Thursday 26th of November

Today in our CRAM class we planned everything were going to be filming, the exact location of every scene, who's going to be who, we wrote a screen play, we printed out the map of the location, wrote the brief story and the treatment, we also did some background research on it, and who is going to be filming what scene.
We are going to film it next Friday at 5 outside the Cambridge Leisure center, I will be borrowing a Camera from school on Thursday and will take it home after school, and as I live right next to the Cambridge Leisure center, it will be safe and I'll take it back home as soon as we have finished filming. As you can see in the image to the left shows the location. Overall this session has been successful, as a group we worked very well together and helped each other out a lot, we all did something to contribute to this. I thought mostly of what we were going to say in the film and wrote most of the scenes, I also decided who is going to be filming what scene. I typed the Brief story, and the Printers in the CRAM room weren't working so I had to go to the Learning centre to print the brief story out for the four of us. I have also been an independent enquirer today, as I did my own background research on alcohol abuse, and I wrote the brief story and went and printed it out.

Next week we are rehearsing for our film, and memorizing our script, and organizing everything which needs to be organized, and I'll be borrowing the camera for the following day. I think Today has been successful and we have achieved a lot.

Thursday 19th of November.

This has been the first CRAM lesson in 2 weeks, as last week Coleridge and Parkside had ICU and the week before was half-term.
Today in our CRAM lesson we were watching a lot of different videos like adverts, warnings and just informative material, from a variety of different time periods. We were watching them to look at how they have changed throughout the years.
The videos from the 1940s-1970s were slightly sexist towards women, and suggested that they were inferior to men and less capable, e.g saying that women were more likely to have a car crash than men. The videos changed a lot through the time, the older videos had a V.O of a posh man, and were in black and white, while the newer videos were in colour, had better quality and sometimes had a V.O of a woman.
Then we were put into groups, ( The same Groups we were in the last CRAM lesson ) and we had to make a name for a group, we called it JKAJ Culture, the JKAJ is the initials of our group members.
After lunch we met Mr.Derek Budd, who is the Youthoria Curriculum Manager he explained a lot to us today and talked about things like pixels, resolution, people's rights about being on camera, and where we would be allowed to film and not allowed to film. We have to make a short film in our groups approximately 1-2 Min's long and no larger than 20Mb. We are making a video about Alcohol, Sexuality, and Relationships. Mr.Budd had given us a sheet where we had choices about what to make our videos on, we thought instead of making it on only one subject we could use multiple subjects to make it more interesting. The video is due on the 31st of January, so that means we have a very long time to produce a successful video. We didn't have one of the people in our group today but we managed without them, and organized things and made decisions for them, so next time we can all work as a group together and continue with our planning. We have already done most of our planning and know roughly what we are going to do, we just need to plan the details and the exact location of where we are going, then after we make our plans we'll go out and film it. Unfortunately this time I have no images to upload to this post, as our lesson today didn't involve any filming.

Thursday Novemeber 5th.

We did a lot today in our cram class, in the first lesson of the day two of the cram students were giving us a demonstration of what we were going to film next, just to give us an idea of what we were meant to do, it was Petra acting as a police officer asking Micheal why he did what he had done, and Micheal "Cocky Badboy" denying it, then after break we had to make a short film with only a few lines in it, it was quite difficult doing this as we were filming on the stairs, but we managed to get some very good shots, it was also quite difficult to keep a straight face most of the time. After we finished this we had to go back and edit it, cut out all the bits we didn't need, and put different clips together, we had a problem with the sound because it was out of sync so we had to rearrange it all.

After lunch we had to film again, it was of a chase where Jayne snatched Kara's Ipod and ran off with it, so they chased each other through the quad until Jayne gave up and just put the Ipod on the bench and ran off. We had so many shots for this, as it was longer than the previous clip, and we used the camera in many different angles too, we used music for this video as no one was talking in it and the sound wasn't very good. We were fine with the editing, until we had to put the music in, half of the track didn't have any sound in so neither did the video, so we just had to use a different part of the track so it was alright. I think we learned a lot today, and filmed some very good clips.

Thursday October 22nd, First Performance Blog.

This is my first Performance Blog which I made today, we started to learn about performance in CRAM and it will be our first assessed unit.

Today we learned the difference of acting on stage, and acting on film, we learned about tricks on camera, like filming at different angles, close-ups, medium shots, long shots, and we also learned about how when acting on film you don't have to act with all of your body like on stage, it could be a close-up of your hands and only act with your hands.

When on Stage you have to be more dramatic than on film, film is more realistic and more like real life, Like the picture above shows that when on stage you have to use bigger gestures and be much more dramatic than on film, and also when your on stage you only have one chance to get it right so its much more tense and dramatic, when your on stage you would have to shout if you wanted to whisper so the audience could hear you but on film you would only have to whisper loud enough for the sound to reach the microphone, when on film you could have as many takes as you need to get it right.

We learned a bit about hand filming today and how to show emotion with our hands and to only act with them, so on film you can do a close-up of someones hand and they won't need to act with their entire body.
We also learned more about editing, how much better a clip can be with just a bit of editing, we edited a clip that some Parkside students made, and we made the clip a lot better just with some editing and cutting out bits and making it into like a short movie.

http://www.ehow.com/video_5226019_acting-film-tips.html
This Video gives tips about what to do when being filmed and how it is different than being on stage, i think the video is quite useful and gives good advice to people who are actors, it tells you about the sound too and how it is different than on stage and how you have to be "tight" while on camera.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/09/matthew-macfadyen-acting-mediums
This article is about what Matthew Macfayden thinks of filming and being on stage, he thinks they're not actually that different, and that you don't have to act that differently like he says "But if I walk across a stage, I'm not going to walk in a different way to the way I walk on screen." He thinks that sometimes people get too tense on camera and the clips can be edited so much that they turn out completely different than you would expect them to be.
This is a picture of Matthew Macfadyen acting in a film
with Kiera Knightley.














http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1945to1951/filmpage_cas.htm
This video is from the 1945-1951 time period, it is about spreading germs and becoming ill, the video is in black and white and humour is added to make it more interesting and funny to watch.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1951to1964/filmpage_streaked.htm
This video is from the 1951-1964 time period its about a lightning jet and it once beat the world-air speed record, the video shows the jet flying at top speed, it was used in the Royal Air Force.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1964to1979/filmpage_jobs.htm
This video is from the 1964-1979 time period, its about teenage girls going to work for the first time, and them growing up basically, its an animated video.


http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1979to2006/filmpage_dummy.htm
This video is from the 1979-2006 time period, its about drug misuse and how heroin ruins people's lives.


The videos change from the time periods, first the video was black and white, then they became colour and had better effects and sound, and the videos became a lot better as the time passed by, the videos are more efficient now and have better effects and are filmed better and of course better quality, and also better sound.