The Oscars 2017

The 89th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honoured the best films of 2016, and took place on February 26 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Holywood, Los Angeles, California, at 5:30 pm, PST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 24 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United Kingdom by Sky Cinema Oscars and NOW TV, was produced by Michael De Luca and Jenifer Tod and directed by Glenn Weiss. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel hosted the ceremony for the first time.

  

Table of results

Moonlight won three awards, including Best Picture, and La La Land won the most awards of the ceremony with six after receiving a record-typing 14 nominations. In a unprecedented event for the history of the Oscars, La La Land was incorrectly announced as the Best Picture, before Moonlight was clarified to be the winner.

Moonlight Mix Up at the Oscars

Moonlight became the first film with an all-black cast and the first LGBT film to win Best Picture. Hacksaw Ridge and Manchester by the Sea won two awards each. Winners with one award include Arrival, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Fences, The Jungle Book, O.J,: Made in America, Piper, The Salesman, Sing, Suicide Squad, The White Helmets, and Zootopia. 

I was very pleased overall to see that Moonlight had won Best Picture and Zootopia winning Best Animated Feature at this years Academy Awards since they were both overall my two favourite films from 2016. Hacksaw Ridge was also another feature which I really enjoyed watching which won Sound Mixing. Despite there not being an Action/Adventure films that won an Oscar for this years Academy Awards, and that this genre is what our short film fits with, I was still really pleased to see that these films had won the Oscars they deserved in their nominated categories.

Test Shots

Prior to filming the car escape scene with Oliver, Alex and I thought it was necessary to capture some practice footage of the Alex's car driving along the road as this will hopefully replicate what we intend to do on the final shooting day on 19th March. We went up to East Hill to record in the locations which we thought would be best to film some practice footage to help build ideas for how we might film this scene on the day. Below are a couple of clips that showcase the shots we made using the GoPro action camera and DSLR.

From these clips, it was obvious the DSLR shots were too shaky in comparison to the footage captured on the GoPro and would not be the camera we would use to film with when we create the car escape scene on the 19th March. We would, however, need to adjust the settings on the GoPro to remove the wide lens effect and change it to either a linear or even a narrow shot.

Short Film | Draft 2 & Feedback

During a lunch hour, the Media Studies students all gathered together to showcase the current state of our short films whilst we continue to edit the rest of our existing footage in post-production. It has also been a while since we have received constructive feedback from our audiences about our work, so it's important to therefore show to them the progress we have made since the last screening of our production.

As of right now, our short film still needs a lot of working on since we still need to film the car escape scene coming up in early March. So far we have managed to film the city scene and parts of the interrogation and escape scene, however on our last filming day we hope to complete all of the missing shots we needed and the car escape too before we can finally say we have completed this short film. Before we presented our current draft to the rest of our secondary audience, the audience members also showed off the current stages they were at with their short films/music videos.

The audiences overall were very pleased with the progress of our short film and are now really excited to see the final outcome of this piece. As always, they gave Alex and I some encouraging pointers on how we could improve the footage which we have before the final version we present to the rest of our audience. The table below shows the summary of comments we received from our audience members.

With the next filming date slowly approaching, we will continue to work on the suggested improvements as soon as possible before we finish the short film before the hand in date in May. 

Photography Shoot

Alongside the short film which Alex and I are editing for, we are also planning out our time efficiently to produce the two ancillary tasks we are required to do for our coursework productions. When we both come to make the poster for our short film, we would both like to use really high quality photos of our main actors in the posters to help attract the audiences attention more to hopefully watch our short film. Most Action/Adventure posters for films like James Bond, Batman, Star Wars, Harry Potter etc. use really high quality photographs of their actors or main subject matter anyway and we wish to replicate this convention for our film poster. I have already researched previously some styles and layouts which I quite like from existing posters.

On the 17th February, Alex and I invited Luke and Morgan to come to our Photography Photo Shoot at school with their costumes on so we could take photographs of them for our poster. We set up a green screen and photography lights for the photo shoot inside the photography dark room. 

During the photo shoot, we both took it in turns to take our own photographs of Luke and Morgan standing in different poses based on some popular action poses we both found on several action/adventure posters which we had researched and analysed. We wanted to also photograph Alex in his costume too simply for experiments.

