Evaluation Question 6 : Media Technologies

In the production of our opening two minutes of Necro5is, we used 3 different computer systems, those being a Windows laptop, Desktop and a Mac. The majority of the editing was done on the laptop due to its fast specs and accessibility/portability. However, the desktop did provide a system on which we could render the finished product fast, so that is where we did that. The Mac was used to compare the different editing softwares (which will be detailed later), but we decided that a Windows computer was more familiar and as a result decided to primarily use that. Also, we found that using a mouse made editing the product far easier, as it provided a better degree of accuracy than a trackpad could.

When filming the opening, we had to decide on what camera hardware we wanted to use. Since I personally own a DSLR camera (the Canon 700D) we decided to use that. This would be better than using the schools available cameras due to its variety of features, the opportunity of an interchangeable lens and the manual feature on the camera itself, that allowed us to change the ISO or light intensity of our recording, more towards our tastes. The DSLR also produced a higher quality of final image, making our finished product look very sleek and professional. The camera was digital, meaning that we could convert the footage straight into a format that could be interpreted by the computer and edited in our chosen software. There weren't many downsides to using the DSLR, other than its size and the fact that at one point it did run out of battery during a shoot.

When filming we decided to use the Rode Videomic in order to record high quality audio for our film. This replaced the poor quality of the camera, which was quite echoed and buzzy. The mic allowed us to capture ambient sound or dialogue, both features we used in our final production. The downside of using the mic was that we had to purchase batteries as it burns through them quickly and it also provided some problems with not having turned it on and as a result having to reshoot some scenes, which in hindsight didn't matter as the majority of our opening has the dialogue muted anyway.

In order to set our product apart from other texts, we chose to include drone shots. These were filmed on the DJI Phantom 4 drone, which is one of the best drones on the market (for the average consumer at least). We borrowed this off of a family member of one of the group, who also flew it for us (to make sure we did not crash it!). Using the drone allowed us to get birds-eye-view shots of our setting, the forest, in extremely high quality (4K). These shots added a sense of prestige to our opening, as it is not something that is often seen. The disadvantages of using it were the time it consumed in order to prepare it and get it into flight, alongside the fact that it is very expensive and as a result required a great deal of care whilst in use. Despite this. I would definitely like to use it for future productions.

In regards to editing software, we sampled three different programs before concluding to use Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. We came to this choice because it was the most effective to use, containing lots of different features and a dedicated, detailed timeline and also because it could be used on Windows computers (unlike iMovie, which is only on apple products). Premiere Pro has the ability to change a clip's opacity, volume and motion (placement and zoom on the screen). Changing something like the opacity allowed us to create a strobing effect, used to tease the sixth character throughout the clip. Alongside this, it has over one hundred built in effect pre-sets, for example a warp effect or a black and white effect (both of which we used in our finished product). Also, Premiere Pro provides a lot of colour correction options, that of which we used extensively on almost every single clip in our work in order to colour grade it so that it fit our genre more clearly. It also allowed our 4K drone files to be handled, despite having a lot of frame-rate lag before we rendered the project (which is due to the computers specifications, not the software). The other programs we used were Movie Maker (for our prelim), iMovie (for our first draft) and Final Cut Pro just to test it out. The former two were just too simple to work for the final product and also did not contain enough options to change the clips how we wanted. The final program was good and had a abundance of features but is not available on Windows, so we didn't use it.

Finally, I wanted to cover all of the different web-pages I used in order to construct my blog and present my research, pre-production and post-production elements. The blogging site I used was blogger, mainly due to its ease of use and newbie accessibility. I used a wide-variety of web 2.0 tools to present my work, including; powtoon, prezi, emaze and coggle. Powtoon is a tool that allows you to create animated cartoons in order to present information. Prezi is a presentation tool that adds more movement to presentations, following a set path instead of a slide by slide layout. Emaze is your normal presentation software but is free and online. Coggle is a mind mapping site, an example of which is above. All of the web 2.0 tools aided my understanding of different topics because they put it into a more interactive and interesting format than just bland blog posts.