Evaluation Question 6

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

In order to construct our film opening, we used various technologies, of which can be separated into hardware and software.

It was necessary to use a lot more than just a simple camcorder. We needed a tripod to do steady shots, a boom mic to pick up sound from further away and a boom pole to holster it, a battery to power the camera and a smaller one to use as back up, two tapes and headphones to check the sound. We also used several studio lights in order to illuminate our shots and give them more depth.

Although we didn’t use it in the final sequence, we used the manual setting on our cameras in order to practise focus pulling, which we accomplished after a few tries. There were several settings on the camera, such as white balance, or colour correction that we didn’t use because the shots didn’t need them.

In the process of using the lights, we learned that in order to illuminate a shot, you need a minimum of 3 lights, two in the front and one behind to cancel out the shadows. I also personally learnt that handling the ‘barn doors’ on lights without gloves is a bad idea.

Another thing we learned was that compatibility was an issue with some of the technology, for example, the headphones we used didn’t work with the camera, meaning that we ended up with static from the speakers. The microphone still picked up the sound, but we weren’t able to check it, so we had to hope it worked.

I used three pieces of software during production and post production, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. With Photoshop, I coloured in the initial pencil sketches of the character designs, as well as colouring in the drawings for the opening credits. I also used filters to create the comic style effect (we called it the Lichtenstein effect).

I created the entire opening credit sequence in After Effects. I used shapes as the crawling bars and motion paths to make them move across the screen, mimicking the Spiderman 2 webs. I had to play with the speeds and paths of most of the bars in order to shorten the sequence. The first version was about a minute long, which is about half our sequence. The revised version was about 35 seconds. The problem with After Effects was that music didn’t work in it for some reason, meaning that I couldn’t fit the titles to the music. Another problem we faced initially was that the names of the actors passed slightly too quickly. We later rectified this in Premiere, by using Time Warp and adjusting the speed of the clip in little segments.

I used a black shape to use as a transition. One picture would be covered and then the next would be revealed a few seconds later. I then added a green screen to the last bar, so that as it passed, it would reveal the first shot of the scene.

In Premiere, in addition to capturing, inserting into the timeline and cutting down, things I learned from my year 10 TV trailer. I also had to adjust the volume and start position of all the music in order for it to work properly in the sequence. For example, during the pencil sequence, the music peaks just as Jessica says ‘Hello’. The music had to crescendo into something epic, but also had to end appropriately so that it didn’t seem like we’d picked random bits of music.

In addition to the Adobe software, I also used a blogging website (Blogger) to keep a log of what I’d done in the way of production and post production, as well as a place to write up my thoughts and ideas. We also used the internet to find our music, a site called Audio Network (http://www.audionetwork.com/).