The production of our film opening has been a great learning process as I
have become much more confident with filming and editing technology. I have kept a record of the whole process on Blogger, which is another skill that I learnt making it easy to communicate with the group and present findings and reflections.The test shoot was extremely important as I got the chance to refresh my camera skills and experiment with new hardware.
Hardware we used:
~Sony Mini DV (Digital Video) camera- which I can confidently set up and I am also aware of making sure that the batteries are fully charged before each shoot.
~The tripod- This helped us shoot steadily from different levels.
I have also developed my camera movement skills becoming smoother with my pans and tilts and more controlled with the zoom. One thing I learnt was that it is not a very good idea to use zoom as it causes pixilation and so the image deteriorates in quality, making it look less professional. This was a great problem for some of our lipstick shots, which
we could have used, did we not zoom.~External mike and headphones - These were extremely significant in our production as filming outside meant that it was essential to listen out for background noise such as cars, alarms, building work etc and work around it.
~Dolly –I learnt how to connect this to the camera as we considered using it for a track shot, however the passageway we wished to shoot in, was not wide enough and therefore made it impractical. This was unfortunate as the Dolly ensures a much smoother and quieter track than the chair we attempted to use.
~Pag light- this was useful in enhancing our shots, creating different effects depending on which filter was down. After our test-shoot we were able to see how much the lighting adds to the quality of our shots and made better use of it for the real shoot. We also created our own light with lamps and candles.
All this equipment was portable and therefore made our job much easier, especially when shooting outdoors.
Software
In Post-production I was able to develop my skills on the edit suite learning many new skills when using the editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro. After the Test Shoot, I learnt how to capture and record the shots from the video tape to the computer.
-I also learnt how to crop or using the razor tool, cut shots and place them along the timeline in a diagonal manner. These were the main things I needed to know about non-linear editing. However, in order to make the sequence more professional I learnt many new skills about adding effects and transitions such as the cross dissolve during the establishing shot, and the fading of titles using the ‘key-frames’.
- I also learnt how to adjust the brightness and contrast on each of the shots using video effects as well as the speed and duration in order to add slow motion on our final shot.
- Adding text, resizing and adjusting the colour was an essential skill as
it was needed to add the credits, which ran throughout the entire sequence. I also learnt how to upload new fonts to the programme from the site dafont.com- Using Audio effects, we were able to lower the treble to take out any camera sound.
We also added the non-diegetic sound track on the audio track along the timeline, where again key frames came in use when adjusting the volume during the conversation. For the conversation i was able to learn how to unlink the video from the sound and synchronize the diologue with the lip movements.
The software we used in fact had a lot more options that would help enhance our project and make it look more professional, however due to the limitations of our knowledge we could not use it to its full potential. All these processes however, were ones that I had not used before and therefore I have definitely developed my basic editing skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment