Final: Legal Alien

Overall this clip was 1 minute and 95 seconds.
We used offlicenced music from http://www.freeplaymusic.com/
This clip was edited on Imovie newest one.
The camera used was a Lumix Parasonic FZ38.

Audience Feedback

When we played our film to a variety of different people such as our friends and family, we recieved mixed views of positive and negative feedback.
We were told that our mise-en-scene was very interesting and worked well in our film.

We were aslo told that our character did not look very believable as his clothes could have been improved in a way which will make him look like more of an alien researcher.
Although our film was enjoyed by many people, we were told that some of the editing scenes were a bit jumpy and noticeable.

Some people also said that the sound could have been improved because in some shots, the sound was a bit over powering.

Thankfully, we were given an extra week to make improvements on our final product. I took a note of everything my audience had told us and i listened thoroulghy, insuring that i made changes at every scene that was required to be improved.

Mariam Nikpour

Case Study: District 9

The film District 9 has focused on all the elements of how a sci-fi genre would look like concidering their audiance this includes; weapons, spaceship, aliens ect. This is why District 9 is concidered one of the best sci-fi films of the past decades, it realy does target their target audiance and the special effects in this film really does distract you from the fact that it was a low budget film. Our project is based on bits of the story line such as the reporter turning into half an alien, however ours has to be shot completely differently since we dont have a budget or equipent to, also the themes of illness and suppernatural events which we showed when we edit the flashbacks and every 0.2s for 4 times were X-ray effects showing something is happening, also illness is shown in District 9 as the main character sweats and shakes, we used shaking aswell however we showed also how the main character was effected mentally especially the 2nd minute of our project, instead of sweat we focused more on the effects that we used on Imovie which helps to highlight the facial expressions on your maincharacter which the audiance can relate to. Both products use a foreign language aswell as English which is very effective. Our main character is in an unknown forest and is forgein it shows disorder and also very misplaced because he is not ment to be there which we can relate to the aliens in District 9 who in the end just want to go home to where they belong.

Treeva Pasha

The Evaluation part 1

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our final product 'Legal Alien' conforms to the conventions of existing media products because i devoted alot of my time to research before making our movie. I looked at films of similar genre's and tried to bring elements from their film and change them slightly to create our film opening sequence.

Most of the films I watched were filmed in very dark environments and included a variety of different supernatural events.

I tried to bring this into our film by getting the typical ‘creepy, lonely alien hunter’ to be the lead guy for our film.

A lot of the films I watched also only had 1 character throughout the first few minutes of the film. We included this aspect into our film by not introducing any other actors into the film.

The voice over we used is in Russain and therefore is very interesting which is the reason I didn’t want the soundtrack to over power his voice.
We chose to create a sci-fi film after watching 'District 9'. As this film is also sci-fi we wanted to use this genre and create our own opening sequence. We did however, change the layout of the film because in District 9 the human/ alien transformation scene takes place towards the end of the film. Due to the fact that we wanted our audience to maintain engaged throughout our film, we decided to have the transformation scene to occur at the begining of our film. We found that doing this did actually keep our audience on edge and wanted to watch more. We discovered this through the auidence feedback session we had in our media lesson. We recieved very positive feeback which gave us the confidence to only change a few slight sound effects instead of the way the film was laid out. In our audience's notes, they said that by having our action scene at the begining of the film just after the titles appear on the screen, made them feel very engaged and excited to keep watching. We were very pleased with this feedback because keeping the audience watching to watch more was our main main and i feel that we have achieved this goal.

• Who would be the audience for you media product?

Prior to creating our media product i prepared a questionnaire for sci-fans to complete. In this survey i asked questions such as, are you male or female? How old are you? What would you expect to see in a typical sci-fi movie? After recieveing all of my questionnaires back i found that the majority of sci-fi fans were male and in their late teens. This was what we based our auidence on and we tried our hardest to meet their specific interests. For example, when looking back on my survey i found that many people expect to see some sort of supernatural event taking place during the film because it is sci-fi. We met our auidence's needs by including a action scene when our protagonist transforms into an alien. Aliens is a very typical theme that most people would except to see in a sci-fi film.

• How did you attract/ address your auidence?

