Evaluation - Technologies

Evaluation - Technologies

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

     Pre-production

The only piece of outstanding technology we used during pre-production was celtx which is a free online screenwriting software which we used to format our script. Sam had used this product before so was familiar with it, and it proved very useful in the process of writing and planning our film. We could have written the film in Microsoft Word, or even by hand, but using celtx made it much quicker and easier to format our idea into a screenplay style.

     Production

Instead of using the school's camcorders for our film, we decided to use Sam's Canon 600D DSLR camera. DSLRs (Digital Single Lens Reflex) generally have a more cinematic quality to them than camcorders because of their larger sensors (APSC in the case of the Canon 600D), plus they have the ability to use interchangeable lenses. Because we knew the film would be set at night and would therefore be very dark, we chose to use lenses which opened up to f/1.4 and f/1.7 to let in as much light as possible. However this also meant that the depth of field was very shallow meaning that focus was an issue. Fortunately Sam had some experience in focussing manually while shooting wide open, so it was less of an issue than it could have been.

We used two lenses in our film, the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 and the Yashica 50mm f/1.7. They are both quite sharp and opened up very wide to let lots of light in. However, neither of the lenses has IS (Image stabilisation) and so we had to use a camera rig to stabilise the footage.

The one major drawback of using DSLRs for filming is the poor quality of the on-camera microphone. If we had dialogue in the film, we would have had to use a boom pole with an additional audio recorder, which we did not have enough crew members to use. However, as we didn't need dialogue, we attached a Rode Videomic to the top of the camera to pick up ambient noises, and decided to record most of the sounds through foley and add them in post.

To light the film, we used one 800W tungsten redhead with some CTO (colour temperature orange) to act as a key when the spy sits down at the table. We also used a small table lamp to illuminate the hallway. By pointing it to the floor, and bouncing it off some CTB (colour temperature blue) it gave the light a very diffused quality which contrasted well with the key light at the table. We also turned on a bathroom light in the corridor to stop it from being too dark (as can be seen on our behind the scenes video).

     Post-production

We edited the film on Final Cut Pro X on an iMac. Before this film, none of us in the group were experienced in using macs, but we very quickly became used to the operating system (although there was some difficulty coming to grips with the macs at first as inverted scrolling can be very annoying). Nonetheless it was quite easy to learn and the computer was very quick which meant that render times were low so we could experiment with various edits easily. We exported the film in ProRes which was a high quality option so we could preserve image quality.

We had to record foley for the opening, and so we used the Zoom H1 because it is a very compact and easy to use audio recorder with a built in microphone. It was easy to bring to school when necessary and can record very high quality audio.

     Overall

Throughout the making of this film, we learnt a lot about how to make technology work for us, and not the other way around. We learnt how to confidently edit on Final Cut Pro X, how to use macs, and how to use blogger.