Working on my own...

So at the beginning of the year, I made the decision to work on my own, rather than in a group. I made this choice because I generally work better on my own. In addition to this, last year I felt it hard to work in a group for numerous reasons:

1. The majority of the students live in Nottingham, whereas I live in Derbyshire, which made it hard to meet up. especially when it snows and all the transport stops.
2. If you work in a group it is sometimes hard to make sure your ideas are heard and used, and I had a very strong idea of what I wanted my video to be this year.
3. Working on my own meant less time working and more time getting on with it.
4. I knew that the grade I get is mine and mine alone. I will feel like I have achieved more.
5. I find it hard to work with new people a lot and i would take me a long time to fit in and concentrate.

Therefore I have done all the planning, shooting, directing and editing myself.
his has been hard because I obviously have 3 peoples work to do in the same time. However, if I had the choice again, I would choose to work on my own again, as I believed I have worked much better than I would have done in a group, and I am pleased and proud of the work I have produced myself.

Changes, stress, complications, holdups...

A lot has happened since my last blog., before the christmas holidays- both good and bad I suppose.  Firstly, due to other commitments, it was hard for me and Sophie to get together a lot, so I finally decided to continue the music video with me as the main character. Obviously this posed the initial problem of having to re-shoot the parts I had already done, but on the upside, I feel the emotion between me and Seth will have benefited from this change as we are a couple so there is no embarrassment, and we can easily show the love :) This left me with a short amount of time to shoot and edit, but thankfully, my organized preparation paid off as i found it much easier to shoot what I needed and shot my whole film in a matter of days over the christmas period. The hardest part was setting up the camera myself, for me to also be in the shot. However, I believed it has worked well.
Now, for the not so good things. Firstly, after editing the majority of my video, the mac I was working on unexpectedly closed imovie meaning that all my work was lost. This happened on numerous occasions which lost me a lot of time, and there was obviously nothing I could do as the technicians had tried to fix it numerous times. Following this (like I needed any more bad luck) the camera that i was using for a following shoot apparently needed 'cleaning', resulting in all my work to have grey lines across it. As this was down to the camera and tape, it could not be fixed which meant that I had to re-shoot all the work again, and more importantly, lost a lot of valuable time in the editing suite.
Relating to this, as we share macs throughout both years, it is extremely hard to get any time on them out of lesson time.
So after all this trauma I am finding it difficult to finish my work on time but am trying my very best, waiting in the mac suite for any possible chance of editing.

Some sneaky footage :)

This is a couple of scenes that I have put on here to have a sneaky look at. Hope you like!

Digipack design progress

This is an image of my digipack design so far. I have the titles, sides, song list, institutional logos, production credits and barcode, and just have the images to put in now. I am happy with my progress so far and will be taking the photographs this week.

Snow and FIREEE!

The snow is finally starting to melt after freezing -16 conditions! Due to a 4x4 I managed to get up into Derbyshire, unfortunately it wasn't a filming day, but I did manage to get some stills of a campfire to experiment with how I could make some shots look like. I was very pleased with the result and hope to be able to get back there soon and do some filming! In addition to this, I found a nice position inside a little cave, then when shot back outside gave a really nice silhouette effect. 

The snow is still falling all around us...

It has now been snowing none stop for six days running and the conditions outside are terrible. There is over 2 foot of snow on the roads. College has been shut due the poor traveling conditions. On the bright side, I already have some filming equipment with me which means I might be able to get some more filming done. However, the big problem is getting anywhere as we are all literally snowed in. I hope to take some pictures for the CD cover and website and possibly do some of the indoor scenes if possible.

Weather advice

Bilborough College will unfortunately remain closed on Thursday 2nd December due to the expected weather conditions and their impact on travel arrangements.

First shoot.

This is a report of my first real shoot, which went really well! I would like to thank Sophie Trueman and Seth Walker for being so amazing as well as putting up with the freezing cold snowy weather. We have shot the solo performance scene and the churchyard scene for the very end. Due to the weather, we hardly had any disturbances, just a few dog walkers wondering what we were up to! The shoot went really well and I got plenty of footage. I believe that shooting everything a few times payed off as it reduces the likelihood of having to re-shoot. Sophie was brilliant, already knowing all the lines to the song and singing them properly, so that the lip syncing looks brilliant.