Harris productions: Evaluation Question 6

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

Digitisation
It has been voiced by theorists that digitisation gives Indies an equal chance of success, however throughout the simple example of Paul's Facebook page which was multiplied in many different languages, this is shown to be questionable. However an example that fits with this opinion is Harry Macqueen's feature film Hinterland which received limited cinematic release using poorer quality cameras, and Corrie Greenop's film The wandering rose which was created on a budget not even close to 1/4 of a Working Titles production budget and the successful film Monsters crew and cast fit into one car.

Below I will explain how this technology helped me and how I developed.

My use of photoshop

Recording hardware
We used:
DSLR camera-

Before media I had never used a proper recording camera before so I had to learn the different aspects of it, I developed my skills mostly through trial and error during my prelim and Sweede. We used this for every part of filming within our film opening. It gave us very professional quality and aloud me to play around with the depth of field to create atmospheric shots e.g the candle.

SD card-

Again I had never transferred material from an SD card to a computer let alone Final cut pro X, so this also was a new but simple experience. After some guidance I quickly became confident in this, quick and easy way of transferring data. It sped the process along as it was so simple and efficient.

Tripod-

This was a very simple but vital piece of equipment as it ensured that all our shots were steady and smooth. It was the first time that I had used one but as it was so simple it needed no explaining. If we hadn't used a tripod we would have had to film handheld, which however is a faster method of filming it is likely to lead to shaky shots which if not intended can ruin the professional look of a piece and lead to more editing to remove and stabilise the movement. Therefore it also helped to speed up the process as it cut the time we spent editing, removing the movement in shots.
Boom mic

We used this to record the voice overs and outside diagetic music. This was the first time I had seen or used one so I needed to be instructed on how to use it and I also developed through trial and error as I, when recording Hollie's voice over, held the mic way too close to Lucy's mouth thinking it would help pick up the dialogue however it reduced the sound quality. So I re-recorded it with the mic further away and slightly above her and this greatly helped increase the sound quality. The boom mic was very useful when recording outside ambient sound to add to the out-ro as it picked up background noise in incredible clarity and therefore helped us to achieve realism in this scene.

Garage band-
We used this to help create our soundtrack for the shop scene and bad boy scene. We had never used it before. We first learned the basics and then developed by testing out different instruments, genres and effects. We wanted more of a rock feel to the bad boy scene to help anchor his rebel characteristics, so we tried many different genres of music and ended up using an indie rock effect alongside some different drum effects, to add a beat. For the shop scene we wanted it to be lighter so we added symbols instead of a drum beat to help with the rom-com aspect. Using this helped us as we didn't need to spend time organising a recording studio and musicians therefore speeding up the process and it was very simple and quick.
Final cut pro X-

basic tools

This is what we used to edit our film. Before media I had never edited film before so it took me a while to figure out the many different aspects of this complex piece of software. At first I started with the basic editing tools such as, using the blade and select tools. There was a quick way of switching from the different tools without having to use the mouse, I learned that we could simply use the keys for example 'B' moved you to the blade tool. This helped make the process of editing a lot quicker as this short cut was a lot faster. After mastering the basic tools (shown in the picture to the right) I then moved on to more complex tools such as the tools which altered the speed of film, these included slowing the film down, speeding it up or pausing it using the hold tool.

bedroom scene

speed altering tools

We sped up shots in the bad boy scene to help fit with the fast paced editing which we cut to fit with the music. This helped to fit with a more youth friendly style of editing as it made it more exiting due to it being quick paced with a wide range of shots. Therefore this tool helped us to fit our films aim to appeal to our youthful target audience. The hold tool helped me to eventuate a significant moment in the classroom scene. The two shots its self already connotes a romantic relationship but when Harri glances at Hollie this anchors this romance so it needed to be clearly seen. This take however was too shot due to a malfunction with the tripod which made the shot shaky and as we had limited filming time with our actors there was no time to re-shoot. Therefore had to edit out the shakiness and I tried first to slow the shot down but the slow-motion effect looked odd therefore I then paused the shot using the hold the shot, making up for the time that had to be removed, as the take had to be long enough for it to be made significant. I also used the stabilising tool which helps to reduce movement within the shot. This therefore these tool helped us to clearly connote our romantic genre.

