The Internet

The internet came to be a big help when researching secondary recourses and materials such as instrumental music, different short films to analyse etc.

GoogleThis is an online search engine that allowed me to find out about things I need to

know, such as where I could get free royalty music, what is the typical target audience of short films and instructions on how to use particular equipments

etc. From this I have gather a range of information and it's not time consuming as I got my answer quickly. When you are searching one thing different results come on the search engine and isn't what I needed, and this would require me

to look carefully at what is relevant.

YouTube

This website helped me a lot with my primary research as it was used to watch short films, which gave me a wide range of ideas for our short film. This was also frustrating as there was a small number of videos that weren't relevant

with what I was looking for but it was free and easy to use. I set up an account so I was able to put our film up on their next to other short films and see what

the general public thought of our film, it was easy to set up and download videos but it took a long time for it to upload which required patience from me.

Blogger

This website was mostly used by me during this coursework as it is where I'm able to share all the research, information and my work that I've worked on for

month. This helped me upload as much as I can about the project I'm doing at the moment, as I was able to put up my work using different programs, upload

pictures and also videos. This is really easy and also enjoyable to use.

Slide Share

This website allowed me to upload PowerPoint presentations and Word documents and then use the embed bit to be uploaded on my Blogger. This reduced the space as all the scripts took up a lot of space on each post, this gave a better overall effect to it and kept it organised. Slide Share used a short amount of

time to upload and refresh the profile in order to get the presentations.

Sound Cloud

This website I had to register and then confirm my e-mail address so it let me upload the music that we composed for our short film, it took a long time to do

this. Once that was done, I had to then browse through my own documents, upload the sound clip to the site and embed it on to my blog. Limitations for

this would be that I could only download two hours worth of music, but as I only had a 5 minute sound clip to download, it was practical and easy to use.

Equipment

For the planning and production stages I used a range of different equipment in order to ensure it was all to a high quality.

Stills Camera Olympus FE230

Using the still camera allowed my group to take photographs for our pre-production planning, such as taking pictures for the poster and different locations. From this we could see what images would work well in our

poster and what location would best to start our filming. From using the camera I've learnt that we would have to have a very steady hand when it came to filming, otherwise, we would have a poor quality film and have a lot of re-shooting to do, as with the photographs. I also learnt how to set up the camera when it came to taking photographs as there are different

settings on the camera as you could also take amateur videos.

HD Camera Cannon FS200

The HD camera was something I've used before at home such as home movies but I never known that there were different things you need to check before you start the filming other wise we wouldn't get the best quality of film that we

would be hoping for. We quickly learnt that the camera had to be mounted onto a tripod before any type of filming can be taking place to steady the shots, we also tried to use it hand held but it was clearly not giving us high quality work we wanted. I learnt how to use the zoom that's located on the top of the HD camera and when we should and shouldn’t use it. There was a button to take pictures and also change the brightness and contrast to get a better quality film. Before you start filming anything, we had to white balance to picture

quality. All this was to ensure that the film we were going to make was done professionally and doesn't look like a home made video. We had to re-shoot some scenes of our short film due to the camera moving too fast and the

stiffness of the tripod movements.

Tripod

As I've mentioned, we had to use a tripod at all times to enhance the steadiness of the filming quality. We used the tripod last year so we knew exactly how to use them and I knew how to use it to

create different shots such as panning and tilts as it gives a more professional look to our film.

Marantz PMD 660/N3B

The marantz was used when we discovered, when editing, that the sound in our short film was at poor quality, it was the first time I've used it also. The majority of the film had non-diegetic sounds, the dialogues needed to be

more enhanced and louder in order to blend it with the music used. I learnt how to record our voices clearly, finding out that an empty room without any echo was best and that a soft cloth underneath would reduced the possibility of a slight rumbling sound occurring. My group also used it

when recording voices for our radio trailer, as it is easy to upload onto the computer and then onto Adobe Premier Pro (editing software).

Computer Software

In order to edit the short film and the radio trailer, create posters and get a high quality, we had to use a number of different software and these soft wares below were the best ones.

Adobe Premier ProWe used this software to edit our short film and also the radio trailer. I've used this

before last year so knew all the basic techniques, such as continuing to edit footage, the tool to cut, adding transitions, locking audio and adding effects.

This year the main thing we learnt was how to create the split screen, speeding a piece of a footage, how to make the credits roll in time with the music and have smooth transactions. I also found out how to lower the audio levels, as the music needed to be brought down in so that the audience could hear the

conversations clearly. The best thing about Adobe Premier Pro is that everything was straight forward and easy to pick up.

Adobe Fireworks CS3

This program was used to created the original font for the film poster. As Vanessa knew most things about this, Me and Rebecca didn't and learnt how to

manipulate the text, changing its appearance to give it and outline and make it look glossy, whilst also using the eraser tool to make the font appear to be

mist. We were unable to copy and paste it into other programs without a white box appearing around it and we were unable to create the same effect in other

programs. Even though this problem occurred, it did help us to understand more about types of font that can be used and how we could still make our

poster look effective with other types of font.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended

This is the program we decided to make the film poster on. I knew some things about Photoshop and learnt how to cut around images. I also learnt how to use the clone tool to fill in parts of the image that had been taken away and fill in the image to make it completely black. Adding text and changing the colours in this program I was able to find a font we were

happy to use. I learnt how to change the number of pixels in the image as different ways of showing it needs a different number. Overall, once we had all learnt how to do things on this program we did not come across

any problems but learnt the value of having the ‘History’ section available so that we could easily go back from any mistakes we had made.