Editing

for the editing of the film, me and Rabbi used the mac software that we have in college. it was the first time we were using any kind of editing software, and so we weren't really sure what we were doing. It took us a while to get any clips onto the PC, we couldn't connect the camera to the PC, we kept swapping bits of technology around to see if anything made a difference, but it still didn't work. we then tried a different wire that connects the two and we eventually found one that worked. After it had connected we couldn't get all of our clips onto the PC, we got our film pitch on there and that was it. I asked around to see if people could help, but we still didn't get anywhere with it. we tried twice to get the clips on, but it always stopped after the film pitch had gone on.

Thankfully, we tried again and it finally went on the PC and we had to wait quite a while for it all to be imported onto the PC. then we could start editing. we had to ask for help again because we hadn't a clue how to edit and we didn't want to delete or lose anything by accident. we were shown how to edit and then from then on it seemed quite simple once we got the hang of it. we went through it and edited it entirely. adding in some titles along the way.

we made a back up of all the clips on Rabbi's memory stick just in case anything went wrong and we needed to get the clips back. But everything in the end went fine and we just had the music to add on. we had to have help again because we didn't know how to do this. we have a friend called Jon who we know had used the same software before and he was happy to come and help. we had a song called 'everlasting sadness' for our film that we got from freeplaymusic.com. he added the music on and then after that all we had to do was make all of the clips black and white. we thought the film would look much better if it were to be in black and white. i went through them all and changed them and watched it through and the effect really suited the narrative.

originally we were going to have a strike through design for our film title-

I'm not okay

but in the final title on the film the design looks like this-

I'm (not) okay

Original idea compared with final version

At the very start of this media project, me and Rabbi wanted to do three separate stories within our short film, we wanted an issue about arranged or forced marriages, but we had problems with getting actors to be in the film and so we couldn't do this issue. From the very start we had the idea of the pregnancy storyline, and we have kept that throughout and it has made the final film. but for the third and final story we always had problems, we changed it many times and each time was because we had a problem with actors. so we thought about a storyline that we could realistically do without having actor problems. which is when we came up with the idea of a story surrounding the issue of self harm, we would be able to film that with myself acting in it. for a while we had the idea of doing a storyline with a girl who has an imaginary friend, she had him ever since she was little, but she never 'grew out' of being with him. she was going to be 17 and still have only her imaginary friend as company. but we decided that again we didn't have the actors and that this storyline, if we ever did it would have to be a separate short film in itself rather than part of a 3 way story narrative. so we got rid of that one.

our third story was then going to be about child abuse. we had the actors to be in it and we even filmed that story, but looking back on it, the lighting was terrible and so was the acting. this story wasn't included in the final film. the only two stories that made it was the self harm one and the pregnancy one. which i think now looking back at it is better than having three stories. have three would make the short film too long and i prefer the idea of just having two best friends and their lives behind the smiles they put on.

original ideas
- Pregnant girl
-Muslim who is in love with a boy outside of her religion - forbidden love-
-imaginary friend

final ideas
-self harm
-pregnant girl

other
-child abuse

Music

i have a piano at home and so we got together to try and come up with some music that we had composed ourselves. we used our phone recorders to record what we came up with, but then we decided that this wasn't the best way to do the music for our film. we looked on freeplay music.com and i made a list of songs that i thought sounded good. i could only judge by the description though, because i was on the college computers and they do not have itunes so i wasn't able to download and listen to the songs. so i made the list and then when i got home, i went on the website again and downloaded all of the songs that i had written down. i went through them all and listened to them, none of them really stood out to me at first, they weren't really suitable for our film even though the genre and description made out like they would be good. Rabbi came round my house to have a listen and she agreed with me that none really stood out. but in the end we decided on one named 'everlasting sadness' it is an emotional sounding song and so it goes well with out short film.

yesterday we added the sound with the help of our friend Jon and we are happy with the outcome. we have the music playing throughout the first scene and on every title that we added in. the music sounds appropriate for what the film shows.

The characters in the final version of the film

Oringinally we were going to have  3 main characters in our short film:
Jade
Emily
Ashley

But after filming Ashelys story, we decided that the quailty of film that we were able to get wasn't good enough to have for the final film, so we haven't used that. this turned out well anyway because with the third story we would have gone way over the time limits.

so now we just focus on Enily and Jade and thier background stories. as i have mentioned, emily has found out that she is pregnant with her boyfriend stan, who doesn't take the news very well and he wants her to get rid of the baby. wheras Jade goes home to find her parents arguing about the fact that they don't like that she has turned out to be gay, her father says that he wants to kick her out because of her sexuality and this makes Jade very upset and she turns to self harm.