We used typical conventions of a sci-fi movie to attract our auidence and allow them to recognise our genre. For example, we used special effects such as 'sci-fi, romance, dreamy and x-ray effects'. Sci-fi fans will be able to see these special effects and identify the genre immideatley. Another way we attracted our auidence was by our soundtrack. The soundtrack is very important in our film because it builds up tension to up coming scenes and it also helps link the scenes together effectively. The music chosen for our film is all extreemely revelant and chosen with alot of thought. Considering that our genre is sci-fi, it is important that i chose typical creepy, and mysterious music to allow the auidence to recognise our genre. If our music was any faster or more up tempo, our genre could have been decieved as a horror or thriller.

Mariam Nikpour

Filming - Legal alien (second attempt) Part 2 Coombe Girls' Science block

On 17th of March,

me and my actor (Ivan Ustenko) went to the science block in Coombe Girls school after school to film our last bit of footage. I decided to use the science block because it has one of the brightest classrooms in the school which is very beneficial when editing the shot. Everything went fine untill the last shot of the day, it was very hard for the actor to keep acting him heaving a fit so I thought of an idea and asked him to just pretend having a headache and cramps in his tummy also to take his time. After filming a 7 minutes footage, I went to the Media block and edit the basics of the story board and which the footage I filmed today I chose the most significant once that help shape the story and edit the selected footage 50% quicker, it was a success and that section was very stricking and really helped releasing the tention in our 2 minute film.

Treeva Pasha

The Russian Voice Over

Yesterday Myung, Treeva, Ivan and I all went to find a quite room in the school to record our voice over. We filmed three of the exact same recordings so we had a few to choose from incase the first two were not very clear.
Today i imported the voice over onto our film, we then had to match the sound with the filming so that Ivan was talking at the correct times. In addition, Treeva, Myung and I then added the subtitles to the required scenes. Once the subtitles had been fitted in to the correct spaces, i then researched on http://www.freeplaymusic.com/ for a playlist which will go well with the voice over. I decided to choose a low-tempo, dark and gloomy sound which i thought worked well because it was not too over powering and it allowed the auidence to hear the voice over and read the subtitles without getting distracted. I understood that there was alot going on in the voice over scene; not only was there a voice over, there was subtitles, point of view shots (and many other shots) and background music. Therefore i had to ensure that the music i was choosing was completley relevant and not too exciting; this will allow the auidence to keep up with whats going on in the shot. I also had to lower the volume of the background sound so that the Russain voice over could be heard.

Mariam Nikpour.

When we were discussing all the possible ways we could record the Russian voice-over Me and Myung thought of doing the voiceover on the Mac, because there was a special option on the Imovie just for recording voice-overs. But we heard from our media teachers that this method did not work with previous project. So we thought of recording it on a seperate camera, at that time my camera was already being used to upload the footage that was filmed so we used one of the cameras in the media department. We brought a tripod aswell so the actor (Ivan Ustenko) was comfortably speaking to it and the camera wont record any movements of the camera or paper. I asked  him to wait 5 seconds after each 3 tries and also a few seconds after each sentence, this is because we dont understand any russian so we only have the script to rely one when we are editing. The edit of subtitles was very important we had to concider the timing, sound overlap and what shots we would add the voiceover with.

Treeva Pasha

After completing the voice over with our actor Ivan whos voice we recorded, I added the subtitles to go with the sound with Treeva and Mariam. The subtitles were important in our film therefore there were many aspects to consider to portray a certain idea to the audience and to show the genre clearly. As every little detail gives adds up to create a better opening sequence, especially as it only lasted 2 minutes in duration. So i chose the font to be white which worked quite well as it stood out in most of our shots. Also as we had the symbolic meaning of our film that the colour white represented more of purity and innocence whilst black would represent more of darkness and evil. There was alot of comparison between the black and white colours if you look carefully in the slightest details of our film. Anyways to go with alot of the russian voice over the subtitles were all in white font to show that he is speaking when he is innocent most of the time.

Myung Kwon

The Soundtrack for 'Legal Alien'.

I was in charge of finding relevant music to go with our film opening sequence. I used a variety of different resources to choose our music from, but because we were not authorised to use just any music, we had to find websites that allowed us to use their music for free without needing a licence.

I heard about the website 'www.freeplaymusic.com' from my media teachers, this website is where i decided to choose all of my playlists from because it had such a huge variety of different genres, moods, tempos and beats to choose from that i felt if i researched the website thoroughly, trying to find the perfect soundtrack for our opening sequence i could carry out this task well.

