Evaluation : Question 6

What have you learned about technologies from the process of construction this product?

Whilst making my film I have learned so many new things about filming, editing and general technology used to make a film. For example Photoshop CS5.1 I personally used this software to make out film production company's logo. With experimenting with the different tools and combining them together to make customized shapes was difficult, but was manageable. My aim for the logo was a skull as it fit with the name of 'Soulplex', so I used the 'Lasso Tool' allowing me to make curved lines to my own liking so I could make the basic template of the skull, with inspiration from other images
I created my own version of detail within the skull and was pleased with the outcome.

After I created the logo, me and my film production partner took the image into After Effects CS5.5 to make an animation to put at the start of out film, we did this by using motion tracking with the help of a YouTube tutorial explaining the steps as we had never used the software before, now I could easily go back into After Effects and create something along the same level without a tutorial now.
 

Motion tracking, image roles in and the text shrinks from large to normal size in a flying effect.




Whilst using Premier Pro CS5.5 to edit my film I learned a variety of different things, from video and audio transitions to simple things like importing clips and rendering to achieve the best quality available.

First of all I imported our clips that we had recorded and were ready to be edited, I did this by going to file on the task bar and selecting 'Import' on the drop down menu. After importing the clips I then went through each clip and picked out the best shot as we recorded several so we could decide after we had filmed them. After we had chose the clips I then deleted them so the only clips in the Imported Clips section were the ones we were going to use. We then made our first cut which was all of our clips together with no editing, after we did this we used spotlights, video transitions like fading out to black or fading in from black, also we also used audio and text transitions. For example we stuck to a simple theme of fading out on our text, so it wasn't jumpy and looked smooth, next time I make a video clip I will be sure   to experiment more with text effects.



We didn't use colour correction in our film opening as we couldn't find an appropriate on to match the theme, how ever we did use RGB colour balance to manually make it look slightly smoother.

An effect I learned was spotlight, we personally used this to make the effect of a moon behind the trees in the first cinematic of our film opening.

Here we have an image from our first cut, which was the tree cinematic with no added effects to it, as you can see it's basic, the lighting isn't great and there is just nothing special about it.

But here we have the image from our final piece, after adding the spotlight behind the trees it added the effect of the moon shining, even though it was filmed in the light we managed to make it look like it was filmed in the dark without any dodgy lighting errors.




Unfortunately we didn't use anything else to record my voice in our film, so all audio was straight from the camera. We added a few sound effects, for example when the phone was ringing, we added a sound we got off freesounds.org so we didn't manually have to have my phone ring and because the clip we got was too long, we cut the sound from the second I picked up the phone.



We also added music, we got one soundtrack from incompitech and one from freesounds.org, we didn't use the whole sound track from either, we cut out one to the other at the appropriate time. We used a track from the start for around 40 seconds, mainly to let the audience get into the film whist the credits rolled over the start of our film opening, the music was quite spooking to get the audience ready for the theme of our film, the second sound clip we used was a kind of Television scratch at the very end when 'Billy' touched the shoulder of Harry, we decided to end our film opening on a more of a loud and jumpy note to leave it on a cliff hanger to make the audience want to come and watch the full film to find out what happens.



I also learned what a Dolly was, I had never seen or heard of one, I had used a tripod in the past but never a dolly, we didn't get the opportunity to use it in our production because our scenery was a field where we wouldn't have got the smooth moving shot effect, I would love to use it next time filming. With the camera I learned how to capture the best shots in many different angles, where to position the camera and when to start and stop recording leaving enough time for editing the clip in Premier Pro.