Use of cameras..

Before embarking on this project, we did a preliminary task and for me this was probably the first time I used a camera to actually follow someone moving instead of blowing out birthday candles. However I do use stills cameras a lot, this proved to be completely different. Yet with more practice I think the footage became better and by watching it back several times in editing I was made more conscious of the framing and composition of each shot.Throughout our time filming we used the same hand held SD5 cannon video recorder.And as a group we equally split up filming different scenes.

Obviously when filming this is something you must take into consideration and often natural or indoors light isn’t enough and you can end up with some crackly footage if there is an ill source of light.We decided that extra lighting equipment wouldn’t be required in our film as we wanted to achieve a sense of eeriness with diminishing light at dusk Yet we did experience some problems when we filmed our original sketch for our production company this was indoors and the footage just didn’t have the light it required so it was not as sharp as we had hoped.Yet we did alter the lighting in editing our footage by changing the saturation and applying different filter whereby the levels of primary sources were increased and decreased when needed. We also applied self made gradient filters which achieved the gloomy effect.

Lighting

Microphones

Obviously when filming in open spaces such as the woods there is plenty of atmospheric noise, and as much as these diegetic sounds contribute we needed the assistance of microphones to amplify certain sound effects and the dialogue

When filming we used two types of microphone, a handheld with a windscreen fur cover which we used when recording inside to minimize background noise and a boom pole when we were shooting the main footage which we positioned over the characters to pick up their dialogue. However trying to operate the boom pole and the camera together did take some cooperation and team work.

Use of software

Previous to editing our film opening the only editing software I had used before was iMovie and GarageBand on my MacBook. So as the main editor I had to learn as we progressed. We edited our opening minutes to our film using Adobe Premiere Elements, which is a great tool with many editing features. Editing was essential in creating the desired effect for our film. So we applied several effects to most of the footage which really enhanced it, these included imported self made filters and alterations to saturation and colour balance. When it came to composing the music I worked very closely with Amy Andrews who’s job was to compose the music. However I did assist her as I had a general idea already of how GarageBand software works. I edited some from home which I learnt to export using iTunes in the required format.Using Premiere also taught me about software and file compatibility, and key alterations to file size.

In Conclusion Generally the use of all these different technologies combined has greatly enhanced our film and am glad that I have had the experience of using all of these tools, which has been a great learning curve, and will be applicable on every level when planning and producing something like this again. By gaining this knowledge on how to operate such technologies I think it has helped us enormously in planning and producing our opening minutes of Duefall. Obviously with technology there has been times when we experienced difficulties but these were soon overcome when explained and demonstrated to us.