Evaluation Question: 6

Evaluation question 3:

When filming, we learnt a lot about the hardware and how it was used and when used differently, what effects that made. The tripod on which we positioned the camera was familiar after having done our pre limb task, but we learnt that in order to do a smooth pan we had to have it at the right firmness otherwise it wouldn’t                             turn quickly enough, or it would be shaky. The camera itself was relatively straightforward to use. We had to make sure that we didn’t rewind the tape then film over the footage that we had already shot, and we had to make sure that the microphone was on; otherwise no sound would be recorded. This, as easy as it may sound, was surprisingly difficult to remember to do whilst concentrating on 

everything else and it was necessary to go back and retake some shots for lack of sound but we ended up with a good set of shots with clear sound. We learnt a lot also about lighting and the difference it makes to the look and feel of a shot. In our film opening, we have used lighting very effectively to create large shadows and also bring out the bright red colour of the wall. In the fight scenes, we used artificial film lighting only, to create the stark effect, but later on, when she returns home, we also used the lighting in the house to create a warmer feel.

 

As my partner and I are both used to using PC computers, at first it was another challenge to use the Mac computers as efficiently, as everything that we were used to is in a different place, but we found that after a short while we were using them with ease.

The editing programme that we used was called ‘Final Cut Express.’ This was something that we had never used before. It was where we chopped and put together all our film footage, then edited it by cutting and tweaking the endings and beginnings of shots. Once everything was in place, we were able to concentrate on the smaller details of visual, like the fade ins and outs of shots and the exact length of the shots (in order to abide by the two minute rule). We then were able to concentrate on the music, for which we imported a track and laid over the sound on the video by adding a new audio track and importing onto there. We used the natural sound from the microphone as well as the music, but turned up the music in the quieter scenes. We were able to dim the sound up and down for smoothness as well as select which track we wanted to play when.

When selecting a sound track for our film opening, we were not allowed to use music that had been copyrighted, so we had to go online and visit a website called ‘freeplaymusic.com’ for non copyrighted music. The download process involved listening to a small extract then downloading the whole track. We would then import it into final cut express to add as a new layer for the sound. We chose 2 tracks to suit different stages in our film and we imported these to final cut.

For our titles, we downloaded a font from a website called ‘dafont.com’ as it was a font that suited our film well. We downloaded it and then we were able to create the titles via final cut, as the font appeared in the list with all the original fonts.

In order to make our ident, we used Adobe Flash and used a pen effect to draw a logo, and used the same pen when writing ‘value productions.’

JT