2014 Showreel - Alexander Dowie

Establishing myself as a freelance film maker

Creating a portfolio website

I plan on creating a portfolio website to either replace or work alongside my blog, this website will be used to showcase the work i have created as well as using the website for networking and creating contacts.   

Show reel.

Creating a show reel using existing work to showcase my Videographer and Editing attributes. I will also be featuring work that is currently been created as part of my Negotiated Client project.

Custom Email

Create an alternative Email to use as a practitioner, for example alexdowie@ADesign.com

Target Audience

To help decide who is my target audience for my client project i will be using Mosaic Profiling to help distinguish people, i have created a table below for all the different groups, where do you fit in?

Groups	% of UK Population	Description
Symbols of Success	9.62%	This group contains the top 10% wealthiest citizens in the UK.
Happy Families	10.76%	Families from small ad mid sizes towns.
Suburban Comfort	15.10%	Middle class people living in comfortable homes in mature suburbs.
Ties of Community	16.04%	Lower Middle class people working near industrial areas.
Urban Intelligence	7.19%	Young well educated people living in inner city.
Welfare Borderline	6.43%	Working class people, the poorest people in the UK.
Municipal Dependency	6.71%	Poor working class people who live in council houses and are dependent on benefits.
Blue Collar Enterprise	11.01%	Skilled working class, Enterprising rather than educated.
Twilight Subsistence	3.88%	Working Class pensioners.
Grey Perspectives	7.88%	Middle class pensioners living comfortably
Rural Isolation	5.39%	This group contains people that live in very rural areas with low incomes but a lot of assets.

Client Project Package

Doing some work for two clients this up coming week, i am creating an advertising campaign to help promote a package that two local business are offering.

What the package includes

This exclusive package gives the opportunity for people to become a racehorse owner for the day and watch it race at either Doncaster racecourse or Southwell racecourse.

The experience starts with a Champagne breakfast at the Crown hotel in Bawtry, mid morning the guests will be taken to the stables to see the horse as it gets ‘dressed’ for the days racing. The guests will also get to meet and talk to the trainer of the horse and the jockey who will be riding the horse in the race, the guests will then be able to name the horse for the day.

Once the horse is ready the guests will be taken to the racecourse of their choosing (Either Doncaster or Southwell) where they will be taken to the Owners and Trainers box to oversee the race, should the horse win the guests will then be taken to the winners enclosure to collect the trophy/prize and have their photographs taken by a professional photographer.

After the days racing has been completed the guests will be taken back to the Crown Hotel where they can relax and enjoy a meal and glass of champagne in the award winning restaurant, before heading to their executive suit room to finish the day.

Ideas for Sky Sports script

Next Tuesday i will be filming with a Sky Sports presenter, i am currently working on a script for this.

“Have you ever wanted to own an award-winning racehorse, ever wanted to hear the horse you named win a race, well now’s your chance!”

“With this exclusive package you will get an opportunity of a life time to become a race horse owner for the day

“We’ve just had another winner here at Southwell Racecourse, next time it could be you!”

“After you’ve watched your horse run, and hopefully win, you will be able to head back to the Crown Hotel in Bawtry for a glass of Champagne and a love meal in the award winning Restaurant”  

“Come on lets have a look around, enjoy dinner

“Now lets go and meet Dave Griffiths the head trainer at DCG Racing”

Censorship in the UK

Curious to see what normal every day people think to articles such as this on the Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2379512/Episode-showing-car-crash-victim-suffocated-serial-killer-9pm-watershed-sparks-100-complaints-watchdog.html

Hyperlapse

Over the past 4 months i have been busy creating a 3 minute hyper lapse film.
The hyper lapse technique is similar, yet a much more advanced version of the well known time-lapse style of filming.
Shooting at 24 fps, i was spending around 4-5 hours on a shoot just to get 3-5 seconds of footage, so literally hundreds' of hours of shooting time has gone into this film, take a look!

Alex.

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/882742

http://vimeo.com/49586033

tesco

very interesting.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24803378

ma

http://www.masterscompare.co.uk/courses?page=0%2C0&courses=147&university=&location=&keyword=&submit=Search+Now&search=1

Ofcom

Interesting Ofcom interview

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/subtitling/responses/UniversityofHuddersfield.pdf

m

Refrences

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/may/30/blue-warmest-colour-porn-julie-maroh

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/sep/04/blue-is-the-warmest-colour-actors-director

http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/09/27/latest-telecoms-and-pay-tv-complaints-figures-3/

A few sites that have inspired me.

Here are a few websites that i find very inspiring.

The first website that i would like to talk about is, http://www.texelate.co.uk/.
This website has a very clean feel, its not to cluttered, the colours used in the website such as the header, are only colours used in photographs on the main page of the website, wich both in turn complement each other.
Another thing i like about this website is the fact that the designer has made the header and footer really dark, grey/black, while keeping the main part of the website as a very pale blue and white, i think the big contrast in colours work well together and help the website look really sleek and clean.

The second website i would like to talk about is called http://www.spoongraphics.co.uk/.

The header of this website is relatively similar to the previous website, however this website uses a light brown colour scheme, and in turn uses less colours on this website, i think this works even better and helps the website look clean and clear. 

 The last website that i am going to talk about is http://rawkes.com.

I personally prefer websites that have the navigation bar a little lower than right at the top of the page, with the navigation bar been closer to the content itself, it is less time and effort the user has to put in to navigate to where they want to go.

Film

The target audience I have chosen for my film trailer is 15-25 year olds. I have chosen this age range as statistics show that people ages between 15 and 25 attend the cinema more than any other ages person. Another reason for having 15-25 year olds as my target audience is that I am in this age range and therefore it is easier for me to gather research from people in this age range.

If my film were to have a certificate it would be a 15.

There are many sites that offer free high quality sound effects that I can use for my project, I also came across websites that sold very high quality sound effects, I kept this in mind for any other film making projects I were to do in the future that had a bigger budget.

On our first shoot the sound turnde out to be to loud and slightly distorted, and thus was unuseable, this was due to the microphone been turned up, once we had realized this mistake we decided to replay each scene on set to check the sound and lighting was usable to avoid making this mistake again. After I had finished my film I showed it to many people in my group to try and get some feedback, I got a good response from everybody, and the only negative comment I got was that some people found it difficult to hear what the actors were saying, so I then decided to go back to my edit and chance all of the sound levels, so it was loud enough for the viewer to hear without the sound becoming to distorted.

Another problem we came across was the fact that the microphone wasnt picking up sounds in the distance, for example when the car is driving around, i came up with the idea to record sound from outside the car window to pick up the sound of the engine, which turned out quite well. We can then put some of this sound over other clips to enchance the car noise.

During our shoots we have had many problems with lighting, due to the location of our shoot been on top of a car park, we have no access to a power supply, this means we are very limited when it comes to lighting. to overcome this problem I  came up with the idea of using a cars headlights, and using a reflector to soften it, this turned out to work really well.

To create spot lights or highlight something i found out that the portable LED light box's work really well, these can also be used with the reflectors to soften the light.