We also photographed a variety of camera shots of our actors too including low angle, high angle and even close up shots of the actors faces. The variety of camera shot would then increase our ideas in post-production to help generate poster that follows the typical conventions of an action/adventure film poster. The slideshow below is a compilation of photographs of the shots we took during the photo shoot.

Some photographs were more successful than others, however these will all be help begin building our ideas further for designing our film posters when we come to edit the photographs in Photoshop (which will be our primary photo editing software we will use). So far, the photograph of Morgan staring at the camera with the gun placed alongside half of his face is my favourite camera shot of the whole sample since the facial expressions and details in his eyes are really emotional and captivating to the eye.

I look forward to begin experimenting with the photos we have now taken from our photo shoot.

Media Magazine and Film Poster Analysis

Since the research I made for examples of media magazines and film posters, I decided to start analysing an example of media magazine and film poster to see how these two ancillaries fit with the genre of their films.

The first example below is a double page spread of a magazine article I am hoping to take inspiration from for my media magazine. The layout overall of this double page spread is very good and is giving plenty of information to the reader about a personal review of the film by a trusted author, There are also small subtitles under each of the pictures to describe the pictures or even quote what the scenes from these films are hinting to the audience. My personal complaint about this magazine spread however is the lack of pictures and bright colours which make the spread more appealing at first glimpse to the reader.


The next example is a film poster which I also like very much. Despite this poster not being in the minimalist style that I would like my poster to be, I still am a big fan of the use of CGI graphics to mix into this poster which immediately attracts the audience for the themes of this film and what genre it belongs to. I really like the extra details of the film blurb at the bottom which credits the actors involved with the production and the credits for the directors and producers too.
 
Having analysed examples of ancillaries which I like and have ideas to take inspiration from, I now need to begin creating my two ancillaries starting with the poster.

Short Film | Day 4

On the 10th February, we were up at East Hill car park with the rest of the cast members re-shooting the shots we had missing from the previous film day back in January. Alex and I had to make sure that the actors were dressed as close as possible to how they were dressed back in January as this could create confusion for our audiences and also make the quality of the scenes fairly inconstant. By the time I had arrived home to edit today's footage in post production, I had noticed that there were occasionally some shots which drastically didn't match with the January footage and I therefore have to make to edit the scenes to make it less obvious to our audiences. A few mistakes I found included actors jackets being zipped up or open, which was not the same in comparison to January footage as well as some camera angles being slightly different to each other and therefore do not match.

A comparison video below shows some of these differences I had noticed.

The final film day will be the car escape scene and will require Luke for the scene where he turns his head around as the car quickly approaches him. We will be using Oliver Hounsell's VW Golf for the escape scene.

Preparation For Day 4

Since the last film day back in January, Alex and I are preparing ourselves for the re shoot day for the interrogation scene as there were several shots which we had forgotten to shoot or shots which we would like to re-shoot since we both believe that we could drastically improve these potential areas. Examples of shots we need to reshoot include the shot reverse shots of Morgan and Alex staring at each other when they are both not talking, shots of Morgan and Luke staring at each other and the shots of Alex approaching Morgan in a more sinister fashion. These shots are ones which we have followed from our storyboard however we will also attempt to experiment with other shots if we so wished to.

We have informed the cast as we have always been doing about the costumes and times which we will be meeting them and hopefully we should finish the day quicker than the last re-shoot day. As we will be filming on a school day, our actors have to have permission from their tutors and teachers to be able to skip their classes in order to commit to the re-shoot day. I will be bringing the filming equipment and additional costumes and Alex will bring the props necessary for the day.

In terms of the weather, it is expected to be pretty similar to the weather which we had in January, so this will hopefully not affect the footage which we have so far.

Inspiration for Ancillary Tasks

This Prezi I have created shows the first hand research I have conducted on my digipacks which is required in order for me to complete my ancillary tasks as part of my coursework productions. I have briefly shown in the Prezi's some examples of film posters and magazine articles which really appeal to me and that I hope to take inspiration from when I come to make my ancillary tasks.