E VA LUAT I O N Q U E S T I O N 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing the product?

Research

During my research process, I found out how important it is to look at other products for inspiration, my first step was to take a look on youtube for examples of opening sequences other students had made in previous years, one main video that caught our eye was an opening sequence titled The Edge, which used a very interesting style of credits, however we did not have much experience with editing and did not know how we could replicate such a design with the software we had. We decided to contact the creator – Rory Campbell – for guidance on how we could create a similar effect.

Another step of our research was to compare our concepts with the designs of hollywood blockbuster movies, for this we used the site http://www.artofthetitle.com which allows you to view many different opening sequences and also provides some brief reviews of the opening and credit sequences. These allowed us to review openings for films from our genre and find out what makes them good in their situation.

This stage also focused on market research, this involved surveying people to see what they would want from an opening sequence for a movie of the crime genre, I uploaded the audio recording from our survey and posted it on youtube in order to then post it to my blog, the recording can be found here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMXwmEOOdfI

Planning

During our planning phase, we reviewed all of our ideas we had come up with during the research phase, and narrowed them down based on cost, the amount of items needed, compliance with market research and how complex it would be to create. During this time we also contacted 2 of the local shopping centres to see if it would be possible to organise to film in one of their jewellery stores in the centre for our initial idea of a jewellery store heist, however we didn’t get any response from them, so we altered our plans to be set in a house, though we did not come up with the finalised story for it until later on. Once we had decided on the idea of a house robbery, we needed to take some photos for a location reconnaissance, through this process I learnt how to take shots that represent the location and how to properly carry out a location reconnaissance. The location recon shots are available here http://slide.ly/view/00c025308359f7e9a25f7de28e7e2b17 as well as on my blog.

Another part of our planning was organising the costumes, we had to make sure that we knew what everyone was wearing and what clothes everyone was bringing. The costume plan is also available on my blog at this link http://filmapocalypse.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/54/

We also had to organise a schedule so that we knew which actors were turning up on which days, what we could film, what costumes we would need and what our timeframe for filming was.

Construction

Throughout the construction process I learned a lot, at first we were having a few technical issues with the tripod, for example it was not sitting correctly or kept locking up, but over time we found out how to fix these issues and make the most out of our tripod.

We also had some issues with our camera, from complex problems such as the camera not filming correctly, to simple problems such as one of our cast members putting the new batteries in the wrong way around, we solved some of the more technical issues through searching the internet for a troubleshooting forum or checking the manual of the camera for instructions on how to modify certain settings.

The editing process was quite new to both Luke and I, myself especially as I had never used Sony Vegas at all, let alone delving into the complex side of editing and adding after effects. To overcome any queries or problems we had with our editing process, we searched for information in the form of tutorials or guides on websites such as youtube and Sony Vegas forums. By following such tutorials we were able to create the desired effects for the flashbacks and gunshots, as well as adding non-diegetic sounds and music to the opening sequence, I do not believe the opening sequence would have been as good quality if we hadn’t found out how to do the editing we did.

Evaluation

For my evaluation, I have used excel in order to create pie charts (like the one shown below) which illustrate the responses we got from our questionnaires, I was tasked with making the charts and it has allowed be to renew previous knowledge of pie charts from subjects such as maths, and apply them to a new area of work. I also assisted Luke with his evaluation videos, in which he edited in a background and pictures to represent his target audience, including the graphs, this helped me to further build upon my understanding of Sony Vegas and showed me how such techniques can be applied to all areas of media and to all manner of different products.

For the evaluation I also took part in Luke’s radio-style recording, in which we talked about how we had improved our skills through doing this opening sequence and the problems we had faced. This helped me to understand how the radio station works, what the different features do, how many different things can be applied into different areas of work and ultimately helped me build on my confidence.