I found a huge variety of songs that related to our sci-fi genre however i could only use a few of them when it came to importing them onto our final project because our opening sequence consists of only two mintues and we also have a voice over to fit in. I had to narrow it down to using just five different playlists, ensuring that i was chosing the most relevant and effective sounds to maintain our mysterious, dark, sci-fi theme. I then imported them on to our project and decided which ones go in where. For example, at the begining of our film we have a shot of the camera tracking across the grass and then tilting upwards for the titles which appear on each tree. We edited this into a fast foward pase however when the camera reaches tree, the pase gets slower until the titles disappear. The music i decided to put with this scene was a mysterious and exciting sound that i discovered from http://www.freeplaymusic.com/, the music was called 'Wasteland' and i feel that it has many conventions of the sci-fi genre that we are going for.

Treeva and I decided to to create a soundbridge for the end of this scene because towards the end of the shot, we introduce our character (Ivan) and the atmosphere changes dramatically, the 'Wasteland' sound we had chosen did not match the next scene so we did a soundbridge, mixing another playlist into the shot. I feel that this worked well and matched the up coming scene. The other sound we decided to use for the soundbridge was called 'Evil Curse'.

We showed our completed product to the media teachers and our class, everyone was asked to fill in a marking criterea form and to give their opinions about our film. This was very useful because it allowed us to gain somemore auidence feedback and we could improve our film using their notes. We were very impressed with the marks people had given us, we recieved very positive feedback. However some people did feel that there was things we could improve. For example, one of the groups said that our editing was a bit jumpy in some of the scenes and there were a few obvious cuts. We agreed with this comment and decided to make alterations to our film.

There was one scene that i thought could have been improved. It was the point of view shot, which then moved to an over the shoulder shot. It was difficult to edit this cut to make it look less jumpy, however using the blink effect on the new iMovie helped us create a creepy sequence which was not very noticeable when changing from the two shots.

Another improvement our audience felt was nessesarry was the sound. When moving from reality into a flashback it was not very recogniseable that the scene was changing into a flashback. Our auidence stated that to make it more obvious maybe we should add a sound effect to represent the flashbacks.

I searched onto the internet for a 'whooshing' sound to fit into our film. I found the perfect sound effect on http://www.freeplaymusic.com/, i then imported it onto our final piece. I had to consider timeing of the whooshing sound because the scenes i wanted to fit it into consists of only 0.5 seconds, therefore i needed to trim the whoosh clip into 0.5 seconds for all the flashbacks where i had imported the whooshing sound into.

The voice over is of our actor (Ivan) talking in Russain, we decided to have the voice over in another language also using subtitles because we felt it would bring a sense of multi cultural aspects to our project. We also wanted our audience to see that our actor who is alone in the deserted woods is from another country and he has been travelling to find aliens; doing a voice over in Russain will make it more obvious to the audience that he is foreign. Not only is our actor not from this country, he is also no longer from this planet because in our film he transforms into an alien; this also represents that he is from another place and it suggests to our veiwers that he is from out of this world.

We used the media departments camera to carry out the voice over task, when editing, i imported the sound from the tape and exported the video leaving us with just the voice over. I had to make sure the subtitles were matching with the voice over. It was difficult to get the timeing perfect, however we carried this task out well by using the new iMovie to make sure the writing stays on the screen for a longer period of time until Ivan had stopped talking. This was to allow enough time for the audience to read the writing as it is being spoken.

Mariam Nikpour.

Filming - Legal alien (second attempt) Part 1 Richmond Park

On 14th of March,
I met up with my actor(Ivan Ustenko), Myung and Mariam, we went to Richmond Park to film 'Legal Alien' again.

Mariam had less props this time, because it was too heavy however we did have enough to work with. The actor helped setting up the tent which took ten minutes, the props were placed differently because of two reasons; there were not enough props to make it work because the angle that I was filming in the first time needed the props to make it work so I needed to rethink all the shots and angles used by focusing on close ups of the character which hopefully not show the lack of  realism and still represent the genre which we were working with, also I was going to try something differently for the title sequence, the tracking shot of the trees in the beginning will build up more tention to the film which is very helpfull for the audiance to identify the genre and story line. When filming the first shot, I had to run up the hill while focusing the camera on the floor then track to the trees which will first, make the point of view look like its crawling and second, create a sence of significance to the trees. I had to repeat this tracking shot 5 times because we wanted to film the tracking shot of the trees, then follow the broken branches and then do the 360 degrees spin while focusing on the characters face being shown as a close up. I realised this was not working so I split the filming in sections and rely on the editing to match them all together. Finally when finished filming the tracking shot of the trees for the 6th time, I focused on the rest of the story board which went perfectly fine. Overall the filming was a success and all of us have high expectations of the outcome of this 2 minutes film.

