What have you learnt about technologies...
- 1. Lauren White
- 2. Before studying AS Media Studies, myself and my group had never used any technologies to film, other than a video camera on a mobile phone or a computer webcam. Therefore, throughout the project we have learnt how to use hardware (camcorder) and software computer programs to produce our finished project.
- 4. To film both our Preliminary Task and The Legacy we used a Sony HD handycam camcorder. The quality of the camera was really important as it gave our film a more professional finish. Through the Preliminary Task we mastered the use of the camcorder and, as the others in my group were participating actors, I filmed all of The Legacy.
- 5. However, even though we knew how to use the camcorder effectively, we were not as familiar with the frame size settings on the camera. We filmed on two separate occasions and, unaware to us, the camcorder was on two different frame size settings and saved in two different formats as you can see on the left. We had never come across this problem before and we only realised the problem during the editing stages.
- 6. As you can see from the screenshots, in one scene of our film the frame size switches from a rectangular view with black lines above and below to a full square frame. As a group we thought that we may be able to change the settings when we came to exporting the file, but there was no option so consequently, the size of the frames change briefly.
- 7. In conjunction with the camcorder, we used a plug-in microphone. Although we didn’t use most of the sound in the clips and used a track over the top we did keep the running footsteps sounds as this made the action seem more real. James’ voice over at the start and end of our opening was recorded using a voice recorder for a clear sound. To further ensure that his voice was clear, he recorded in a quiet place.
- 8. The use of the tripod helped us to film steady shots and improved the professional quality of our film. I used a tripod at all times when filming so there was no wobbling and nothing would distract the audience from being engrossed in the narrative. The only time we did not use a tripod was when James held the camera whilst running to achieve a point of view shot.
- 10. As known of my group (including me) had ever used Premier Pro before this was a learning curve for all of us. After importing our filming, we had to cut the clips down for it to make sense as a narrative. We worked as a team to do this to achieve the best result. A strength of Premier Pro is the wide variety of editing functions to make each film its own. I used the volume changes to achieve continuity of the sound of running footsteps over all frames.
- 11. A weakness of Premier Pro, particularly to novices like myself, was the difficulty of using it. Often, my group and I had to resort to a Google search to figure out how to edit our filming. For example, fading in and out titles in our sequence. However, now we have used it fully, with importing, editing and exporting we have a better knowledge.
- 12. For our film, we needed a copyright free music track and we decided to search on Free Music Archive. I have learnt that looking for a track is a long process and so as a group we decided Jake and James should take on the task. We decided on ‘Near the End’ by Syndrôm, after repeatedly changing our mind on other tracks, as it is upbeat and modern which reflects our own film
- 13. The new technology we used throughout filming and editing The Legacy helped us gain new skills and learn a lot through the process. We learnt to adapt footage for different situations. For example in one part of our film James gets up from his seat much too slowly for the context of the narrative so we adapted by speeding up the clips rather than re-filming.