Filming

Whilst filming the poker scene, which makes up the majority of our film, we encountered various logistical problems but it was successful overall. We had to keep in mind not breaking the 180 degree rule, maintain continuity and make sure the shots are well framed and level.

Lighting was another concern as although we were filming inside it was a very bright day and the light came through the curtains. We tried to balance out this problem by using a lamp behind the camera to balance the lighting. I believe we were able to achieve a good mise-en-scene with cigars, whiskey bottles, suits, green table cover and authentic poker chips/cards creating a solid verisimilitude.

We had several technological problems with the microphones as they didn't appear to be recording sound at a high enough volume, so we had to use the cameras built in microphones however we have little dialogue as most of it is narration which we will record after we have uploaded the footage so it won't be as big a problem as it was last year. Some shots we wanted to attempt weren't possible such as the 360 panning shot of the poker players as the room wasn't large enough to manoeuvre the dolly around.

On the day we made some changes to the plot such as introducing a prior game to the focal poker hand to remove 2/5 of the poker players and giving the audience a chance to see all our characters playing and lowering the number of characters involved in the final hand to intensify the action.

Overall I think the filming was successful and as we filmed using two cameras we were able to gather just under an hour of footage which should hold us in good stead for editing.

Ancillary Task - Magazine Film Review

This is the near finish magazine film review for our second ancillary task, however the picture in the middle will be replaced by stills from the movie once we have got our footage. To complete this task we used 'Microsoft Publisher' to create the magazine spread  and studied the conventions of popular film magazines, 'Empire' in particular. The 'In Cinemas' section is inspired by 'Empire' where we list the release date, certificate, cast etc. We also decided to include an interview between the director after seeing it featured in many of the film magazines.

Blog Layout

To appear more professional we decided to change our Blog backgrounds to be relevant to our film and all of us in the group would share the same layout to show we are in the same group. We used the picture of the casino table we use in our poster and tiled it on our blog. We then had to edit the text colour of our blog title to be clearly visible. 

Poster - Ancillary Task

Using Microsoft Publisher we created a teaser poster for our film - 'Face Down' embracing creative darkness inspired by the film 'Buried'. We narrowed our choices down to three a portrait poster with a poker-lamp at the top of the picture and a landscape or portrait  poster without the lamp. After discussing the options between us we decided that the lamp looked out of place and therefore ruled out that poster whilst the landscape poster is unpractical for use in magazines thus we chose the portrait poster without the lamp (poster 2). We also decided to ask for feedback from a focus group, another media student in our group Phoebe Ward commented "It's really good, it shows you what it is about in the poster as the poker table is the central focus however it doesn't give much away". We also found that most of the people we asked liked the film name - 'Face Down'. Sophie Sinclair said 'I think it's good, but it doesn't give much away and the gambling genre wouldn't appeal to us' however teenage girls aren't the demographic for our film. We asked another media student, Ollie Kent, to give us some feedback he said 'It's brilliant I definately want to see it when it comes out, however maybe the poker table should be higher'.



Ancillary Tasks

To reveal the process of creating and developing our ancillary tasks - poster and magazine review, we overlayed a narration of all 3 members in the group and imported pictures to match our narration.  We filmed ourselves speaking then imported the video to Adobe Premier Pro where we unlinked the audio and video, deleted the video line and embedded the imported pictures into the sequence.

Storyboard Animatic

After we created a shooting script we decided to create a storyboard (despite our artistic failings) to visually represent the shots we hope to achieve in our film. We then took photos of the individual storyboard pictures and uploaded them to the computer. Then using 'Adobe Premier Pro' we put all the photos into an animatic then downloaded non-copyright music from 'freesounds.com'. We decided to use harmonica and electric guitar style blues music as it is typical of the gambling genre and something we may wish to use in our actual film.

Film Name - 'Face Down'

After much deliberation we have decided upon our poker film's title as 'Face Down'. This has dual meaning as it combines the meta language of Texas Hold-em Poker with the cards being deal 'face down'. Additionally, the term 'face down' can connote being miserable and your luck running out which echoes the themes we wish to express in our film. Also when your face is down you are avoiding conflict and around the poker table Sean (main character) will be inexperienced and most likely reflect the title in his facial expressions.