The main pieces of technology used in the making of this film were the camera itself and Final Cut Pro. We didn’t find a great deal out about using the camera as the preliminary task had familiarized us with its use. To make our film really work it was the editing that needed to be of a particularly high standard anyway, and so we learnt a lot about Final Cut Pro, from how to colour correct and create special effects to how to fade music and take out unnecessary diegetic sound.
Before we started to properly edit our film we spent around an hour just playing around with the different video effects that Final Cut Pro has on offer, as we knew the shot that could make or break our film required special effects. Originally we found an effect called ‘Kaleidoscope’ which did pretty much exactly what we wanted. The problem we had was incorporating the image we felt we required, which we wanted to appear momentarily. After delving a little more into the features of Final Cut Pro though, we realised we could create the desired effect without using an image. This was down to the colour corrector tool, which actually proved even more useful later on in our editing. By cutting the piece of film zooming towards the eye into four, we were able to create a blue and white police light effect, as you can see in our film. We felt this was a perfect solution to our problem as it still connoted what we wanted to, and added to the mystery surrounding the opening scene at the same time.
The colour corrector tool also came in handy when we were editing the scrolling newspaper shot as we made an error we almost couldn’t correct. The problem was that we had to reshoot when the camera first starts scrolling as there was a large amount of unsteadiness as the downward movement began. When we filmed that small part again though, we failed to take the lighting into account and so the two pieces of film were lit completely differently and simply didn’t go together. The first thing we thought about was using the colour corrector tool, though the lighting was so different that we weren’t sure we would be able to correct the colour enough. Fortunately though, after some serious experimenting, we got nearly identical lighting, which made the shots look feasible together.
Final Cut Pro was also useful when it came to sorting sound out. We learnt how to remove diegetic sound and also how to fade sound in and out. Knowing how to remove diegetic sound meant we could take away the wind, which then didn’t spoil the atmosphere we wanted to create. The creation of that atmosphere was also helped by our ability to fade music in and out, which gave us more flexibility around how we actually used the music.
Another piece of equipment that proved helpful was the Dolly. This helped us to keep the moving shot in our film (where the camera moves towards the newspaper) steadier. Having not used this in the filming of our preliminary task, what we learnt about the Dolly was that it can only really be used on smooth surfaces, as the wheels are not cut out to handle bumpy terrain, meaning a less steady shot is captured. We had to reshoot a few times before we got a predominantly steady movement.
Excellent evaluation
ReplyDelete