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.

Q7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When looking back on our media preliminary task, I can see we managed to get a stronger feel for the equipment we were using, which I believe has helped our thriller opening to be more professional with the type of shots we have done and our use of editing, such as the overlays, which we were a lot more afraid to use in our preliminary task. However, we stuck to important conventions such as the 180° rule, shot reverse-shot and match on action, these helped our production keep up with a professional and organised style we wanted it to be.

I also feel we were a bit too eager to create our preliminary and rushed our planning for it, only going off a quick storyboard, however with this task, we planned the location a long time in advance and visited it to get location photos and pick the rooms we were use and the route we were going to take with the camera to get to it, these were planned with the ideas of getting the most thrilling scenery whilst having the safest route, this, and the use of storyboards and shot lists helped us plan the shots we were going to use and also helped us to keep continuity.

For our preliminary, we used very simple shots using the tripod, mainly consisting of still shots; however we found that when we created a shot of walking with the tripod it created a nice tracking shot, however, it wasn’t as smooth as we wanted it.

For our thriller opening we were able to get hold of a Glidecam, this allowed us to be a lot more free to move the camera around using a tracking shot and increase or decrease the pace of the movement and angle of the shot without having any bounce of footsteps, this has lead our production to have a very professional, smooth feel to our shots we have used.

Although we used Final Cut Pro in our preliminary, I feel we have shown development in creativity in our thriller opening, an example of this is our use of overlaying shots, which we used in the corridor scenes, we did not use this technique in our preliminary, however found it gave our thriller a personalized style and allowed us to fit more footage into the opening.

We have been a lot more confident with sound compared to our prelim, for our prelim we only used one soundtrack and created simple loops, however, in out thriller, we used multiple soundtracks and also added sound effects, this gave us much more of a bold sound, which we thought worked well with our thriller.

We did take one huge aspect from our preliminary to our thriller, that is the camera choice, we filmed on a Canon 550D, this camera was great for us, it is lightweight and small, allowing us to carry it around very easily around, we were able to film in full HD, which we knew would give us a really professional looking production at the end and also we found the ability to use manual focus a bonus, giving us more freedom to have shots exactly how we wanted them.

I think one of the main strengths we have to our thriller is the way we have weaved our clips to relate to the music, such as the scene in our thriller when Jake is walking to the door, the music is loud and tense leading up to him grabbing the door, however, the music then suddenly cuts down for our shot of him opening the door, this false tension we have used really holds the tension throughout our production, instead of it simply being in one place and having a large amount of tension very quickly.

I think a weakness is our lighting, because of the problems we had with power links, we were not able to use the lighting we wanted to, this made some of our shots quiet dark and I feel it hid some of the important aspects of our thriller we wanted people to pick up on, however, this was easily mended through the use of colour correction in Final Cut Pro X.

Overall I strongly believe we have created a very effective and professional thriller opening, we have shown a confident use of shots and a creative flare with our editing, also where we have come into trouble, we have put in hard work to figure out how we can alter this to make it as good as possible, this attention to detail has, I feel, helped our production pushed through the boundaries set for us.

Try Out Shots

Our first try out shot was Jake starting to walk down the corridor, past the graffiti, though this is a well placed shot, having Jake walk past the lettering, however, we felt we wanted a more dramatic shot, so we chose to film him walking past the graffiti, as he did before, however, in the corner of the shot, have glass, from the broken window, this indicates the danger within the house.

Our second try out shot was of Kieran rocking back and forth whilst the camera panned up towards his face, this was an effective shot, however, we wanted to go off our storyline and not reveal the burns on the characters face until right at the end, so this shot would not have worked at holding the tension as it would have gave away the facial injuries. 

The third try out shot consisted of Jake walking into the room and turning off the record player and then Kieran standing up, this shot didn't work as Jake was too central in the shot, stopping you from seeing Kieran stand up behind him, we then filmed this a few times to get it perfect.

The last try out shot was a point of view shot of Jake turning off the record player, this is an effective shot because the audience is then allowed to become part of the thriller, however, as you can here from the audio of this shot, we realised straight away that Kieran had to be much close to Jake to create a startling effect when played back as he will then be right up at the camera.

Production Ident

We felt it would be best to continue using the name that we created for our prelim task, which was ‘Hashtag productions’.  For this we have decided to make our production more professional by creating an ident, which is shown below for our thriller opening. We wanted to do something a bit more creative than just writing it out, as a group we brainstormed some ideas and came up with an idea of having the ‘ashtag’ and ‘productions’ to come in, then followed by the four lines of the hash tag (#) with a specific sound effect. This ident will be placed at the start of our thriller with our title and credits. 

Title Ideas

Below are a handful of ideas we came up with to use for our title, our thriller left us with a lot of ideas we could play on to link with our title, such as, we could use Nocton in the title as that was the location it was shot at, we could have used love and pain, memories and revenge as they all interlink with our thrillers history. As a group we have decided to either use Nocton Hall or Discarded.

After discussing these two names, we felt that Nocton Hall was a bit too simple for our thriller, so we have chosen Discarded, We chose this because the meaning behind the word is that you are left alone and forgotten about, it also plays on the word ‘scar’, which it clever because our character is scarred from the fire of the building.

Storyboards

Below are our storyboards, these will help to give us the initial basis of shots we would like to use.

Production Changes

From our first production idea, I feel we have made a few changes to develop our thriller into a smoother, more professional production.

As a group we have made specific changes to improve the overall outcome of our production. We have taken a few things out and added innovative, daring ideas to try to improve the quality of our production. One thing that we have taken out is the typewriter scene, which was placed at the beginning as we felt that it didn’t hold the tension and made our thriller seem very dull, we took this out and replaced it with our titles, these were originally simply going to be placed at the end. We spent a lot of time thinking about our titles and realised that they worked too well to just be put at the end, so we decided that we would cut them up and include them in the opening scene, we feel this has work out effectively and helps keep the tension high.

We have also had many discussions about our chosen music, we started with ‘tiptoe through the tulips’, but when putting it against out video we realised it again didn’t quite work, for the simple reason that it was too upbeat. We tried to find a different track but then came up with the idea of slowing the track down to give it more of an eerie effect, this worked and fitted in well, we then left some of the non-diegetic sound in, such as footsteps and added diegetic sound, like the breathing on the spy shots to build up the tension.