Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

 

 

I feel that as a group we have progressed dramatically since producing our preliminary task, especially in the areas of sound, camera angles and editing.

 

Firstly, we didn’t edit our preliminary task but instead filmed the whole thing in one take and then put the clips together into one video using … This shows the huge jump we took from the Preliminary task to our final film, which features a wide variety of editing. For our final film, we used iMovie to edit, experimenting with a range of cuts and transitions such as dissolve, fade to black and fade to white. We also decided to use a filter on one shot of Olivia to give it a dream-like feel to reveal that this image was a thought in Phoebe’s head. None of the shots in our preliminary task feature filters. As well as this, we learnt to ‘stabilise shaky shots’, which was useful as some of the shots that we took on the beach in our film were hand-taken. Another skill we learnt whilst producing our final film was how to create titles, which was of course vital as our task was to create the opening title sequence of a thriller film.

 

Through watching back our preliminary task, we learnt the importance of music and the vast effect that it has on the overall film. Our preliminary task did not feature any music and we noticed the almost empty feeling this gave to the piece, therefore, we carefully selected appropriate music to create the eerie tone we wanted for our final film.

 

In terms of the actual filming process, in our final film we used a tripod which made a big difference to the overall professionality of our filming. Through the location of our preliminary task having little access to lighting, we realised how important factor lighting is. This was one of the reasons that influenced our decision to film on a beach as filming outside gives an open source of light so the picture was clear. Another progression that we made from preliminary task to final product was that for our final film we learnt to buffer out background noise which meant there were no distracting factors.

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

For this course, we have had to learn multiple things from scratch, the most significant being learning to set up an easily navigable blog and learning to use editing software (in our case, iMovie).

 

Blogger.com

Learning to use blogger proved to be challenging at times but overall was an enjoyable experience. There was a vast amount of useful online tools to help learn how to use blogger as well as us having the year 13 subject leaders to answer any questions that we had. We used blogger.com to record all of our research and planning, making it easy to locate as it is all in one place.

 

iMovie

iMovie was the programme that we used to put together all of our filming and create our final product ‘Vanished’. Originally, we began editing in the school peer suite with the software that they had in there, but found it very hard to understand. Another group was using iMovie to edit their film and had recommended it so we downloaded it onto Emma’s apple Mac. This was much easier to use. Using iMovie, we could use a variety of transitions and cuts, filter shots, steady images, remove background noise, add voice overs, and add text and more.

 

The Camera

We were given a video camera by subject department at school. We had little previous experience in using video cameras as normally we would use our phone camera, but it didn’t take long to learn how it worked. By the end we were able to film with the camera confidently and kept it on a tripod to make sure the shots were stable.