Emily used to live near Jade and they were able to spend a lot of time together, but in the film, emily has moved away and so they don't get to see eachother very often. They spend the day together, but we only see a small part of thier time together, when Jade says how much she misses her friend, this suggests that something might be wrong, but neither of them say what thier lives are really like at the moment.

They depart and that is when we show what thier lives are really like. we show Jade's first, as she is the last person we see leaving, and so we follow on from her.

we have put a few titles in the film which just say simple things to the audience, such as "are you really okay?" and "happiness doesn't last for long" these just give the audience something to think about whilst they are watching the film, they might answer the wusetion in thier head and wonder if they are hiding thier feelings from anyone.

Filming.

Filming the self harm story

On Thursday 3rd of November, me and Rabbi planned to go to my brother, Aaron's house to film the 'self harm' story. We went to his house because we wanted him and his partner Lindsey to act in our short film and I thought that the upstairs of their house would be ideal for what we intended to film. We went round and I explained the basic plot line of the story so that she had some context about the film, we then explained it to my brother and told them that we would like them to improvise an argument that is based on the sexuality of the character 'Jade' that i am playing. They stood either side of the dining table, Lindsey stood up and my brother sat down. We practised the argument twice before actually filming so that they could get into it more easily and we could see how they were going to act and if we thought it was okay. Lindsey started off the argument and then they went from there. The argument was better than me and Rabbi had expected and so we set up the camera to film the scene. We start off this scene with Jade just arriving in the house. We had the camera being handheld by me so that the audience gets to see exactly what i am seeing. I shut the door and this is then Aaron and Lindsey's queue to start arguing, with the camera in hand i walked down the hallway slowly and then film the argument for about 10 seconds. In the argument my brother said that he wanted Jade out of the house because of her sexuality and he wanted nothing to do with her, Jade overhears this and so she gets upset and she runs upstairs. The camera was still handheld so that the audience see's everything that Jade does. She runs upstairs and into her bedroom, she is panting ans crying uncontrollably, she goes straight over to the chest of drawers and she gets out a little box. When the audience see this box they will wonder what it is and why she is getting it. They then find out when Jade gets on the bed and opens the box to reveal three blades that she has taken from pencil sharpeners. The audience can then piece together that she intends to cut herself.

We took other shots for running up the stairs so that the shot will switch from my point of view to then a view from the bottom of the stairs. We filmed the rest of it upstairs which basically showed Jade getting angry and upset even more which then drives her to putting a blade to her wrist. She doesn't want to kill herself though so the cut wasn't deep. She harms herself and then to end this story we have her looking up directly at the camera and she then says "I'm okay."

Rabbi is the director of this short film and so other than the hand held part of the story, she was filming. She filmed the same part from different angles so that we can have an invisible editing effect in our film, when out together it will hopefully look quite effective. She had some shots from quite down low and other up high, and we also had one shot where the camera was resting on my leg so that we could see Jade lowering the blade to her wrist. We tried to use a variety of different shots to get everything we needed and when watching everything we filmed we decided that everything went exactly as we wanted it to and we are really happy and relieved that we have got one story done the way we wanted it too.

The only shot that we need now for that story is a shot that shows Jade walking up to the house and then walking in. We were going to do that on Thursday but we got outside and it was very dark and so there wouldn't have been any point because we wanted to to be a bit lighter. We told Lindsey this and she says we can go round anytime we want to film that little bit.

Acting in the story
I was very nervous to be acting in our film because i thought that i would get it wrong and mess the whole film up. The first part that we filmed was the handheld part and for the first take, i walked down the hallway too fast and my filming of Aaron and Lindsey's argument wasn't as good as it could have been, i didn't get them both in all the time and it was a bit shaky. Then was the part where i run up the stairs after seeing the argument and this part went much better, i had to pant and be panicky. I ran up the stairs quite fast which made me pant anyway, and i was nervous about filming it which naturally makes me shake and so the effect that we wanted went perfectly because i was shaking a lot and that is exactly how the character would have been. I had to run up the stairs quite a few times which made me out of breath for most of the time. The second time filming the argument was much better as we got a really good shot of my point of view looking round the door to then witness the argument. The running upstairs was slightly better as well because i added a cry into the sound as well as panting, which really added to the upset effect that we wanted.

