Eval Q6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? 

Recording Hardware:
We used - DSLR camera -


Before starting media studies, I had never properly used a recording camera before so I had to learn the different aspects of it. We underwent activities as a class using these cameras such as a swede and prelim. With both activities I had the role of cinematographer, and carried this role onto our actual media product. I mostly learnt the basics through trial and error. Through the entire process of filming our opening, I learnt new things along the way. It allowed me to play around with the depth of field and manual focus creating very professional scenic shots. For the actual making of our production, I had the role of  the cinematographer so learning about the DSLR camera was vital. It was important that I understood various different terminology and knew how to apply this terminology. I learnt various bits through trial and error. An example of this is lighting - due to that fact we shot our film opening over different days, the lighting was different. I didn't pay much notice to lighting as the weather was relatively similar, but in fact we soon found our that lighting had a massive affect. There was in fact a clear difference in lighting. So I quickly learnt how to change the lighting to look right. I also quickly picked up more about depth of field and came to grips with what looks affective and what doesn't. I found that because depth of field has an impact on both the aesthetic and technical quality of a picture.

Sometimes you’ll want to use an extensive depth of field in order to keep everything sharp. A classic example is when you’re photographing a landscape, where generally the most desirable outcome is to capture detail from the foreground to the horizon. Other times, a shallow depth of field will be preferable. It enables you to blur background and foreground details, causing distractions to melt away and allowing you to direct viewers to the focal point in a picture.

SD card-

I also had never before transferred material from an SD card onto a computer, never mind Final Cut, so this was also a new but gradually simple experience. With the help of others, I quickly became confident when doing this.

Tripod-
The tripod was a piece of equipment used throughout our film. A very large majority of our shots were shot on the tripod making it a very vital piece of equipment within our project. The tripod is extremely simple to use but extremely important as its vital the shots are steady and smooth. There is very minimal explaining required when talking about the tripod due to its simplicity. If we didn't have access to a tripod we would have had to film handheld, which would had given us unsteady, shake shots. However for some shots handheld filming was used. These handheld shots were intact more difficult to edit and therefore the tripod helped to speed up the editing process proving to be beneficial. 

Boom mic- 
A boom mic is the piece of equipment we used to record our dialect. This was the first time we had approached this piece of equipment. I wasn't in fact in charge of the sound but I helped to set up and am fully aware of how the apparatus functions. Like the other apparatus, we learnt through trial and error. It took us a few attempts to get the mic close enough to the actors without getting the mic in the shot. We had to vary our shots so the mic didn't enter any shots. The boom mic was very useful to us as it recorded our speech on a loud bridge over water very clearly.

Garageband-
This is the software we used to create our soundtrack for our film. Previously I had only played around with garageband but had never created a final product. Generally garageband is very complex and takes time to adjust to this complexity. At first I found garageband very difficult and couldn't quite get to grips with it. I began by using basic tools such as the trim tool, position tool, blade tool etc.. Our film required a rather complex soundtrack due to the situation. We thought that the music is a major aspect to our particular film as it creates certain types of emotion to the viewer. Our soundtrack involved remixing the song 'to build a home'. In order to do this more complex tool had to be applied. We had to change the bpm (beats per minute) in order for the two different beats to mix and run smoothly. The beats per minute could be changed on the top bar. Another complex but conveniant tool that I learnt to apply was the flex tool. This allowed me to change the bpm without changing the pitch.
This was vital when mixing the two beats into each other. The beat that was mixed into the song was a loop found. Loops are short looping sequences of beats/sounds. These were very simple to use. the whole point in mixing these two contrasting beats is that in our film opening there is a jump between two characters and their situation/environment. We wanted a slow, slightly depressing sound overplaying Michaels situation as we wanted to create a upsetting mood. We then tried to replicate a more grime sound whilst overplaying Kieran. This software has been extremely useful in the making of our film opening as it provided us with a large variety of pre-recorded music, meaning we didn't have to record our own music. This saved us a huge amount of time.

Blogger-
This was affectively our text book for media as it was what we recorded all of our progress on. It was also the first time I had ever used blogger. At first blogger seemed like a complex thing to use, but soon realised it was very simple and efficient. Blogger also allowed me to receive feedback from teachers and others.

Final Cut-
Final cut is the piece of software that allowed us to edit our shots to then create a finalised product. Before the making of our production, I had used final cut briefly when making our swede and prelim. I found final cut very difficult to begin with as there are many different aspects of it that can be learnt. To begin with I used the basic tools and appliances such as the elect tool, blade tool, hand tool, zoom tool etc.. A majority of my final cut experience was learnt through trial and error. After mastering these basic tools, i then moved on to slighly more complex tools such as the speed altering tool, crop, transitions and effects.  We sped up our final shot and the train passing to give is a time-lapse affect. We also had to crop a few clips where the boom mic accidentally entered the shot. Due to our genre of film being social realism, our film opening didn't need much editing. Social realism contain very little editing to create a more realistic approach. Social realism films will focus on aspects such as cinematography. Most of our editing involved putting the shots together and varying the length of the clips.