Q6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the whole time we have spent filming and editing, I have learnt so many little techniques that, when used correctly can really make your production stand out from others and make it look very professional.

Shooting:

I first learnt the simple technique of using a tripod, these allow you to have very steady, still shots, whilst you are still able to move the camera. I also found instead of moving with the camera in your hand, having it on the tripod and holding that creates an extremely steady moving shot, this technique is used a lot within our production. We also used a Glidecam, which allows you to run with the camera or track a moving person whilst still keeping the camera still, so we used this to create our tracking shots of Jake, following his movement around the house, however, mainly to follow him down the corridors.

Whilst shooting we used the Canon 550D’s standard 18-55mm kit lens, although this is quite a basic lens, we found it the most useful, we were able to get nice effective close ups and also get effective long shots, we found this was the best choice for us and allowed us to carry less because we were only using one type of lens.

I found that you should keep your lighting consistent within your film, this is to simply stop any confusion, also, the more well lit your production, the easier it will be to see people and see anything you want the audience to notice, this could be anything from a picture on the wall or a cut on the actors face, we used small lights, such as a handheld torch for some shots, this allowed us to pinpoint what we wanted to show.

In our production, we learnt that we could use manual focus to our advantage, we found that we could use it to hide unwanted information, this helped us when we had both characters in the shot, we manually kept the focus on Jake, keeping the identity of the other character hidden, holding the suspense effectively.

Whilst I was filming, I found each type of shot had a different purpose, such as close ups are used to show a certain piece of information, such as a light switch being turned on or an emotion on someone’s face, and long shots are used to either show location or to get across the size of an area, or a building.

Before I started filming, I looked into how important the composition of a shot is, I found out about the ‘Rule of Thirds’ this rule divides the frame into a 3 by 3 grid, and instead of having your main focus dead in the centre, you have the main subject on the points where the lines intersect.

Editing: 

For our production, we used Final Cut Pro X, this is a great video editing program and was a huge step up from iMovie. Because I had never used this before, I found it quite hard to get the hang of, but I watched many tutorials on YouTube and found that helped me get the confidence to try things and learn about it all a lot faster.

Though we haven’t used a lot of transitions in our actual production, this was because we wanted to use straight cuts, we felt it held the tension more and added more pace, rather than using fades between shots, however when we came to using transitions within our titles, we found them quite complicated to do at first, but after giving it a few tries, we were able to make out titles fade in and out, this helps them look a lot more smooth and professional.

After putting all our production onto Final Cut Pro X and sorting it into the places we wanted it to go, we found it was a bit plain and some sections just needed something to give them a boost. We found that colour correction helped us change our basic clips to feel a lot more tense and eerie, we were able to alter the contrast of the colours and make them more intense, this helped make each colour picked up on the camera more punchy to the viewer, we also darkened the shadows, allowing shots such as the corridor shot to be darker than we had already filmed them in, adding to the tension, though this took a lot of playing with, it worked extremely well and also it’s something we knew that you couldn't do as well on iMovie, giving us the edge.

When watching through some of our opening, I found that some of the corridor shots were quite boring and simple, we were debating interlinking shots within the walking to make it more interesting, but we thought it would be very effective if we could overlay two shots. I have previously worked with changing the opacity of photos on Photoshop, after changing the opacity of the two shots and layering them, they were, as we thought, very effective.

In Final Cut Pro, you are able to layer sound clips up, we used this throughout our whole production, because we did not want just one soundtrack throughout, we wanted to add multiple sounds playing over the top of one another to help add some confusion, but most of all, it adds depth to our production, though this could have just made our production sound like we have just chucked sounds onto it, we have placed them in ways that sound the most effective, this took a lot of time, but I think it has gave our production a professional edge.

Blogger:
I learnt how to use Blogger effectively to put up all my planning and research, this helped me a lot because i could easily go back and look at all the work I had done to make sure I was following my planning when setting up and creating my thriller opening.

Youtube & Facebook: 

After publishing our thriller opening onto youtube, we then uploaded it to Facebook, we learnt from friends and family what worked well and what didn’t, this useful feedback and constructive criticism will then go on to help us in our evaluation.

We used HD cameras to film our production with, and because of the HD quality, we had to work out different lighting and composition to get as much out of the quality of the camera as possible. We also used cameras with manual focus, which allowed us to get the atmospheric shots where the focus changes, along with getting incredible detail on the close up shots.

Final Cut Pro X:

I quickly understood the basics and developed my knowledge with the program over time, ending in me being able to produce a professional thriller opening.

iDVD:

I was able to learn how to add finishing features to the thriller opening such as a theme linked title screen.