Oh My Guru with directors commentary

Oh My Guru.

Our completed film. I think our film worked out to be quite good and I am pleased with the completed version.
I enjoyed working on the film, however it was a lot of hard work and patience was needed. I have learnt, by making this film that continuity is very important with a film and a minor thing can make all the difference. I think we have improved a lot from the last time, when we were doing our preliminary task

I think the animatics task helped us see what we needed to do, but also how we changed things and how that made our opening better.

directors commentary

A director's commentary is a chance for the production team to give and insight to the viewers on how they made their film. With our director's commentary we wanted to do just that. When we started to write our director's commentary we first watched the film so we could see what we wanted to talk about. We drew up a spider diagram about all the aspects we would talk about. We included things like music, location, dilemmas and different types of filming shots. We tried to include all this in our script. We wrote out a script to read off when we were recording our director's commentary. We recorded it on an Edirol and paused our films at parts that we wanted to explain in great detail. We got rid of all sound so we could hear our voices.

Editing our film.

When we uploaded all our footage to the laptop, we used Pinnacle studios to edit it. This was a good program to use as it had all the editing software that we needed. We had to spend a lot of time cutting and editing scenes, trying to make them fit together, working out which part went where and so on and so forth.

We started putting all the walking scenes together. We decided to use a lot of different camera angles at this point so keep the audience interested. When we were editing these parts we found some parts of the walking was not filmed very well so we had to re film these. We had to make sure our main character Rani was wearing the same clothes for the scene, as we didn’t want any continuity errors.

We decided to add a voiceover to our opening so the audience can understand how Rani is thinking and to get to know her better. We first tried to record the voiceovers on an Edirol but we decided that this was too quiet so we re recorded it on our camcorder. We then put the movie clips into the sound bar. We had to make sure the voiceovers fitted into the right time.

We had flashbacks in our film and we wanted to emphasize these so the audience wouldn’t get confused, so we made Rani wear different outfits for each one and had them all in different settings. Originally we wanted a glow effect to make it more obvious but unfortunately the software we used didn’t have it.

We had a bit of trouble at our splash scene as we had a lot of footage of Rani waiting for a car to come so we could splash her. We decided to do this scene twice as when we splashed her we could see that Frank was in the shot with the bowl of water to throw over her. When we were editing we found we liked the first part of the splash in one take and the second part where she was splashed in a different take. We had to cut and edit tiny parts of the scene to fit the two together so they would play as smoothly as possible. We decided in the end to add a small transition to mask the differences between the scenes.

We added titles of all the people who helped make the film. We had them on every corner at random places on different shots. We decided to keep the font simple yet effective so we opted for a white colour and a black shadow in case people didn’t see it. We also decided to use white as our font colour because in our research we found in most romantic comedies their font colour is usually white. We used this with our main titles Oh My Guru, we had them white with a black shadow as our background image was quite loud. We decided that every word Rani said we would make the word appear up, after and then it would go into the background. Our background, we think ties in with Indian culture we were going for.

How we have created music and used it effectively in our film.

In our film Oh My Guru we have added various music to create a mis-en-scene to add more to the scene. When we first started editing our movie we found that it was missing something, as there were no background noises it was just silent. So we decided to do a little research into free music websites to try and find music that would fit our movie. We didn’t manage to find any that really went with the theme of our movie so I got my friend who knows how to play the guitar to record one for us. We asked her to look at what editing of the movie we had done and just play something that came to mind when she watched this. She did this very effectively.  
Also in our research we looked up some movies to see what type of music they had at the start of the movie. Our inspiration film 'Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging' had chirpy and happy music. We looked up a few others and 'The Holiday' had the type of music we were looking for. We recorded our friend playing the guitar on the ediroll. However when we were editing we found it was a bit quiet so we had to turn the volume up on Pinnacle studios. We also had voiceovers so the audience would get a feel of our character. Again we got this idea from our inspired films and we found in some romantic comedies there are quite a few voiceovers included.

Paramount Pictures

We have chosen Paramount Pictures for our production company. I have researched what films paramount pictures have done and found two of our inspired films: ‘Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging’ and ‘Alfie’ were produced by this company. Other 'romantic comedy' films by Paramount Pictures include the iconic ‘Breakfast and tiffany’s’,’ failure to launch’ with Sarah Jessica parker, ‘how to lose a guy in 10 days’ and much more.

We have also decided to co produce our film with film four an independent film company. East is East and ‘Slumdog Millionaire ‘was produced by film4 and this film ties in with our Asian twist theme. i looked at films done by paramount pictures and films four, and there arent many but 'lucky break' was one i found that they were both prodced by.

continuity

Whilst editing our two minute opening today I noticed we have a small continuity problem. It is only minor but that can make all the difference. I can now emphasize with big shot film directors who spent a lot of money to set up cameras, pay actors, set up sets etc, to see when they are editing that one part of the film does not match up or is a blip. For example I remember a few months ago I watched a trailer for the film 'The Other Guys' and I saw on there that in a scene there were two men with medals on and in a different shot of the same scene they didn’t have them on, and then the medals appeared again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6WOoUG1eNo

I also did some researched and saw there are quite a few videos, websites and TV shows that show all the continuity in films and television. There is even a TV show on BBC three called 'Great Movie Mistakes' that shows all the blunders and gaffes. It is quite unfair for people to do this. From editing our movie I have realized no one is perfect, that not every movie can be wonderful and they should not be criticized for not trying the best they can.