made our production schedule, planning when, where and who we are going to be filming, putting in the exact time and date. This is so we are always planned are ready and we know when and were we are going to be filming, this also saves us time in the future by planning everything out now, so we aren't confused and unprepared. 

9/01/2013

Today we were still sorting out the production schedule. We wanted to film the athletics, football, badminton and trampolining, but to do this we firstly had to ask the PE teachers if it would be okay of we could film their class. We thought we could email them, but then thought this would take too much time to get a response back, so we decided to go and ask them in person if we could film their classes. We roamed around the schools searching for PE teacher for when they were free, so we could interview them, and asked if we could film their class playing sports. Some of the teachers were unavailable  so we couldn't talk to them, but we did find some teachers and they said it was okay of we filmed their class and interviewed them. We also asked Mrs Hampton the head teacher if we could interview her. We then went back and completed our schedule and put in all the times and dates we were going to film. We then took time to film the first and last scene on our storyboard which was point of view shot 1.2, 1.3 and 5.1. This took a lot of time and takes because people kept on getting in the way of the camera so we had to start the shot again. It was easier to film during lesson time because there wan't many students around because they were all in their lessons. We came across some students and teachers alone the way, but tried to avoid filming them. I then exported the video clips onto the Mac. I first tried to open the clips but they wouldn't , so I opened them with VLC (default). Then I tered to put the clips into imovie but because of some technical difficulties they wouldn't let the clips go into the program. Because I was not used to the Mac as they were new computers, and i didn't know much about them I had to ask Mrs Merrick to try and solve this problem. While miss was trying to solve the problem out, Nicole and I went to enquirer about the enrichment activities that happen every Thursday afternoons for the year 7 to 9s. We went to the enrichment office to find out all the information and all the activities that go on, we got a sheet that had all the activities and days on it, so we could plan were and what we wanted to shot. We also thought it would be a good idea to go and see if we can get more teachers to interview and film their PE classes. When we got back to the class miss had figured out how to put the clips into imovie and we then added the interviews that we are going to to to our schedule. Our main task for today was to organise ourself by finishing our schedule off and book the equipment needed to film. All these tasks were completed by the end of the day. 

10/01/2013

Today we made the consent forms needed to give to the students that are going to be in my video. These were necessary because if we do not have consent form the students parents and have the child in the video, that may lead to legal issues, which we don not want to deal with.  

11/01/2013  

Today we didn't do any filing because if was no scheduled in, but instead I cough up on some of my written work. 

14/01/2013

Today we interviewed the head teacher Mrs Hampton we asked her the following questions:Once we had done the interview, because we were using the big professional cameras and they can't put the footage onto the Macs, I had to borrow Mrs Merrick's laptop log on using my username and put the footage onto there, so i could get the footage on the Mac then. 

15/01/2013

Today we went to see Mr Smith in the PE office to ask her if we could interview her and film her class doing a trampoline lesson. She told use it would be fine for use to interview her but that her class isn't really that cooperative but she said we could come along to film them anyway period 5 tomorrow. We also made copies of our consent forms so we are able to give them out to students in tomorrows filming 

16/01/2013

Today was a very busy day and I think we have accomplished a lot. In period 1,  I needed to make an Apple ID because we will be needing them when we get our iPad on Monday. We then had to think of all the questions to the teacher we interviewed today.

In period 2 we filmed Mr Hutchinson's class class playing netball in the sports hall, we had to make sure we got different shots from all angles of the hall, we also had to make sure the ball didn't hit the camera, and it came close quite a few times. At the end of the lesson we asked Mr Hutchinson if he could give out the consent forms and tell the students to return them to student reception.  We then went into the PE office to interview Mr Hutchinson, we asked him these questions: 

1. What do you enjoy about teaching sport at Bluecoat ?

2. Why is it important for children to be involved with sport?

3. What was your favourite sport at school? 

4. Why do you feel that sports at Bluecoat should be show to a wider audience? 

We then interviewed Mr Smith as she was in the office when we were interviewing Mr Hutchinson and she was free. We asked her these questions: 

