Nigel - Evaluation Question 6

I personally feel like that I’ve learnt quite a lot about the technology which my group used to construct the thriller opening throughout the whole production of it, for example editing, the actual cameras, lighting and other pieces of equipment like the tripods. This was easy to learn with a mix of lessons taught by people around who knew more than me in the first place and trial and error. I believe that although the opening is not perfect, it allowed a lot of these lessons to be taught.  

I became more confident and able to use the camera more efficiently because I had a larger role in being the cameraman. I do think this has helped my ability in camerawork and has allowed me to learn a lot more than I knew when operating a camera before this project. The actual technology was a special camera which one of our group members was generous enough to allow us to use so he could teach us how the use the actual piece of technology, as we did the same the first time in the preliminary task. The first few shots that I was in charge of shooting, I made sure that there were more than one take so if one failed we could hopefully use another, I also had asked for other people’s opinions on every shot that I was put in charge of, which helped to boost my confidence. There was a focus pull which we shot, which ended up in the final product as we wished it to look like. We used focus to show that Geoff had been effected mentally by the situation after all this time, in our graphic match.

Something which I feel I learnt the most about was the editing stage of the production. As a group, we spent a long time editing our project, the sequence and the titles, this was a big learning curve and the amount of time spent on this allowed us all to become more familiar with using the editing software and the technology in general. Creating continuity and aiding the sequence to flow smoothly was a big boost skill which was improved. We came into some issues with making the sequence flow at one stage in particular so we had to go and reshoot several shots to be placed in-between. I think these re-shoots helped us to keep the attention of the audience and basically not be so boring. To be more ambitious, we used a graphic match between two locations of the character with the same expression, with the same composition at different settings. I feel this was planned well and the technology allowed us to complete this. We took a picture of the setup on our phones and recreated it with the tripod and camera position being the same.  There were no fancy transitions used but to help show that the location had changed in the graphic match, the background sound changes noticeably. But there were filters to show that there was a flashback to a past event when the shots appeared to and from the present. Another editing section was the titles. To do this we created a separate project and worked on it, experimenting with different ideas until we came to the conclusion that the fog on the black screen with the transition of the text would suit our context.

Using technology was obviously an important part of the whole thing for us. But to try and make the best thing we could, we tried to perfect the sound with sound recorders and royalty free music websites.  The sound recorders allowed us to take sound produced at different times and locations and then add it into the project later on in post-production. Although we tried to keep these away from the shot, at one shot taken had a small recorder shown, so our placement of these and vision of them on camera should be limited to none next time we use them, and instead perhaps record asynchronous sound instead of recording it as it happens on camera, adding it in later in post-production.

For this project, we did use lighting in several scenes to make sure it was perfect. Setting this up took several minutes each shot so we could all adjust it to a general agreement on the quality. I learnt that lighting is essential to keep continuity and bringing something into more depth in the frame. It didn’t have to be blaring light but can be a small dull shine to do this.