Looking after the tripod was key to the quality of level, if the parts were too loose you couldn’t get a clean pan. I had to get to grips with a hand held HD camera this wasn’t new to me but I wasn’t at all confident at using it. I practised whip pans, zooms, techniques to not loose footage and many more different shots that I later used to my final product. I did a few test scenes that were non-related to my media product, so that I was not unfamiliar in a filming environment when it came round to filming.
The editing software that I had to use was Final Cut Pro on a Mac Book, my first big hurdle of the media AS course was adapting from a Mac to PC, with help and a short amount of time I was soon up to scratch. I was taught how to import Jpeg files into the programme and other similar files. My understanding of how editing worked got better and better and I could then easily cut clips, add clips, add sound and fade in and out. For my Prelim I did not add any sound or edit any, for my final media product I used two different editing musical soundtracks, this was a clear difference between them both. Also my prelim had no sort of editing, for my final product I learnt in depth how to edit to a level where it looked professional. In final cut editing sound was also something that I became familiar with, I learnt how to sound bridge and heighten sounds- which became very useful for a doorbell sound in ‘Exchange’.
Planning was vital for my opening two minutes of a thriller genre film, via blogger I uploaded photos and text to help me plan for my film, for example characters and costume. I leant the technique of constructing and drawing a storyboard, this way very enjoyable but later helped my group out to understand what order our shots should go in and what sort of shot we should use. The shot list also did the same job, but isn’t as visually effective. Planning things such as props, costume, filming dates and that the fact that they were well organised on blogger made it very easy to prepare for our filming. We went out for a Recce filming day, this we did not do for the prelim, this allowed us to film in the locations and environment that we had planned to use, from our Recce we analysed the good and bad points and then made improvements from the mistakes. We had to use large boom microphones not the stereo microphones, this was fairly simple to use, but we learnt techniques on how to pick up on the sound best, this reflected in our final product as we did not have to bring much sound in or edit it. The lighting was one thing my group found slightly more difficult to use, first of all we had to learn how to safely use them as they became very hot if used for more than 3 minutes at a time. We changed choice on many types of light as we were filming half indoors half outdoors, with our knowledge from the camera tripod we could easily use the light tripods. In our preliminary task we used no lighting as it was incredibly basic and we had not gained our understanding of all the technical equipment then.
From my Preliminary task to my final thriller opening, there is visual evidence of how they contrasted and how my understanding of media equipment, editing, filming and planning grew and this reflected in ‘Exchange’. My prelim was incredibly basic compared to my polished and well constructed opening.
BJH
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