Speeches - Earl Spencer

Blog

The Brief

Project Brief BBC channels are increasingly cross promoting their programme content and for this assignment you will be producing a TV trailer for a series of radio programmes on Radio 4 called ‘Speeches’, about a selection of great speeches of the 20th Century. 

Radio 4 will be running this series of programmes, each focusing on an individual speech from the following list:-

·Franklin D Roosevelt: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

·Winston Churchill: We shall fight them on the beaches

·Harold Macmillan: The wind of change

·Nelson Mandela: An ideal for which I’m prepared to die

·Jawahharal Nahru: A tryst with destiny

·John F Kennedy: Ask not what your country can do for you

·Martin Luther King: I have a dream

·Margaret Thatcher: The lady’s not for turning

·Earl Spencer: The most hunted person of the modern age

The TV trailers will act as ‘teasers’ about the speeches by creating short films which use a combination of an excerpt of the speech accompanied by atmospheric, original footage and text graphics.  These films need to be 1 minute long (with a 5 second leeway in each direction).  You are not searching for original footage of the speech being delivered, and nor are you trying to film literal interpretations of what is being said, but rather you will devise, shoot edit and post produce a sequence of shots which add visual accompaniment to the words being spoken. This film will also feature text elements which are used to highlight words being spoken in the speech.  You can also use music and/or sound effects in your film.  


For this project I will be using a variety of video and sound editing software to achieve my desired effect including: Final Cut Pro , Adobe After Effects CS5 and Adobe SoundBooth CS5.

Research

I have undertaken a lot of research on the variety of famous speeches I could make the trailer on. I have decided to do my speech on Martin Luther King’s – I have a dream speech. The speech was a memorable speech when I was growing up in school as I did a project on it and I feel that I can really shoot some good clips and produce a really good film to fit the speech. As the speech is about racism , hate and civil rights I fell the film can have some very good clips to symbolize this without being literal.

Filming

Ive filmed a few shoots but the shoots are very literal, people in chains and being mistreated. Im struggling with not shoot my clips and making them too literal and shooting my shoots and them being too random.

Mind Changing

After a week of filming a load of clips I’ve changed my mind and decided to go with Earl Spencer, as his speech was a speech I listened to when I was growing up. It was about an event and person I have the best memory of, therefore I feel I can film and create a video to this speech best.  My first ideas for the film is to create a trailer that is like Diana in many ways very natural, peaceful and British.

A Small Problem

im having a small problem with the section of speech im going to use, as the speech is running for a minute the time runs out in the middle of a sentence.

Key Words from Speeches

I took some time out and went through the section of the speech in using and picked  out some key words that set the theme of the speech. I used a site, that if you put a selection of words on the site your can rearrange them, change their colour, size and font. The site is I used an online site called wordle (http://www.wordle.net/)

Speech – Section

Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity, a standard-bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated always that you were taken from us so young, and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all. Only now you are gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without, and we want you to know that life without you is very, very difficult.

My Idea

As Diana was a very nice kind hearted and loving person my video is going to represent that.

My idea is to shot loads of clips of nature and natural scenes, such as animals, rain, sunshine, flowers etc.

I want the film to feel soft and run smoothly adding a lot of fading in and out of scenes and not too much jumping between scenes

Production

Ive now started on the project and its started well. However I need some more clips as the clips I have taken will not last the length of time for the film, and some clips will be shown for far too long.

Pro 2

After carrying on with some work ive had to re read the brief as Ive lost site on what the brief is about and I havent re read the brief since the assignment was set. I need to make sure im keeping in lines with the brief, as even though the brief is very open I can find my self not meeting the criteria.

Another problem i had with the assignment which i had to overcome was I have a newer version of final cut pro at home to class. Therefore the file wouldnt ope at home so much of work was done in class . 

Evaluation – Crit

During Crit I was told my work theme fitted my speech. In terms of I was going down the route of having shots that represented Princess Diana's beauty, kindness and spirit.  A big criticism of my work was a few of the shots I had filmed, 1 in particular a scene with a cat. I was told my that scene was out of sorts and didn't need to be in there. So I removed it and replaced it with a different clip. During Crit I was also told to add more text into my advert over the few days of Crit I added some more text to my movie. As the brief required you to have text in the film.

