HL:Question 6

• During the whole production and development process of our film opening we used a blog called http://www.blogger.com and the benefits of Web 2.0 were very clear
• We found that with its easy to use interface we could post up research and comment on each others posts easily, we also found the blog very useful for uploading any videos from ‘YouTube’ that we found from research straight onto the blog in an efficient way
• Also with its auto-save feature we never had any real worry about our work being lost as the blog would auto-save a post frequently
• When shooting our wilderness woods footage and final production we used a Canon 550D, this gave us the choice between filming in 1080p at 24fps or 25fps or 720p at 50fps or 25fps as opposed to the school video recorder that we used during our preliminary task
• We opted to film in 720p at 25fps and used a manual focus, this enabled us to change the aperture levels allowing us to turn the aperture down when a scene looked bright, also to manually adjust push and pull focuses that you see in our clip for example the last scene with the victim is lying down on the ground 
• We used wilderness woods as a test run to see how effective some of the shots would look in conveying our thriller/horror
• We liked the idea of how we could manually use pull focus to bring shots into focus and used this as one of our A grade shots in our final production

• One of the features we found useful with the Canon 550D was that we could adjust the aperture and control the levels of light that we wanted to let into the lens of the camera, however unfortunately when certain scenes in our final production the sky became very bright and even turning the aperture right down didn’t make much of a difference
• During one of our shoots we also experimented with a fish eye lens which made our footage look visually distorted and gave a wider depth of the area being shot, although we liked the look of this particular footage with the fish eye lens, when editing in post-production we made the decision that it wasn’t appropriate for our genre
• We were able to use effects on Premiere Elements 9.0 to adjust color levels and exposure using
• We had to be cautious with the contrast and exposure levels as too much would make the footage look tacky and distorted, however we were able to prevent this from happening and accomplished similar levels of light to create continuity between different scenes
• Due to limitations of track & dolly equipment for some of our shots this was vital to ensure a smooth shot
• Therefore we had to improvise by creating our own track & dolly, we did this by using a rectangular plank of wood at about 1.5 meters and a skateboard, the plank allowed the skateboard to track across smoothly preventing any bumps that would have been caused by the ground

 

• This type of improvising occurs even in the real film world for example (Monsters, Edwards, 2010) used cushions and pillows as a tripod in the car to steady shots
• We tried to use visual effects on adobe premier elements like strobe light, brightness and contrast, we made a series of separate titles and moved them around by playing with the motion scale and position of the titles to create active titles that moved around the screen like (Se7en, Fincher, 1995)
• Our production process could compare to some real life productions in the fact that many of our shots took many takes and trial and error to execute, we considered locations carefully and mise en scene and costume to add verisimilitude and we also thought very carefully about the correct soundtrack and characters to play individual roles in our film opening
• I have learnt a lot about how effective technology is as a whole and also film productions dependence on it.
• For our post-production we used Premiere Elements to combine together all of our footage, from this we were able to edit and cut clips that were not neccessary, we found the interface user-friendly in that we could edit singular frames and cut precisely where we wanted which made our editing work much more efficient
• Uploading particular soundtracks that we found on (www.freesound.org) that we wanted onto Adoe Premiere Elements
  
  
  wasn't a problem with the ease of the interface, an advantage of using adobe premiere elements for our soundtrack was that we could incorporate multiple soundtracks and alter sound levels by simply dragging down the sound level of the particular soundtrack, this enabled us to have our primary soundtrack whilst layering other soundtracks on top but with a lower sound level, allowing us to create a soundtrack that fitted the genre of our film opening
• We also used Adobe Premiere Elements to export our clip, we exported our clip using a custom setting thus preventing the quality of our film opening being changing, the format we used to export was 720p at 59.9 fps in an MPEG format
• I have learnt how to edit clips on Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0 and how to use the same clip twice but put on in reverse so that to the audience they look like to separate clips
• I have learned about the effectiveness of primary research when developing a treatment or when wanting to receive feedback on ideas using surveys such as ‘surveymonkey’ to get constructive feedback from fellow friends,
• Also have experienced its ease of use to get the survey out to its audience and how it collects back the data in a simplistic way
• For a real film production its circumstances would differ, firstly they would have a much bigger budget, therefore being able to utilise professional post-production software such as Adobe CS 5.5 Production Premium, which allows editors to use software such as photoshop on clips
• Also for a real film production you would expect there to be a much larger team involving actors and other teams such as props and costume, furthermore due to the difference in feature length between our film and an actual film opening there would be different time scales for filming and in post production