Evaluation - Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies when constructing your product?

Blog, this helped me keep track of how the script was progressing from its original idea and allowed me to see how changes had been made and to refer to earlier thoughts. Also in the age of paperless communication it allowed everyone else to share in the progression and development of ideas. YouTube, Vimeo etc. These Internet video sites are really useful for accessing clips of well-known movies so you can watch them for ideas and analyse them. It is also a good place to look at sound effects and sound tracks to trailers and sequences. Without YouTube or it would be almost impossible to research film ideas for the young independent filmmaker. Netflix and ITunes films are also useful places where you can watch whole films for a small rental fee further broadening your inspiration base. IMDB, is useful for obtaining facts about films such as the director, the production company, dates and also for looking at demographic breakdowns for gender as to who watched the film, what rating they gave it and how they perceived it. This is a very useful insight into how a films release can be deconstructed. It also informs anyone interested in making a film in this genre who there intended audience are and therefore one can choose to write the narrative more consciously with this in mind.

Digital cameras and camcorders are cheap and easily accessible and with the rise of the flashcard it is incredibly easy to capture footage and go straight to edit. Using a DSLR gives you an opportunity to experiment with framing and using the focus option to achieve depth of field shot if you so wish. These lightweight cameras are ideal for difficult shots that require getting into unusual spaces to get the framing you want. Because it is lightweight you can get quick OS shots, shot/reverse shots quickly without having to move a huge camera around. Also you can capture as many takes as you like and delete those you don’t like on playback. We used a Nikon D3200 with tripod for fixed shots and handheld for some of the chase. We could not have done this hand held chase with a big camera. We used adobe premiere pro digital editing software. This uses a linear timeline sequence making it easy to construct the story arc we wish by dropping the footage into the relevant bits of the timeline so it doesn’t matter when we shot the footage if it works for a specific part of the narrative all we have to do is add it to that part of the timeline. This can be then further trimmed or adjusted for contrast, exposure, and beneath the video timeline is the audio timeline where the sound attached to the video clips automatically appears. We used a Zoom 1H to record sound and then added this in and synced it up with the recorded sound from the camera. This is where the audio effects are added such as urban soundscapes and music. This can be placed anywhere in the audio timeline as the narrative requires. Once the rough edit is finished, any transitions, special effects credits and titles can be added.