Media Evaulation Question 6

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



1. Camcorder

Using a camcorder was the most important part of the filming process and being able to use it effectively was crucial to avoid time wasting or any other technical problems. We soon learnt to make sure we had more than one battery with us just in case on ran out. Also, we learnt about how important having multiple cameras in order produce effective shot reverse shot scenes. Learning to adjust the exposure and light settings on the camcorder were also very important to make sure we got the exact kind of shot we needed.





2. Tripod

This ties in very closely to the importance of a camcorder to get effective footage. Without a tripod, it makes it very hard to get perfectly still shots. This is very important in order to get a coherent and effective scene without the shakiness of the human hand. The times we didn't use a tripod were in the POV shot of the gunman, and a steadicam for Tyler's walking shots and scenery. A tripod allowed us to get our shot angles absolutely perfect for what we need, however it does take a considerable amount of time to set them up to perfection.





3. Steadicam

This handled cradle for the camcorder was used to obtain smooth movement of a panning shot whilst still being held in the hand. This was used for all the opening shots of the forest before Tyler's eye. This was very beneficial in filming Tyler's leg too since is allowed us to get closer to the floor than a tripod would allow, also allowing us to follow the feet without shakiness.




4. iMovie

We originally used iMovie to edit our preliminary continuity task. This included learning how to upload all the footage and then cut into the shots we wanted as well as using camera techniques such as match on action. However we found iMovie quite hard to use due to our limited knowledge of it as well as it's incapability to cut in milliseconds. We also had trouble trying to fix a continuity error in our preliminary task, that broke the 180 degree rule. We had a black and white filter on our footage and iMovie would not allow us to then flip the image to fix the 180 degree error. We decided to look at other ways of editing our final film that were more effective.




5. Lightworks

Since members of our group have had some previous experience of it, we decided to use Lightworks to do all our editing of our final film opening and also to fix our continuity error on our preliminary task. Tyler, a member of our team, had Lightworks on his computer at home and therefore we went to his various times after our filing had been done to edit our scenes together. Although confusing and complex, Lightworks gave us more precise control over how we wanted our final product to look.

6. Blogger

Using Blogger as our main body to document all our processes throughout this coursework was reasonably easy and straight forward to use. Being able to place images was my biggest issue with the site since it is very hard to get them in the place you want them. Apart from that, Blogger has been very useful to present our ideas/filming/editing processes throughout the coursework.

7. YouTube

YouTube was useful to upload our various videos that we have made during our time making this film. We have our audience feedback, continuity task, filming from our forest day and the final product all on there. This has allowed us to easily put the links into our blog without having to upload the whole thing into Blogger itself. We found that doing this terribly lowered the quality of the image.