Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Evaluation (Production/Filming) Jason
Videos of us practicing shots
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We were slightly held back by the fact we were forced to change our location last minute. Our storyboard had been drawn up with the previous location in mind but was easily adapted to our secondary location. Adapting our storyboard to the secondary location wasn’t too serious of a problem, but finding a suitable location we found to be difficult. The college has specific rules as to where students are permitted to go and where they are not; the vast majority of locations that lent themselves to a horror trailer were off limits – everyone in the team agrees that we should have filmed sooner. Moreover the limited access of the internet in the college premises we found to be a problem, albeit a minor one. During the planning and research section of our coursework many of the necessary sites that had information on certain films were filtered, fortunately this was a problem we could easily rectify at home.
I cannot stress the importance enough of counting in and out, especially with regards to the editing section of the project. Not only does it inform anyone present at the scene that we are about to film, it makes the editing vastly easier. While filming certain scenes we had forgotten to count in and out, as a result we ended up having to waste time in the editing room searching for when the footage we wanted began and ended. As soon as we realised we had forgotten to count in and out while we were filming, we ensured to do it for every piece of footage we filmed from then on.
I cannot stress the importance enough of counting in and out, especially with regards to the editing section of the project. Not only does it inform anyone present at the scene that we are about to film, it makes the editing vastly easier. While filming certain scenes we had forgotten to count in and out, as a result we ended up having to waste time in the editing room searching for when the footage we wanted began and ended. As soon as we realised we had forgotten to count in and out while we were filming, we ensured to do it for every piece of footage we filmed from then on.
New location we had to quickly adapt to
At the start of the year our teacher thought it was vital to teach us about lighting (incandescent, fluorescent, halogen) which came in very useful over the course of this project. We were also taught about hard and soft light and how to achieve them, seeing as we were filming a horror trailer we decided to go for hard light, which could have been done better. Most of our attention went on lighting our actor when we should have paid just as much attention on darkening the background. The trailer would have looked a lot more professional if we were able to properly achieve hard light and darken the background – it would’ve also brought more attention to the actor. We intentionally placed more light on our actors face during the scene he receives a ping than in other scenes, as in a dark room the only light source would have been his Blackberry, it also gives clearer view of the reaction to the pings he receives.
Understanding the camera was empirical before even filming practice shots – this includes comprehending depth of field, focus, white balance and the ISO settings. Thankfully we were taught about these early into the course but putting them into practical use was slightly more difficult. Several of our initial practice shots came up slightly blue, however that could have been due to the fact they were filmed under fluorescent lighting. We experienced the same issue on our genuine filming day, luckily by then we already had a reasonable understand of white balance and were able to quickly remove the colour cast. An issue that’s noticeable in the finished product that we failed to realise while filming is the direction of the lighting being obvious. In certain scenes half of our actors face is heavily lit while the other is covered by a shadow. Upon reflection we should have spent more time removing shadows than dealing with white balance. Fortunately we had experience with DSLRS before, albeit limited, but our experience meant that we had no problem keepings shots in focus. We were so determined to keep the shots in focus that we didn’t make any use of the manual focus option. For example; keeping our actor in focus but the scenery out of focus would have made the trailer slightly more eerie. Many shots had to be filmed with minimal lighting and our shots came out far too dark. This problem was easily solved by simply increasing the ISO setting. |