Alice Cahill, Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Over the course of this project, we had come across a variety of different technologies.

A list have I made of all technologies we used over the duration of our media project:

Cameras

Canon Legria HV30 Mini DV
These were the cameras which the school issued us to film with. They recorded on tape which then had to be captured onto our editing suite so that we could edit it.

Advantages

• Lightweight
• Easy to use - anyone within our group could use it
• Shot in HD

Disadvantages

• Shots were not wide enough - since the room was quite small, some of the wider, establishing shots were difficult for us to get
• To overcome this, we used Mahalia's Canon 600D, which was capable of filming the wider shots we were looking for

The Canon 600D

Advantages

• Wide shots were able to be shot
• Better quality than the Mini DV Camera

Disadvantages

• Different quality to other camera - Which made using both cameras' footage difficult for us to edit between them, because they looked very different
• Lighting came out differently on this camera (grading was harder) - Which made using both cameras' footage difficult to use and grading took longer
• To solve this, we ended up using the Canon 600D for all the shots, to make editing and grading easier and less time consuming for us

Lighting

All of us within the group were inexperienced with high-quality lights like the ones we were given, but we were all eager to use them. We were given a tutorial on how to set up a three-point lighting system, use the filters and on health and safety, which was extremely useful.

Our 3-point lighting system set up

Due to our media product's genre, we decided we did not want many harsh shadows so we pointed the lights at the corners of the room and the ceilings so that the light would not be too strong on the character's faces, giving them a more natural look.

Advantages

• No time limits to filming - During one shoot, we filmed all day until it was dark outside. As we used the lighting kit and blocked out any natural light, this meant all the shot's lighting looked identical which meant we had to grade less in post-production
• Complete control over the light - We could change the lighting completely in a shot if it had too many shadows, or if the light was too concentrated

Disadvantages

• Overheating of the lights - The room we worked the majority of the day in was quite small and as well as that we had to close all the doors and windows to control the lighting to avoid the natural sunlight creating glare of light in the shot
• To overcome this we took regular breaks opening all the doors and windows to let in cool air
• We also used the lighting gloves whenever handling the lights
• Thick cables all over the floor
• We tried to be careful and not to trip over when walking around the room

Tripod

We attached the camera to the tripod and used it for steady and smooth camera movement throughout the shoot.

Advantages

• Useful for panning shots
• Allowed us to shoot smoothly and steadily, creating a more professional feel
• Easily portable

Disadvantages

• Difficult to film tracking shots - if we had equipment like a steady mount, we may have been able to film the movement shots more professionally than we already had

Shooting The Montage

(1) Creating a Dolly Effect Using a Skateboard
When trying to create a dolly effect when shooting the montage, we did not have access to a dolly board, therefore we improvised and used the tripod with a skateboard underneath, which worked out quite well, even though it was quite noisy, it did not affect us because we cut out the background sound in the montage anyway.

(2) 'In and Out' Points For Shot Transitions
When we used the slide transition in our opening we had to use 'in and out' points to make it look more smooth. For the test shoot we did not use 'in and out' points which we tried to fix on Adobe Aftereffects and was difficult to edit in- so we resolved that issue by using black books in front of the lens for the main shoot.

(3) Auto-Exposure Difficulties
Another reason we chose not to use the Mini DV Camera was that when we used the books for 'in and out' points, the camera would auto expose and take a few seconds to adjust, leaving the screen blank white.

To resolve this we used the Canon 600D's manual exposure. Which we thought looked better:

Editing

I have used Adobe Premier previously in media projects, for example last year my group created a children TV trailer project. This meant that I knew the basics of how to cut, change and arrange clips onto the timeline.

Grading

To grade our product we used Adobe Premier using the 3-wheel colour corrector, which we were unfamiliar with, but we learned quickly.

For our film opening, a lot of the shots were quite warm as the camera was very sensitive to the bright, yellow lights.
Therefore we had to turn up the blues highlights to give it a more neutral colour.

3-wheel colour correction tool

Titles

Certain of the members of our group were already very familiar with After Effects, so they were able to create the titles we wanted, without too much help from internet sources.

Example of a tracking title and how it is made