It was that bar...in Penang

In our last few Media Studies lessons, we have been split into two groups working on a short film. In my group was Alex and Alastair, and after Alex decided to put on the first thing he could see, we decided to take on a rather different approach to our film. Our general idea was that I played a (possibly) Eastern European man who runs into an "old flame" while walking down the street. Alex was very convincing as my characters "old flame", who is dressed in a Chinese tunic with a hat and an umbrella, (to clearly show s/he was Asian) and Alastair served as our cameraman/director. During the first lesson, we filmed our movie. We borrowed a Canon camera and a tripod from Mrs Mann and set off to win a BAFTA. As our short film was based on romance, (and unintentional comedy) we used camera shots such as zooming in and panning from Alex's feet to his face, to make it seem more sexy and romantic. We also used over the shoulder shots, to make it easier to film the conversation going on between Alex's flirty Asian and my sexy unknown-place-of-origin character.




In the following lesson, we had managed to wrap up filming so we started to edit our chunky film and string the different shots together. To do this, we used IMovie. We imported all the different shots onto the Mac and spread them out into one big collection. We then uploaded the best, final ones onto IMovie and cut the other shots. We managed to get the order of the shots right and uploaded them into the timeline of IMovie, so it can be played as an actual video, complete with proper face slapping! During our editing, we decided to take a more comedic approach to our video and add different effects and sounds. When Alex first appears, we added a voiceover to romantic music (because we lack the talent to insert an original song) and then added a sheep noise for comedic purposes. During the scene where Alex talks, we changed the pitch of his voice to a higher tone, to better suit the movie's atmosphere. Finally, we decided to use the iconic "face slapping" scene twice. During the second time, we slowed it down and added an echo effect so that it stuck with audiences more and became generally funnier to view.