1. What was your favourite spot when you were in school? 

2. What is your favourite sport to teach? 

3. What is the importance of sports? 

4. What is the best experience you've had at Bluecoat? 

In period 4 we interviewed Mr Pickard in the PE office and asked him these questions:

1. What do you enjoy about teaching sports at Bluecoat?

2. What was your favourite sport at school?

3. Do you feel that sorts at Bluecoat involving to everyone for example gender ethnicity or ability?

4. Do you think that the London 2012 Olympics have influenced students to be move involved with  sports?

In period 5, we went down to film Ms Smith's trampoline lesson, we had to wait for quite a while because the girls were taking a long time changing then putting the trampolines up. But when they eventually got stated, they were still really shy and kept on looking and pointing at the camera. Nicole and I decided that it wan't a good idea to film this class as they were not comfortable with use being there, so we stopped filming and went back to the class room to upload all the footage we had got from today. 

17/01/2013

We were meant to film another one of Ms. Smith's classes but the people that took our camera yesterday didn't bring it back in time and when they bring it back, we had to put all the clips onto Mrs. Merrick's laptop so we had enough space on the memory card, this took the rest of the lesson. We found that the people who took our camera had deleted  the interview we did with Mr. Hutchinson. In the afternoon we had to film the enrichment days with all the sporting activities first we went to the boys doing rowing in the gym, then we went to a group that were doing trampolining, then a group playing table tennis, we asked if we could film the boys playing football but the coach said no because he thought the ball would hit our camera. Then we Interviewed Mr. D and then we interviewed Mr. Hutchinson again because we someone else deleted our interview with him. 

18/01/2013

Today we weren't doing any filming. I decided to rename all the clips as it would be easier to know which one we need when we are editing. 

21/01/2012

Today I had to get up early in the morning as we were filming all the student coming into school this would be my establishing shot in my video. We went across the road were the bus stop was to get a shot of the whole school and the students as they walked through the gates. There was a lot of snow on the ground and falling from the sky so in order to protect the camera from getting damages, I put my umbrella up.I suggested that we then film scene 1.2, 1.3 and 5.1 again because it was snowing when we were filming the astonishing shot in the morning and the last time we filmed scene 1.2, 1.3 and 5.1 it was sunny and there was no snow. So there would be continuity errors when editing the video together. So in order for this not to happen we filmed those scenes again. 

23/01/2013

Today in lesson we cough up on written work. We did some filming at lunchtime, to get interviews of the students. But we only found one of our three a year 11 girl, we couldn't find the other two because it was lunch time and everyone was in the great room eating lunch. The questions we asked her were:

1. What's your favourite sport?

2. What do you like about sport at Bluecoat?

3. What's you best sporting experience at Bluecoat?

24/01/2013

Today I caught up with work and we didn't do any filming, because Nicole was ill and I can't just film all by myself. 

25/01/2013

Today in lesson I worked on my blog, we didn't do any filming then because we had to film students because we can't pull them put of lesson, we filmed at lunch time. We got two more interviews from students and that exactly how many we needed three in total. We gave the consent forms to all of the students that we interviewed and asked them to return them to student reception. We asked them the same questions as last time: 

1. What's your favourite sport?

2. What do you like about sport at Bluecoat?

3. What's you best sporting experience at Bluecoat?

28/01/2013

Today we are starting task D on the Projects brief. We have to do this task as individuals so this is no longer a group project. Essentially the task is in 3 parts; 

1. On your blog - write a post entitled: Post-Production Considerations. Research and write up definitions of all the key words/phrases that you must consider as part of this task.  They are the words listed in the task description. Obviously some will be important and some will not - explain what they mean, write about your need to consider them, how they relate to the industry and your project and if they are not relevant - why? If you can, give relevant examples of where they are or have been used.

2. Use Adobe Premiere to edit your final video together.  Consider the editing techniques suggested in the task description.  Use them where relevant. Use the internet and/or the Adobe Premiere help to research how to use them.  Stay close to your original idea/storyboard... but if you make improvements - document this in your blog.

