CF: Evaluation; Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from making your film opening?

• We used a blog in order to allow us to collaboratively share our ideas and record our research, it also allowed us to recieve feedback from fellow students and teachers, which we felt would allow us to maxmise the standard of our work. Blogging is very practical for group work as it is open source in that the designated users can add to and edit the information from any device connected to the internet. The features of “Blogger” also allowed us to certify only people that we chose to be able to gain access to the blog, such as ourselves and the teachers.

• We used a Canon 550D with a number of lenses; we predominantly used a 50mm lens, and sometimes used an extension tube to allow us to achieve a number of macro-shots. We used a variety of other pieces of equipment such as a tripod to allow us to get smooth shots, and we used a steadi-cam to achieve this on shots where we felt the camera needed to move. We also used a track and dolly so that we could produce tracking shots.We did not use any sort of artificial lighting for our outdoor scenes, and only used regular ceiling lights when shooting in our interior scenes.

• Here is a picture of a track and dolly, which is very similar to that of the one we used in the production of the "Damnation" opening. It allowed us to create tracking shots that were smooth and gave our video a much larger variety of camera techniques.

• We also discovered a number of techniques concerning the equipment that allowed us to optimizethe standard of our production. A key example of this was how we were able to achieve the correct ‘white-balance’. To do this, we took a photo of a plain white piece of paper, and then set the white-balance in accordance to this photo. This allowed us to ensure that the footage that we shot outdoors at night was not grainy, and instead sharp and crisp.

• Here is a picutre of the on screen display controls that allows users to control and change the white-balance of a camera, which as I previously said, was essential for us to shoot a video that would not look grainy at night, and instead appears sharp and crisp.

• When shooting the production of our film opening for "Damnation", we encountered a number of problems related to a wide variety of aspects which we had to overcome, sometimes by improvising. A key example of this, was on our first film shoot, we were without the track and dolly, but still wanted to achieve some smooth tracking shots. To overcome this problem, we used two longboards (long skateboards), we set them parallel to each other, and rest the three tripod legs on the two decks.We would then push the boards along, thus creating the same effect as a track and dolly. This proved to be practical, but due to the improvised nature, it was maybe not as effective as what the actual track and dolly m ay have been. The displayed our use of our DIY device on a prevous post to the blog. The picture below shows this.

• The main difference between the production of our film opening, in comparison to that of a real film production, is that due to the small number of crew members, each member had to take on more than one role, and we often shared roles. A role that was shared for example was the editing process, in that we delegated seperate shots and sequences to be edited by each member of the group. Some of the roles that I felt that I took on was the production of props that were used in the final film opening, such as the map and the fake blood etc.
•  Another role I took on was being in charge of equipment. Obviously though, the three members of our group shared the roles of the creative triangle, as we all contributed in the writing, production and directing processes of our film opening. However, the production process of our film opening was similar to the production of a real film in a number of ways. On a more simple note, we followed 'unwritten guidelines' of more commercially made movies, such as the 180 degree rule.
• Another aspect of our film that is more traditional of a large budget film rather than an independently made film, is that we had to carry out a health and safety risk assessment, and had to inform people of the local area that we were shooting footage for a film for school work.

• The picture below shows the 180 degree, where the camera can move anywhere within the semi-circle, but it shouldn’t stray across the read line. Otherwise, cut shots between the talking characters would have them facing the same direction. The picture below displays the 180 degree rule graphically.

• The editing process for our group was significantly lengthy due to a number of aspects, most notably though is the use of montage edit, the large use of special effects and the use of motion tracked titles (both the movie name title as well as some of the credits). For editing, we predominantly used Adobe premiere for editing clips, colour correction etc. For designing and motion tracking titles, we used Adobe After effects. One of the shots in our film opening included the dropping of what the audience can infer to be a bullet casing, to model and animate this shot, Cinema 4D was used.
•  The first process of editing was looking back at our different takes of each shot and scene, and deciding which take we liked the most, we would then import these clips into premiere, and put them into their basic order. The next stage of post-production was choosing a font to use when displaying the name of our movie ("Damnation"). Using www.Dafont.com, we found a font named VTKS seven, which had a very discordant and scratchy persona to it, which is what we were trying to convey, and so we down-loaded the font and decided to use it. Next, we had to decide what kind of transitions to use between shots.
• We found a number of images on the internet consisting of a black screen and with scratch marks, these images appeared very rough. We used these images as transitions, but put them on to a low opacity, and made them appear to shake, again, this added to the theme of discordance. The fast cutting rate that we had been planning to use was easy to achieve, we simply used very short pieces from each shot we wanted to use. Although the Canon 550D presented colour extremely well, we decided to further enhance the appearnece of the shots by colour correcting many of the shots, this was done in Adobe premiere elements which made it extremely easy.
• Below is a picture of the DSLR camera we used to shoot the footage for our film (canon 550D), as well as pictures of the 50mm lens with an F/1.4 aperture we used, and the extension tubes that we used which allowed us to achieve macro-shots.

• The 50mm lens with the F/1.4 aperture allowed the camera to receive large amounts of light, and this was essential for us when shooting footage at night to avoid resulting with grainy and bad quality shots.
• The use of the extension tube was absoloutely vital in making our choice of camera shots stand out, as it allowed us to produce extreme-close up shots of items, objects or characters. To create such shots, most would think that we used another lens, but due to our micro-budget, we decided to use an extension tubes, which are financially effective. A macro-shot in our film opening is displayed below, where we wanted to show the discordance in the antagonist's behaviour, a macro shot was used to show an extreme-close up to the hand of the murderer.

• I have also learnt a lot in terms of creating buzz for a media product, to do this, I have used a variety of methods, but the most effective ones have been the use of viral marketing through Web 2.0. Firstly, I posted the film opening to "Damnation" on my social network pages, thus allowing friends, family and people I know to view the media product, many of these people then shared the video with their social group, and this carried on until we had a substantial amount of views. We have also been promoting our film opening on "hot-pages" (pages which are receiving a lot of visits on YouTube and the internet generally), we found that the best way to do this, was find "Youtubers" that have a loyal audience, who will view every video from a page that they subscribe to, as soon as this video would be released, we would post our film opening on that page.