Evaluation Question 6- Sophie

Question 6

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

In the main task we used a big variety of different technologies, for example filming and editing, and learnt a lot about them throughout the course of the entire project.

To actually film our video we had to originally learn how to use the camera, the right procedures and methods and the correct framing for each particular shot.

We originally struggled to be able to get the correct white balance, as we didn't know how to set it on the camera, however, in this product we were able to analyse the camera and how it worked, therefore being able to set the white balance on the camera.

no white balance

set white balance

We have learnt that if you don't set the white balance on every shot it makes a big difference, making the shot seem very unsaturated and unrealistic, and so we made sure to set the white balance on our cameras before shooting for any shot for the final product. We also learnt that if you set the white balance on some shots and not others, it would affect the continuity of the video. The screen grabs above are to show the difference, the left image shows the colouring isn't as bright or as saturated as it should be, if we had set the white balance the shot would have been a lot clearer too. The right image shows one of our shots from our final product, where we had set the white balance, the wall is very white and has a much clearer tone to it. If we hadn't set the white balance it would have had quite murky, grey colouring.

We found it quite difficult to get the correct framing for our video as a lot of our shots included our actor running, so to keep the focus on him at all times was rather difficult. However, we learnt how to use a tripod to put the camera on, it moves very smoothly, therefore we were able to keep the him in the frame rather well without having to move the camera ourselves. As our final video is called "Noose" we wanted to include a close up shot of an actual Noose in our setting, the woods. This proved to be rather difficult to get the correct framing as we had to use zoom on the camera to get better shot of the Noose in the tree. This is a screen grab of our final shot of the Noose, this was a very difficult shot to get the correct framing of, I think it could have been better, although we did learn how to zoom and get the correct angle on the camera which proved to be more successful.

One issue we had with the camera was that we had to use two separate cameras for each setting. This was a slight problem as one camera had better quality than the other, this wasn't very noticeable, but was however rather annoying when it came to editing as we had to make sure all of the clips were similar quality so it didn't affect the continuity of the video. The lighting was pretty simple to use, we used a spot light for almost all of our shots. The only thing we really had to learn about the lighting was how the wheel on the side changed the brightness of the lighting and when to use it.

Another thing that we had to learn how to use was the mac; this was the hardest piece of technology to work with. We used the mac to edit our video using Final Cut Pro and Garage Band. Personally, I found Final Cut Pro rather difficult to use however, after learning how to use it properly it wasn't too hard to edit on, although very frustrating. We found out how to apply filters, colour correction, distortions and how to transition with more than just a normal cut, such as wipe and dissolve. We used Garage Band for sound editing, this was easy to get used to using as it had almost everything you needed, as on the side it gave you all of the parallel sounds you could use. Overall, I personally, learnt a lot about technologies from conducting this product as I had never really used any of these before, other than Garage Band.