classroom scene

Original blue coloration

In the bad boy scene the coloration of the shot was too blue and made it look strange, therefore we used the Sepia colour effect to dull the colour to help signify our social realist genre as this made it seem non-glamourous and dull, which made it look more realistic so helped us to achieve an element of realism.

duller sepia effect

At first the shop scene was too dull and we decided to edit it in the style of a music video to help signify our rom-com genre like seen in Wildchild as it is faster paced and therefore more appealing to our youthful target audience. So we incorporated a mixture of fades and transitions to make it more glamourous. This therefore helped us to appeal to our target audience and signify our genre. However not all of our experiments with transitions made it into our final cut.

an example of a transition that we tried

The most helpful tool was the speed tools as they helped us to fit the pace of shots to our chosen editing pace and to cut shots to the music and therefore helped to signify the genre and target audience if our film.

Our use of technology helped us to:
Share posts

an example of one of Ben's posts that I shared

As we worked as a group of three we needed a quick and easy way to share our blogging on each others blogs. This was simple as all we needed to do was copy and paste each others work on to a new post and add their initials into the title to indicate who did what. This saved us time as it was a very easy and quick way to share our work, which also helped with us working as a group as we could all take different tasks each and then share what we had done with the others.
Feedback
We received feedback in many different forms. For example we received it through, email, commenting on blog posts, verbally, in a written format on paper and using the youtube annotation tool on rough cuts. This really helped us develop our film as using these many forms of communications it was made clear what needed to be improved and worked upon.

Facebook-

feedback from a friend via Facebook

I also received feedback over social media for example Facebook messenger aloud me too easily send my friends a link to our rough cut on Youtube and then quickly receive a reply involving feed back.
We used Facebook messenger to communicate as a group. It was very useful when organising shooting and generally discussing ideas or aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production. Made the whole process quicker and simpler.
Blogger

example of links list

This was the first time any of us had blogged before so it was all very new to us however the simple and efficient blogger site aloud us to keep an ongoing record of our process throughout the pre-production, production and post production stages and gather our research.This was made easy by being able to add tags to posts so we could easily find material we needed whether that be a storyboard for filming or ideas on costume. This was made even easier by creating links lists in which we could sum up sections of work e.g audience research or rough cuts, so they were all in one place and this made the task of finding needed work very quick and easy as it helped us organise our work. We posted schedules onto this so this also helped us work well as a group as we could easily access needed data from each others blogs.
It aloud us to:

add links to posts to help us evidence our research
add photos and film clips
change colour, font and size of texts to help us organise our work by creating headings that stand our and highlighting terminology which helps us evidence our knowledge
post story boards, call sheets and screen play which helped us evidence four preproduction research
organise work using links lists

links, colour change, font change and size change have been used

Youtube
Youtube aloud to easily share our rough cuts and filmed audience feedback. Our YouTube uploads are effectively self-distribution, we can monetize these by simply enabling ads. Also it allows us to quickly embed videos onto our blogs this speeds up the process of moving files using a memory stick which I had previously used before.

Conclusion

This has taught be how to create a movie and that it is possible using the technology provided. It shows me that I could produce a film much like Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee and Colin, these were both produced by Indie companies using micro budgets.

I have learned how to use final cut pro, and to develop our film further than we imagined using transition effects, speed tools and editing. I have also developed my skills on garage band and now know what quality is effective and not. We have almost created what we envisioned using this range of technology.

Blogger

We have used blogger to keep account of our journey as film producers. We used different tools such as labels to make it easier to locate specific blog posts for ourselves and other people. This tool allows us to highlight specific words and puts them on the main page and hyperlinks to and posts with that label. We also edited the layout of our blogs to make them more user friendly by adding links to different catagories that we were exploring. On our blogs we can also see how many people have viewed our blogs and on what days. This is helpful as we can get an opinion on how good our blogs are by the amount of people viewing them and also commenting on them.

We used youtube to upload our work onto the internet. This also aloud us to embed our work onto our blogs and let more people see it. There is also an editing tool on youtube which we haven't used yet which allows us to annotate our work and add comments for other people to see.