Treeva Pasha

Storyboard: Legal Alien

This is the storyboard that I created to use as a general base for the filming we were going to do. I drew the rough sketches of the shots we were going to take and coloured it in so that as a group we could get a general idea of how it would look like in real life when we filmed it. Treeva and Mariam and I discussed the different shots that we were going to take and wrote down roughly how Treeva was going to film in at Richmond park. Also adding several annotations such as the 360 degree shot of the tree.

Today we went to Richmond Park and filmed our first footage. However this storyboard was just a rough idea and as we tried some shots, they didn't work. So some had to be changed to different shot or not used at all.

Myung Kwon

The Script: Legal Alien

Legal Alien

Written by

Treeva Pasha

FADE IN:



1 EXT. IN MYSTERIOUS FOREST - AFTERNOON



Start with SMOOTH tracking shot through the trees.

Tracking along the long branch of trees that seems to have broken onto the grass.

A large oak tree is tracked and the camera goes up 360 degrees.

There is a RUSTLING diegetic sound—SOMETHING seems to be present.

This is followed by a mid shot of a PARANOID looking GUY.



HE looks at the map in the middle of the forest.



Vlandislav (Voice Over)
This only started happening to me a few days ago.



(Flashback)



Extreme close up of a hand SHAKING.

Point of view shot of the forest. Camera pans from left to right, then up and back down.


(Flashback)

Extreme close up of the character chest, which is HEAVILY breathing. A mid shot follows this with the protagonist reading a small Russian book. Afterwards an over the shoulder shot of HIM reading the book, this is then tracking behind HIM to be followed by a shot of HIM using a laptop.


Vlandislav (Voice Over)

My name is Vlandislav. I have been living here for months trying to find a trace of life.


Half of HIS face is shot in the frame by the use of a close up. A rule of thirds is used to keep the frame in proportion and HE is seen USING the laptop.
(Flashback)
Extreme close up of the protagonist AWAKING, pulling his face from the ground whilst the camera tracks out and from right to left. Camera tracks from the past from left to right.

A mid shot from the behind of the character including part of the tent, this tracks to the side and reveals the character that looks up.
Vlandislav (Voice Over)
And then, I found it.

(Flashback)


A mid shot of the character CROUCHING having a epileptic fit on the ground. Raging furiously.

Media Questionnaire

Here is the media questionnaire that I created, so that as a group we could gather

some background information and resources to help us understand the basics of what a 

sci- fi film should include. I decided not to include too many questions as it could put off the people filling out the questionnaires and also because we only needed information that was important. So five questions seemed quite a fair number to ask people to fill out. 

I showed this to Mariam and Treeva who agreed on the questionnaire and to check if the questions seemed appropriate and to see if it would give us a good set of information we could analyse from. We then printed several copies out and got them filled in by people who were selected at random. To give a more reliable set of data.

Myung Kwon

Editing 'Legal Alien'

The footage you see above you is our first attempt to film; a couple of scenes put together showing the mistakes we made.

Whilst editing our footage we noticed that the scenes did not match eachother, so consequently the audiance who will be watching this film will find it hard to relate which means they will not fully understand the film. So we had a meeting and discussed all the faults in the footage that we recorded and finally came with a disicion to refilm everything. The reason why we decided not to film just a few clips that were missing was because the lighting would be different and also probably the time of day since we did not record at what exact time we filmed this footage. But we took it as an optimistic point of view, because we are refilming everything and we have gone through our first footage several times, we came up with many alternative ideas that could make the footage even more effective and successfull so we changed our story board which hopefully will result to good footage when we film next week.

Treeva Pasha

Today i started editing the Legal Alien footage, however to be honest i had only the skills which i had learnt from our Feed the Fish preliminary task. Therefore i was quite amateur to the whole editing. However as i started editing using the knowledge i had gained before from the feed the fish task, i could get a quick idea of what i had to do. What i found was important when editing was to get the timing and music right. Also finding the shots which are good, doesn't matter if its from the first footage we took like some of the ones put together shown above or from the second.