I had to be panting for most of the shots and i really had to act as if i was genuinely upset and angry. It took up a lot of energy and by the end of it my mouth was dry and i was so out of breath from it all. I wasn't expecting to be that worn out from it, but i really did put all my effort in so that we got exactly the shots we needed. When we had finally finished Rabbi went to get me a drink of water, and i couldn't physically move my body, i was lying on the bed and found it hard to get back up. I felt like i was going to faint.

But i think it was all worth it because me and rabbi had such a great time filming the story and we were incredibly proud of what we managed to film and it made up optimistic about the rest of our short film.

Poster Designs

I started to try and design what our film poster will look like, i came up with this:

When looking at this (if it were to be part of the poster) the first thing you notice is the "I'm Okay." This is because those words are written the largest and so they are the words that stand out the most. I decided to keep the "I'm Okay" in the blank area on the page and have the not in amongst the darker background so that it is less visible, just like the true feelings of our characters are less visible to their friends. I then included the tag line underneath which leaves the audience with a question to ask themselves. The shape that the title is in is crooked and looks like broken glass which reflects the slightly broken lives of our characters. 

I also did these designs for the poster. Right at the top next to the original logo, i drew a montage of all three of our main characters all sat looking sad and telling themselves that they are okay. Then i drew a girl looking down and crouched on her bed, after being upset, and in the background the 'I'm okay' is there to represent what she is telling herself. I then tried to draw something for the self harm story, in my head i imagined the word 'okay' being reflected in the blade, but then i scrapped that idea as i decided it was harder than i first thought. Rabbi then told me what idea she has for the poster. she said that she imagine all of the characters faces merged together and then underneath would be the title, tag line and the production company logo and information. so i attempted to draw what i imagined she was trying to tell me. She said she liked what i drew so that could be our starting point for the poster. I then had an idea to have the three main characters covering their faces with an 'im okay' sign, to show that they are hiding what they truly feel, and then underneath their faces are revealed and they are in fact very sad and upset. 

Designing the new logo

Now that you have seen what the new logo looks like, i will go through the designing process that the first logo didn't really have. The first logo was just rushed and done quite quickly so that we could have a logo, but this new one has had a lot more thought gone into it. The first design for the logo looked like this:

The top two designs were the new ideas for the logo and the bottom two were designs similar to the logo that we had already. The first top design was what the new logo was going to be, it has the T Z and V visible in it's design and it is quite simple and fits well together. I liked how it was in a 'rectangular' shape and also looked a bit like an arrow going downwards. But then the 2nd top design was thought of and drawn and i instantly preferred it to the other new design. I like that it is in a circle, because to me that makes it more 'logo like' and so i decided that it would be the new logo. 

After deciding on that i thought i would draw it a few more times on another piece of paper to see if i came up with anything else to add to it or any other ways of drawing it. This is what i did:

When I started to redraw the logo, Rabbi said that she thought the T in the design looked like an umbrella and so i experimented to see if we could do anything with that idea.I drew an umbrella design on the T and then drew the Z in a shape to a lightning bolt underneath the 'umbrella T'. I then drew a more simple version of the 'umbrella style' logo but i didn't really like the way it turned out. I preferred the original design. So then i drew the original design for the new logo out just so i could see it on the page and work out if there was anything that i needed to change on it. I decided that it was fine just how it was, but i had the idea to try and draw it in block letters just to see how it looked, and so i did that at the bottom of the page, but i didn't like that either, it was too big and wasn't simple enough like the original design for it. So i stuck with the normal version of the logo and decided to try and so simple drawings of the logo on certain products. I drew what it would look like on a TV screen just before the film is about to play. I tried writing the T Z V Productions in all capital letters to see how it looked compared to doing both upper case and lower case letters. I think 'T Z V Productions' is how it will appear on all products. I did a colour version just so show where the different letters appear in the logo, as a kind of 'colour letter key' for the T Z V. Rabbi then said that she liked the colour version, but I think having colour as part of the actual logo wouldn't look right; i think the plain black is how the logo should be.