HUSH HUSH. - Val/Josh

The book Hush Hush is easily one of my favourites, and gave me the idea for my story. It's about a girl called Nora Grey who meets Patch after he becomes her school biology partner. She has no idea where he's from, but she's attracted to his mysterious persona against her will. He seems to know all her, things that not even her closest friends know. He seems to be there every time something dangerous or strange happens, occurances that seem to start happening after Patch arrives.

Nora soon comes to the shocking realisation that patch is a fallen angel. And that he was meant to kill her, to become human, however, Patch ends up falling in love with Nora, and Nora with Patch.

Nora's friend 'Jules' is in fact a nephilim, wants revenge against Patch, for tricking him into swearing an oath, allowing Patch to claiming his body during the Hebrew month of Cheshvan. To kill Chauncey (Jules) Nora must sacrifice herself, but as Patch is in love with her, he risks his life to save her, becoming a guardian angel. This has a similar idea to our book as it uses a mysterious guy to which a girl is attracted to although the guy turns out to be a 'fallen angel' and we mirrored this idea.

The task

JEV


This is Ellie, Valeriya and Josh's coursework. The pages are set up to show development process through research to promotion and then onto our final piece. We were asked to create a 2 minute opening of a film. Here you see the process of which we plan, develop, film and edit our opening. We have used the blog format to present our work and have filmed certain parts.


What the task was


Preliminary exercise: continuity task involving involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character with whom he/she exchanges a couple lines of dialogue. This task should demonstrate match on action, shot/reverse shot, and the 180 degree rule.
Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.


Difficulties we encountered

In the preliminary task we spent a considerable amount of time deciding on our storyline and plot as even though we had several ideas we struggled to come up with one that we could actually produce in the short time we had. After we eventually had an idea to work on we found it hard to reflect the storyline within the shots and had to rely rather heavily on dialogue to ensure it was clear and the audience could understand the story. As it was our first time using the equipment I personally took some time to become accustomed to the camera which meant taking some time to complete all the shots, an example of this is shown at the end of the actual video when the camera suddenly tilted upwards and again when Ellie stood up leaving her head out of the frame. Again as it was our first time, editing was a slow process and looking back it wasn't quite as smooth as we could of perhaps made them.


What we learned about filming


I personally became a lot more comfortable operating the camera, I learnt how sensitive it was necessary to be with the zoom and how to pan effectively. During the task I got the chance to experiment with several different shots, and how you can make a scene much more interesting by shooting from different angles. Moreover it became apparent that it was important to film as much as possible from different shots as when editing if a problem appeared with one of the shots then it is extremely time consuming to re-film. Finally during the filming process we realised how important planning and in particular the storyboard is, as a good storyboard allows the filming process to run much more smoothly as you know exactly what you want and how your going to do it.

Josh

JEV opening and dolly test

ANALYSIS

Firstly, we decided to test shoot some ideas for the first scene of our movie. As it is focused on a girl in a room we thought it would be effective to show her from a distance, then zoom into her face, and her hands, as she is writing. Then, we would've gone from this into a side shot, using the dolly as a prop to guide the camera steadily until it got behind her, where it would change into an over the shoulder shot.
In our practice, our cameraman wasn't here, so Valeriya had to take control, using her experience from different shots using the dolly before the Christmas holidays. However, it didn't go as smoothly as we imagined, as the shots Valeriya took were too jumpy, due to the fact we had no dolly.
The crane shot, we all agreed was the only one that was smoothly done, and after editing, although it wasn't perfect we could see a massive transaction to when we first started.
To have it perfect in the finished piece we will make sure we have the dolly to use and instead of using the same shot to zoom in, we will have a separate shot to do so.

The dolly test was the first time we actually filmed spontaneously, with the use of the dolly. We filmed about an hours worth of footage, only deciding to put the ones we felt were done the best. The first one, a scene from 'Romeo and Juliet' Josh captured the part where i fell perfectly, zooming out at exactly the right moment. However in watching his dolly moving skills we realised he needs to be slightly more steady when moving the camera.

For the next two shots, we decided to collaborate them to show a sort of short scene, where Valeriya reads a note and the camera moves closer, then stops to zoom in, this is called "?" it zooms into her eyes, causing a suspensive effect, and the scene quickly changes to Josh on a chair, as if the camera is going into her mind. It gives an eerie sense that he has something to do with what the letter is about, as the camera is moving along the dolly as his eyes are following it, however this also could've been done better by the camera moving less.
valeriya