Because as long as we could put the together, it would create a very good piece of work. Such as the 360 degree tree shot that I gave as an idea when helping and directing Treeva as she filmed, the first shot was not very promising however half to the shot was very stable and clear though the starting half of the other footage was better, so that i put them together and edited it clearly so that it did not jump and so the audience would not notice it and feel disconnected from the film.

Also this applied with another shot which I gave as an idea with the over the shoulder panning shot which goes from the book on the left, nicely to the right of the shot where the laptop is. Treeva did a very good job in filming this, so that it worked. I had seen these nicely connecting panning shots on many movies i watched, which was very influential and representative in my film and directing it with Mariam.  In this shot a key highlight is the subtitles which I talked about in the film commentary that we did together to evaluate our work. We explained by displaying the film on the projector and directing it. That is done in many movie extra options if you look on DVDs. I used the contrast between black and white to show bad and evil, also using white font seemed to work relatively well in the film. During the film you see a lot of quick black screen shots, which lead to a longer shot with white font saying 'I found it' that exposes the tension I built up. Also the meaning of this part was to show that the evil is slowly taking over him but then at the end of the opening sequence he is taken over.

So that as long the footage was edited properly, the footage itself didn't have to be perfect.

Another key point i would like to mention is the main title of the film when it is presented.
Through the questionnaires, i found out that the colour blue had a lot of meaning in sci fi and trying it out with a blurred screen gave a very nice emphasis on the title and allowed the audience to focus on the title after the tension built up from the running sequence we start off with on the opening sequence. Making the size of the font small also added to this nice effect, showing not always big fonts get the attention of the audience. Also mentioning the use of contrast in our film alot, making the size of the title 'Legal Alien' font small it allowed the audience to compare the size of the title against the tall tree in the blurred blackground.

To make sure that we had a range of good shots though, it was important for us to film many shots from different angles, which Treeva did. Whilst adding good sound after i edited the right shots was important so that it created the correct atmosphere and emotion that we wanted the audience to feel, which Mariam did. This shows that working as a team was very important to get a successful outcome with different ideas to make our work unique and outstanding.

When i was editing using the new version of I Movie 09 because the file of our footage was AVCHD which was different to the other groups, because we used different camera; the Lumix Parasonic FZ38. However it allowed us to get a high definition video. By using the new imovie 09 I found that it was easier to use than i thought and that it had some good effects that enhanced our outcome, that you wouldn't be able to do with the old imovie. For example the main effect we used alot to show the genre of our movie was the 'SCI- FI' effect that gave a green tint effect, which was unavailable in the old imovie.

The problems i found using the Imovie 09 when editing was that it crashed every now and then without allowing me to save the work, so i would have to re-do the work again. Though we could fix this major problem by using a different computer fortunately. Otherwise there weren't really any problems with editing on the new Imovie 09. I quite enjoyed editing the footage actually. Especially adding the different effects to make our work look much better.

Myung Kwon

Filming Our 'Legal Alien' task

We arrived at Richmond Park on 24/2/10 to begin filming. We had to make a few adjustments to our original plan a few hours before filming. For example, we wanted to film in the evening but because we were filming in a public National Park, there were no electrical devices that we could use to plug in our lighting facilities. This became to be a big problem because we needed lighting to enhance the dramaticness of our project. I thought about changing location to somewhere closer to electrical devices so that we could use an extention cable to plug in our lights, however it was raining that day and i did not what to risk anything dangerous. Therefore, we decided to stick to our Richmond Park location and just film during the daytime and bring lanterns incase it gets darker whilst fiming. This did affect our project as a whole because we wanted to bring a mysterious, scary vibe to our movie and we were going to do this by filming in the evening. We overcame this problem by filming in the day time and edited our footage by using iMovie to change the brightness and effects of our scenes.

Treeva's role was to film all the footage using her camera.
My role was to create the soundtrack and edit it onto our film.
Myung's role was to edit the footage.
Myung and I also took on the role as the Director's. We helped Treeva as she filmed the footage and we directed her from scene to scene using our story board.
However, we all contribruted our help into all of these tasks and worked together to edit the footage and sound to create a film that was to the best of our abilities.

Mariam Nikpour