During making the film I struggled with some techniques of  final cut pro, however I managed to over come these after my teacher showed me what to do during the  workshops or after asking for individual help. I very much enjoyed the project, I liked the freedom the brief gave me. I could go down any avenue and express myself with my work. I felt the filming was the easiest part of the project and most enjoyable again because of the freedom. Doing the project again I would maybe pick a different speech such as the John F Kennedy “Ask not you country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. I also like this speech and looking back on it I would have a lot of filming ideas for it, as it is a lot different to Earl Spencer speech.

I would say managing my time better in the next piece of work is essential, but overall I think my work went well and I very much enjoyed the brief. 

Propaganda Poster

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000003706 StartFragment:0000000454 EndFragment:0000003690

Propaganda Poster Blog

Much research went into propaganda posters, looking at posters from the world war 1 and 2. (Can be seen in sketchbook). Most posters from the event of history and time period have many dark colours, such as dark blues, reds and browns. The background on most of the posters very much have dark creams or oranges. This makes the poster look dated ad give the poster a 20^th century look to it. Much of my research came from the internet and online books looking at world war books and posters for information and ideas.

Slogans such as “i want you” and “be ready! Join now” can be used and translated into the poster for social networking. As these slogans are asking for people to join the army or navy, but social networking sites such as twitter and facebook also want people to join up and start using the site. “ Be ready! Join now” could be changed to “Join now! And log in”. For my poster I choose the slogan “im counting on you, dont discuss friend requests, messages and notifications”. These are features of Facebook and therefore I applied it to my poster design. I have thought carefully about using words for the features or draw the icons on my poster. I decided to just draw the icons, as they are very widely well known to 10 – 35 year olds Facebooks target market. And there is then no need to add text to these icons.

The colours I picked for the poster are the same colours as the original however I decided to change their tone and make them bolder so they stand out more and look modern the same era as Facebook. If I picked the original colours and the added the facebook icons, the icons would look out of place as they are from two different time periods.

I did think about changing the layout of the poster however with most of the posters their images being centralised I decided to keep this image centralised too and have the text above and below the image of the poster.

I drew a few designs however decided on my final design very easily as I liked the idea very much. Problems I had to over come during creating the poster was finding a poster the right size for my to copy that wasn’t pixolated. I found a large picture in the internet and managed to copy the picture without any problems. Some of the illustrator techniques I found hard to come to terms with or know how to do, so I had to search for videos online that demonstrate skills for illustrator. Being original was also a task as many poster have been created for the world war 1 and 2, I wanted to create a poster the look very different from the original with different colours and text type however I did try this and research it and the poster wouldn’t have looked as good as the original.

Panoramic Photography

Produce two panoramas for web distribution using a camera with tripod and photoshop for editing and stitching together. The two photographs should be taken myself and have a theme.

Panoramic photography is  the area of photography dedicated to taking pictures with a wide field of view, you can purchase fixed panoramic lens to take these shots, the lens is long and rectangular. Skilled photographers can take a 360-degree panoramic picture. (VR Photography), these are then edited on photoshop and stitched together to then make one picture.

My theme for the Panoramic photographs is open space. This is why I chose to shoot The Level in Brighton and The church area near the north lanes Brighton. Both locations have a nice open space with alot going on around the area. The level had a small fair taking place whilst i shot my pictures, this made it difficult to edit in photoshop.  I enjoyed shooting the level and editing it however i had a few problems one of the problems i had with the level is the tripod I used. When spinning the camera around my tripod moved slightly each time, therefore when I open the pictures up in layers on photoshop the picture wasn’t straight and i had to crop the picture. I learnt from my mistake and this didn’t happen so much with the church garden. Another problem i encountered was the changes in light from the sun. My pictures were very contrasting in lightness and darkness, which made it very difficult to match the entire picture together in contrast. With also limited photoshop experience these techniques were increasingly difficult. I did enjoy the project however and i learnt many new techniques of which I can now apply to other projects and assignments I get set.