Evaluation Q6

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this film opening?

After some practice in the lessons and using it to make our short film ‘The Package’ and our preliminary task, it was pretty simple and easy to use the camera and tripod. We only faced a couple of issues, one of which was sometimes it was extremely difficult to get a good pan that didn’t wobble which is something that happened a couple of times but we managed to cut these parts out in our actual film. Another problem we faced was remembering to get the shot level on the spirit level on the tripod as it was always annoying if we looked back on shots that weren’t particularly in line.

Although we planned to use lights in scenes that we thought would be too dark, we managed to use the natural light which actually gave a more gritty and British feel so was actually a positive. 

As we used little diegetic sounds whilst filming, we didn’t use the microphone a lot. One of the problems we faced when filming in doors was that it sounded very quiet on the microphone and very muffled. For this we used the sound from the camera which worked better as it was clearer and of higher quality. In the opening running shots, it was difficult to get a good background noise of high quality as there were always people talking in the background so we managed to find a good busy street sound effect on the website ‘SoundFX Now.’

            

We also used these types of websites for other sounds in our piece, especially the heartbeat and explosion noise in the flashback. We trawled through a number of different copyright free music websites to find the perfect piano piece which we finally found on www.freeplaymusic.com.

Both Bea and I were very used to Macs so it was very easy for us to navigate ourselves around the internet and files. However, neither of us had used Final Cut Pro which initially took some time to get used to as it was very complicated to get the exact effects that you wanted. However, after editing ‘The Package’ together, we were pretty sure how to use the basics and then we learnt specialized actions along the way whilst editing our final piece.