Mobile Phone Task

We have been given the task to conduct an interview about mobile phones and then to edit the interview into a short film.

These are the questions we are going to ask:

1. Tell me what life was like before you had a mobile phone
2. When did you get your first mobile phone and why did you get it?
3. Tell me about all the mobile phones you have had.
4. Tell me about your current mobile phone
5. Why did you choose this phone?
6. Tell me about the ringtone you have on your phone and why you chose it.
7. What do you use your mobile phone for?
8. How much does your mobile phone cost you each month?
9. How often do you send text messages?
10. What text "language" do you use and how did you learn it?
11. What's the best thing about having a mobile phone?
12. What's the worst thing about having a mobile phone?
13. How important is your mobile phone to you?
14. How would you cope without your mobile phone?

Over the past week, we have been filming and editing the footage for a short film about mobile phones.

Earlier in the week, my group and I filmed the footage for the documentary. I was the interviewer in the group, so I had to ask the questions to the interviewee. We also filmed some clips of people using mobile phones and took still photos to be used as cutaways in between questions to make the film flow better.

On Tuesday we began editing the footage using Adobe Premiere Pro. We only had basic knowledge of the software so we needed our teacher's help quite often for the first lesson.

This screenshot shows us working on the film after we had uploaded the footage from the camera and cut the interviewer's questions out, leaving us with about ten small clips of just the interviewee's answers. We had also uploaded the cutaway clips and the still image cutaways from the camera and we were deciding on where to put them. We were in the process of picking out video transitions so that the clips wouldn't abruptly cut into another one.This screenshot shows us creating the end credits for our film. We used the title creator to do this and just made a simple text title with our names in a list. We weren't really sure how to use the title creator so we just made do with basic text. This screenshot shows us adding a music track to our film. We had to cut the track so we just had the beginning and the end for the start and finish of our film. We wanted to fade the audio of the interviewee speaking out and then bring the music in, but we were not sure how to do this so we just fiddled about with some of the audio effects and transitions until we sort of had the effect we were after but not quite what we wanted.

Below is my group's finished film, uploaded onto YouTube:

Codes and Conventions - Filming and Editing Interviews

Today we watched parts of documentaries and took note of the codes and conventions in them. We watched "In The Teeth Of Jaws - Part 1" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42Zj8R0kumw) and "The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special In 3D On Ice Part 1" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orLGI7c5oHc)

These are the codes and conventions I noted down:

• A bar at the bottom which says who the person speaking is and what their role is.
• If the interviewee is positioned on the left, the interviewer will be positioned on the right and vice versa.
• The questions asked by the interviewer are edited out.
• The interviewee's eyeline is in the upper half of the shot.
• The interviewee looks at the interviewer and not at the camera.
• Cutaways to footage of things to do with the topic to break up the interview and show what is being spoken about. They also help to avoid abrupt jump cuts.
• There is no light source behind the interviewer.