Hello and welcome to my blog, this is for my slasher film opening, Liar. The blog includes all research and notes. Enjoy!

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Evaluation Q6; Technologies

This is one of the evaluation questions for our film opening. "What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?"



During the making of our film opening, we learnt about new technologies and over time developed our skills on them. The main new technologies we used were Final Cut Pro, Garageband and LiveType.
We used LiveType to create our idents. At first, Poppy and I had never heard of the software. We learnt by experimenting with different techniques on it such as different live fonts where the font has an effect or becomes animated, and changing the position of the words. We created our three idents using a mixture of our own footage and livetype.
We used Garageband for creating our soundtrack which again, Poppy and I had never used before, and therefore didnt know how to use it. However we started by learning the basics and then experimented with different instruments and sounds. We also researched into which instruments fitted in with the slasher genre most. We found that typically, strings or synth effects are used, as these help to create suspense. We kept experimenting until we found what we wanted for our film opening. I think our soundtracks really make the movie and without them it wouldn’t be as effective, and as shown on our feedback, many people have commenting on the soundtrack being very effective.

Final Cut Pro is what we edited our film opening on, which Poppy and I hadn’t used before. So we had to start learning from scratch. At first we learnt the basic editing skills such as, how to use the blade tool. We then started looking at different effects to make the CCTV footage as realistic as possible. This is an example of the editing skills we used for our film. Firstly, we added the effects such as Bad TV, and Black and White. This made it black and white and the quality of the screen slightly distorted and fuzzy. We then experimented around until we got the timer section,  with which we made a certain date and time countdown appear on screen to make it seem more realistic. We also edited it by cutting certain parts from scenes, such as the stabbing which we felt seemed fake at first, as did audience feedback.
We changed certain shots on final cut to make them more effective like creating close ups and dutch angles. However, some of our experiments didn’t make it into our final cut, such as experimenting with cross fading.
The most useful tools to us were the different effects and colour changing tools on Final Cut Pro, as these really helped create a sinister and slasher feel to our movie.

Overall, the technology we used helped us create very close to what we imagined and planned for. I think if we had used analogue film it would have not had the same look or feel to the movie, especially with all the effects we used and editing. It would also have been alot more time consuming. This shows how digitisation is making film making a lot more accessible to everyone for cheaper.
If anything, a better quality camera could have helped us in our low level lighting scenes of which there were a lot of, but overall the equipment and technology used was very good and helped us create what we had invisioned.
This has shown us that we could create a movie, similar to Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee and Colin, which were both made by Indie film companies on microbudgets, using similar technology to what we used.

Overall we have learnt how to utilise all these new technologies to our advantage, using Garageband to create a soundtrack and being able to experiment with different sounds, we have learnt how to decide if it sounded good or not so good, we have learnt how to make a basic linear cut on Final Cut and also how to add effects, editing, and transitions to develop the movie even further into what we wanted it to be. 

No comments:

Post a Comment