3. Keep your Unit 62 blog going - each day add in a post reflecting on your progress so far, add in screen shots reflecting on the editing process.

I started to use Adobe Premiere pro Cs6, I didn't know how to use it properly  so I looked up a video tutorial on-line on YouTube called Adobe Premiere pro Cs6 For Beginners -01-Getting Started 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvJtjQgDTPc and found out all I needed to know to get stared up.

29/01/2013

Today I spent most of the  lesson editing my video, I have finished the first scene when the program just shut off, so I had to re do everything. I have now started to edit the netball scenes in my video. Towards the end of the lesson Nicole decided to change all the names of the clips in the main folder were all the original clips were. Because of this, all the clips of my video would not play, so in order to make them work again, we had to change them back to their original names. This took a lot of time and effort, by the end of the lesson we decided that it would be much easier to start editing all over again rather than naming all the files  to their original name. Pulse we hadn't done that much work, so it would be that difficult to catch up with our work.

My homework to bring into next lesson was to find out what a ripple and role edit is and how to work it our on Adobe Premiere, we would present this to the whole calss next lesson. 

30/01/2013

Today I taught the class about ripple and role edit on adobe premiere, other classmates taught me about other tools within adobe premiere. I have learnt a lot in this little session we did with the students teaching each other. As before this session, I did not know how to create a title screen, but then learned by from one of my class mate telling us how to do still, rolling and crawl titles, this is useful for credits. Another student taught me how to trim videos, but fortunately I already knew how to do this, as it is the most important tool in editing in my opinion. Each one on the students in my class taught me something  some of it I already know but some I did not. So all in all this lesson was very helpful and informative.

04/02/2013

Today I was editing my video, I added in Mr Hutchinson's  interview into the video, but I only used his voice to narrate over the images. I also did this to shorten down my video, as it was looking very long and I haven't even done half of my video yet.As I was replaying my video to see what I have done so far I noticed that the colours look weird at some points, it went dark in some palaces and then back to the original colour in others. So in order to fix that I had to sort the colour so all the video looked the same and there wasn't any continuity errors. 

05/02/2013

Today I continued editing my video, I added some trampolining videos and asked miss to check if it all comes together fine, she thought the first bit was a bit too long and it did not go with the narration. So I took out the point of view shots going to the PE department and just kept the establishing shot time lapsing. I added in shots of comments on the PE staff room about the 2012 Olympics and overlapped a shot of students playing football which I made transparent to give a overlapping effect. 

06/02/2013

Today I edited in a lot of clips to my video. Firstly I got Mrs Merrick to look over what I have done so far and see what she has to say to improve it. After she told me what she thought, I took on board her advice and adjusted the audio of the video so it would all sound the same level of sound throughout the video, so there wouldn't be any continuity errors. I made the shots of the comments on the PE door longer so it was easier to read and see. I also added shots of Mr D's interview. As well as that, I cut out different bits of what the teachers and students favourite sports are and put them all together so it's like a little montage. I added in titles to say what the name of the teachers are and there job titles. I also spent my free period editing my video and period 4. In period 5 we came together as a class and looked at each others videos to give feedback to each other on what we could improve on and what the good things in our videos were. 

The feed back I got back was:

 -Improve the leather of the first bit with the Olympics comments on the PE staff   room   door, make longer

-add background music 

-Sort screens out with the black bits around the edge -Mr Pickard "actually" take out 

07/02/2013

Today I continued editing my video, I was determined to finish it all off today, which I did do. I took on board all the feedback I got from last lesson and made all the changes that were necessary. Firstly I made the leather of the scene were the Olympics favourite memories in overlapping with the students playing football longer, as suggested last lesson so I would be easier for the audience to read. I then finally added on some scrolling titles at the end of my video thanking everyone who has helped in the production of it. 

08/02/2012

Today was the deadline for all of the Project to be handed in. I was sorting out all of my written work. Got screen shots together of adobe premier so I can put it on the blog. I have finely finished off this project.