New Music

Here is the new music we decided to use because we thought it suited our film more:

 

 

New Font

New Font

One of the main changes we had to make was the handwriting and font of the baubles. The original writing was quite messy and did not look very festive, so we re-did the handwriting so that it matched what we were hoping for. These were the type of fonts we were hoping to create:

For our first film, the name labels were written on pieces of paper which was then stuck onto the baubles. This time we decided to write on the actual baubles instead, which looked a lot better, although they were harder to write on so we could not be as creative, like with the cards.

This was the handwriting we used for the card name labels:

Re-Filming

We found a lot of things we could improve on for our first draft of Saving Santa. We decided to re-film our opening sequence to make it better. We went back to our filming location after school and made our opening sequence better. We used a wider variety of names for the title sequence and added in a fight scene to make it appeal to our target audience more. We used a bigger tree so that it looked much more like a realistic Christmas scene and made sure that when we filmed it, it was less shaky. The labels looked a looked a lot better when we re-filmed it and the lighting was more cosy for the film, with less shadows.

Instead of just dragging Santa out, we thought the Robber could carry him over his shoulder as it would make the scene more exciting. The Elf and tree were shown in a different place and the layout of the background meant the camera angle was a lot better.

 

 

First Draft

This is our first draft of our opening sequence (it starts at the time13:42):

 

 

New Titles

We used titles with a wider variety of names for our final film. In our draft we repeated the names of everyone in our group which is not realistic because the names would not be repeated in a real film.

Main actors- Sam James, Tom Lee, Katie Jones, Oli Wong, Olivia Frain, Lucy Fitch, Delilah Tulips, Lee Hart
Costume Designer- Lucy Harding
Production Designer- Issy Payne
Casting by- Dan Amato
Written by- Tom Richardson
Special effects- Bonnie Johns
Music by- Phil Carp
Produced by- Bessie Hawkins
Director of photography- Chay Pollinger

Draft Evaluation

We had a lot of good feedback for our first draft of our opening sequence. Most people liked the way it was laid out and thought we were very creative with how we incorporated the titles into everyday objects or things you would see at Christmas time. We got quite high scores from many people because of the way we filmed everything as one clip. Although we also got useful feedback on the improvements we could make for when we re-film our titles.

The main feedback on improvements we could make, were to make sure there were less shadows and use a bigger tree because ours was too small. Many people also thought that our labels did not look very professional, especially the ones we used for the baubles on the tree.

 

Here is an example of the feedback sheet people had to fill in and give back to us:

 

Here is a photo of our group evaluating everyone's work:

 

Changes made along the way

Final changes

After we had shot our film the first time around, we realised a few things that could be improved. Because most of our film is one continuous shot this meant that we had to re-film the whole sequence. We had repeated our own names quite a few times in the opening titles so we thought we would vary the names and include each name just once. We made the name tags look more professional, for example, by writing on the baubles and not sticking the name tags on with paper. We also used fancier writing that was more creative and readable. 

There were quite a few shadows in our initial opening sequence and the lighting was not very homely. We were able to adapt this and improve it.

I have learnt a lot from these changes about how much of a difference the finer details make to the film. The final film really shows up the tiny imperfections of the first one and looks a lot better.