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

By Fabiha Ferdous

Final Cut Pro• Throughout my whole project I have learnt how to use the software Final Cut

Pro. In Final Cut Pro there were two windows on the left window we could view the scene that we only clicked on and on the right window we could see our footage that was on our timeline. This helped us see whether we had any errors that we had to fix up. One of the common mistakes we made was always leaving tiny gaps, we knew how to get rid of those problems as we used to zoom into our timeline spotting the gaps.

• Another way we got rid of this problem was a blade tool which allowed us to get rid of certain bits of the scene which were not needed for our film. I found this tool extremely useful to use.

• Moreover, we learnt how to create jump cuts, as we cut one part of the scene and added another part to speed the process. A complex parallel edit was quite challenging to do as we were unsure of what order we wanted our narrative to be, we found it difficult to make the actions of the boys and girls similar to show contrast. We had to constantly cut different scenes and use more than one timeline to. It took us a while to order our clips as we filmed many scenes and had go through all of them seeing which one is the best to use.

• Whilst editing our movie we were still learning how to use Final Cut, we had many difficulties with this software, and it made the process of editing much more longer and harder. We as media students do not have all the skills and knowledge of Final Cut Pro and are not exerts in this field.

• Overall, using Final Cut Pro has definitely improved my editing skills, I am now a confident editor and am ready to go into A2 and edit a whole music video.

Editing on Final Cut Pro

Logic Pro

We had a teacher come in to teach us bout Logic pro. This software is used to create music and we used this to create our soundtrack.

In Logic pro we learnt that in order to make a piece of soundtrack we had to use 5-6 instruments. Therefore, we needed a variety of music and loops such as stings, bass, drum and flute. This was rather difficult to do as Logic Pro was very complex to use due to the fact that there were many sub categories of different instruments.

Before starting our music we had a guide song. This was Radioactive by Imagine Dragons. We chose this song because we thought that in the very beginning of the song where there are strings, in the music; it would be suitable for the girl. When the beat drops in the song, we thought that it would be good to use for the boy. However, as we were doing parallel edit we needed a piece of music that was neutral. This music should be of a high pitch for the girl representing her innocence and low pitch for the boy representing his aggressive character. This piece of music was extremely difficult to make as we constantly had to fade in and out for the different characters.

Furthermore, another thing we learned was that we cannot play the same instrument twice as it makes it boring for the audience. If we were using the same instrument, we had to add or take away another instrument. This was rather challenging as we had to go through more sounds and had to constantly change the pitch of the music. We found the sound editing to be more complex than the initial editing. But I feel that we successfully acquired a very high level of skill in the software. If I had more I would have like to have doesn’t more time on titles and effects. I feel this was our weakest area.

Creating my soundtrack on Logic Pro

Blogger• Blogger is a social network site where we had to put all our work

in, our research and planning. I found blogger very complicating to use in the beginning as everything like a list, making it difficult to access certain pages.

• Organising the research was not hard to do as during this time we didn’t have to worry about our coursework in terms of filming. However, once we had to started planning our documents and had to keep on track with our production, this was difficult to do as we were really stressed out about filming during this stage. Also, for our planning we had to always provide evidence, for example, we had to always put our work to and explain what we were doing. We had to insert many videos such as our Preliminary Task, by uploading it on YouTube then on Blogger.

• When we researched existing media films we made had to look into our genre and analyse movie openings in terms of camera work, editing, sound and mis en scene, providing clear and detailed research. I found this useful as it inspired me to add a few things in my film opening.

• I believe that I was successful at using blogger as I was easily able to upload pictures and videos, show detailed research and planning.

Blogger

Motion

We used the software Motion 4 to create our titles. Motion had a lot of different fonts for us to choose from and lots of behaviours. We chose the ones that were most relevant to our film opening/genre.

When researching titles from romantic movies we found that most of them were written in a ‘swirly’ font. We were inspired by this and used the font Apple Chancery to create our title.

We also looked at behaviours and wanted to do a fade in and out of the title, in a slow pace fitting in with our genre as it looks elegant. We used the behaviour scale in and out to do this.

The colour of our font was white, we thought this would be the best as it was the most neutral colour. Our narrative has a ‘gangster’ element and is rather girly. Therefore, we thought it should be as neutral as possible.

Overall, I think our film titles could have been better, even though it is simple I felt that it was lacking in dynamism. Also, we did not have much time to do our titles, if i had more time i would have perfected it as much as possible

Motion

Filming We used DLSR Cameras to film our openings. For our filming we were given a camera and a tripod.

We were aware that we had to use a variety of camera shots, such a high/low angle shots and long/close up shot.

We used high angle shots for the girl as this made her seem more feminine, portraying her as innocent and vulnerable . And for the boy we used low angle shots to portray him as dominant.

We had a tripod to film most of our scenes. We were able to pan up and down also pan left and right. The tripod also changed in length and this made it really useful for us to get steady shots. However, we found it very difficult to film certain scenes such as the establishing shots of the flowers and the dirty grass. We wanted those shots to be really low therefore, we had had to record those shots with a steady hand. It took us a very long time to record these shots. If we were given a budget we would have invested in more equipment such as a tripod which goes very high and low. We would purchase a proffessional camera for the quality to look better.

Overall, in terms of filming I think we were pretty

successful as we used a variety of shots. In future if I film again, I would use more

equipment, such as the tripod dolly. This will help us familiarise other media

equipment and had a variety of different shots.