Kenya Bell and Mathew Bray

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

During the creation of our media product I have learnt how to use the camera equipment in different ways. My weakness at first with the camera equipment was that I didn’t know how to focus the camera to give it clear detail, this is where we ran into a problem where the whole scene I filmed was blurry and could not be altered. However this weakness was resolved before we carried on with anymore filming as continuing doing the filming while this skill was weak would not give us any benefit.

After playing around with the camera settings and practicing focusing on main things I improved my camera skills and therefore it became a strength instead of the weakness. Since I had improved my camera skills we went back out with our actors and I reshot the scene which was completely blurry and this time it went all to plan and nothing turned out blurry.

A strength I had was using the tripod correctly so that it gave the effect I wanted it to give within our opening sequence. There are many different camera angles but only some and done specifically with altering the tripod in the right way. An example of this would be in the gang scene where Tony is stood at the end of the table and the camera is on an angle. This effect I did by adjusting one leg of the tripod so that it was shorter than the two others this made sure the camera was doing a cantered angle.

Me, Mathew and Jack set out to film the murder scene and in this scene we have Mathew walking down the street with the murder weapon I his hand. We knew that me holding the camera in my hand and walking along side Mathew would not give the right effect. So we chose to take the track and jib to give a more natural walking effect and enhance our film so that the audience did not notice the camera movement as it would not have been relevant to the story line or the audience’s feelings (show the scene of Mathew walking as this is all said)

Our opening sequence included a voice over which was recorded separately with a boom mike. This piece of equipment was used because we didn’t need any video to block the scenes that I had already filmed. Also the boom mike put the dialogue into an mp3 format, so that it could be added into our opening sequence straight away with no alterations to file format. Using this piece of technology ensured that the actor’s voice could be herd clearly throughout the narration making it more efficient. We could of used a boom mike for our filming, however we didn’t find it necessary because the actors where all loud enough to hear from just the camera.

We had a strength with the sound that was produced for our product, because I made sure that the camera was always close enough to pick up the actors dialogue. Mathew also made sure that when he was editing he gave the sound the same levels as each other so that it did not overwhelm the audience with dramatic changes in sound.

When constructing our product we used editing software which was the foundation that helped Mathew join all of the scenes I had filmed together. But first to do this he had to cut the scenes down using the blade tool.

From creating my product I gained a better understanding of how to use the software ‘Final Cut Pro x’. When editing on ‘Final Cut Pro X’ I learnt exactly how precise you must be when editing your product so that it looks professional. I learnt how to use the blade tool so that I could easily trim and break up sections of the film and move them to a different sections. This came in very helpful when it came to editing in our titles.

To create the soundtrack to the film, we used the software garage band. To create the music we used loops that were already included in the software. This was effective as it allowed us to create a

soundscape that fit into the genre of film noir. If we had the possibility I would have preferred to create the whole soundscape originally, rather than using any loops at all.