Film in media, my favourite

So I’m a media student and that means a lot. It means I’m learning about journalism, film production, audio production, photography, theory, script writing and web design. They’re all the topics that I’ve covered in a year, minus a couple boring ones but I won’t go into them. By far my favourite of these is film production and well lets talk about it.

Film production

I love attempting to be creative, if you’ve read my first post you’ll know what I mean but if you haven’t well, I suggest reading it. But I love it. Film is a huge huge interest of mine and it’s my favourite unit. It includes, storyboarding, scripting, proposals, treatments, presentations and ideas. Yes, ideas the very foundations of the industry. Dreams are ideas. Stories are ideas. Everything started with an idea and well let’s leave that because I’m not a philosopher. But ideas are key to this industry, you’re favourite film was someone’s idea in the beginning. Before you pitch you’re idea to a production company you have to develop it and give them a reason to make it, give them the details and that’s where all the pre-production comes in. They want to see your proposals and your budgets and your storyboards they want to read your scripts and be able to visualise it. They are you’re first audience and if they don’t like it then it’s back to the drawing board for you. But if they do then it’s now the exciting bit, you get to make your film, all your hard work will be made a reality.

So now comes other stuff like shooting scripts and choosing who you think will be good enough to portray your characters, the characters you developed and created and visualised in your head. You will have probably already thought about it but you always need backups, but don’t tell them they’re backups cause I’m guessing you won’t want to hurt a Hollywood stars ego. But once you have then filming starts. You will have your director who will be an ace at film making and will be able to create atmosphere and think of things you didn’t, they will mess with the mise-en-scene and create suspense or tension or joy or melancholy. They are the true creatives. Again that’s another reference to my first post. But they are and they’re important, then there is the director of photography and/or the cinematographer who will deal with all the technical camera angles and different shots to create emotion, and everything that will make the film stand out. Then there’s the boring bit of acting which I’m not going to talk about it cause I don’t really like it to be honest as I don’t believe it’s one of the creative parts of the production process.

Now onto the post-production process which is by far the most creative and most amazing part of the whole process, it includes, editing and VFX which is just incredible, I love VFX and CGI. I don’t have a lot of experience with VFX but I loved trying out new things and going the extra mile and changing the colour of a wall because we had to use the same corridor for two different scenes so to make them look different I changed the colour using the HSL Secondary panel in the colour section of Adobe Premiere Pro. But to be fair, the whole editing part of it is the best, you will start with an assembly edit which is where you put all the clips you are going to use in the order you want them to appear, I say you but your editor will, and you should get used to your editor changing it a lot because that’s what they do and I love it. The editor is so so important they are the final line of creativity in your film and they make some of the biggest decisions in the process, if they feel it will make the film better they might cut a bit out or change the order of something or add some CGI or and effect you didn’t plan, they are true creatives. So the editor or editors will do an assembly edit and then start with the effects and cuts and other fancy stuff. There are dub cuts and grade cuts and so many other cool stuff, they will add lower thirds in and superimpose text, or do al the cool green screen editing. They will make the final product look clean and amazing. They will send the sound of to someone to dub it. Then they will put the whole thing together and render it and there you go, your film, your idea is finished, now you can go brag about it.

If this gets enough comments then I will do an article about my other college units and what I love about this wonderful industry.