Evaluation Question 6

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

Hardware used: Camera, Tripod, Pag Light, Microphone, Headphones
Software used: Adobe Premiere Pro, LiveType, Adobe After Effects

I have certainly got a lot more comfortable using professional software and equipment.  Though I was already familiar with non-linear editing on Adobe Premier Pro for my GCSE project, studying Media at AS-Level is a lot more indepth and there is more time devoted to it so I felt like I really learnt a lot since I had a lot more time to experiment and learn from experience the way to do things properly. We spent a significant amount of time colour grading using ProCamp and the Three-Way Colour Corrector tool and undertook a lot of research to achieve the ‘film look’ to a professional standard.

Though our sequence didn’t contain dialogue, there was still a lot of audio editing to be done such as equalising the volume levels of each clip, applying a high-pass filter when Ava removes her headphones and removing the camera buzz from the interior shots. We completely changed our original idea of Ava dropping her purse at a busstop to the ‘isolation scene’ on the stairs as we felt the scene was a bit random and irrelevant and didnt help to propell the narrative forward.













We filmed this new short sequence 2 weeks after the original footage had been shot and on the camera we thought it looked fine but when we came to edit, the lighting was very low and grainy, teaching us the importance of using PAG lights in low light settings, regardless of what it looks like on the camera. We had to use the Degrainer tool in Adobe After Effects to make it less ‘noisy’ which we had never used before so we also familiarised ourselves with that software package. We also used LiveType to create the titles.

Using the manual settings on the camera allowed us to be very creative and more advanced with our shots  and cinematography, using focus pulls and deliberately out of focus shots to create mystery and a unique visual style.

As with many films lots of shots we planned never made the final sequence but filming them regardless only helped to further our skills and ease with the equipment. In hindsight there are a lot of things I would have done differently e.g lighting in the interior shots and using a tripod for every single shot as we did not intend a handheld shaky effect.