18th February to 9th March - Preliminary Task

The preliminary task was "film a person coming into a room, having a conversation with another person with a reverse shot", and since I had done this task last year for my GCSE coursework, I decided when filming this to be quite a bit more ambitious with it. Basically, give myself a broad enough scenario where I could allow myself to mess around in editing, see what I could discover with Sony Vegas.

Starting on February 18th, I began the scripting process for my preliminary task. As shown by here, not much substance, but what it allowed me to do was give me creative freedom later down the line. This script would later go on to not be the final one, because of some technical difficulties and need to pad the length out a bit. It had no plot, it just allowed ambition.

Next was storyboarding, immediately after finishing the script. It came to a total of around six different shots, due to the length. The first shot showed what was happening without revealing too much. The second had Man's face revealed and speak, giving a feeling. The third revealed Man2, fulfilled reverse shot and provided a contrasting difference from mid-long shot to long shot. Fourth and fifth were both close ups where I had an idea of something experimental I wanted to do in editing. I wanted to see if I could have a second shot overlay half the screen, clearly split in the middle because it would show the synergy of the two characters. I gave up on this idea during editing, because I couldn't work it out. Finally, shot 6 was a high-angle of both Man and Man2 walking down a hallway with the cameraman staying equidistance away as they sung Firework.

Filming was relatively quick, not much to say, had everything in 40 minutes. Editing was the hard part because I realized how mediocre the audio was on some clips, and how mediocre the camerawork was on others. This is where I made the big decision for this task of keeping all the ones with good camerawork, and removing all audio, turning it into a silent film. How I achieved this effect is through the use of filters on each shot to make it look more like it was developed in the early 1900's. To replace the audio, I removed each clips current audio and put in a fairly old light-hearted track "Kevin MacLeod - Look Busy" and for all the dialogue, after any shot containing some I put a black screen with a fancy white border with the dialogue in text form on top. This would also have a filter placed on top of it. At this point, I knew that I wanted some more experience with non-live-action stuff, so at the end of the previous shots, I added in a record scratch as the Youtube Copyright infringement message appeared, so I could do a short joke parodying The Fine Bros. The Fine Bros were quite topical at the time, for trying to trademark "React" videos and striking any video with the word "React" in it. The joke became The Whine Bros due to the pun and it was useable because I was going on the assumption that the audience would have a reaction to the earlier half. This led me to get in contact with one of my friends who could record audio and I used our mascots commonly associated with our online personas to represent that. This was mainly to test my usage of moving images through the editing process. As it zoomed in to a black and white version of the message, specifically the face, I had Gary Jules - Mad World playing because that's a song commonly used for "edgy" things on the internet. Overall, I think this task could've been done better, but I did what I set out to do at least.

YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g72odeR69Fo