Evaluation part 4 - Adam RUTHEFORD

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology played a major role in every stage of our film making process, from the original research right through to putting the product on disc. This is also the case with both Ancillary tasks. Looking back on the work I have done I feel much more confident using media technology and feel I have honed my skills well. The following document where I used technology in my product:

Initial Research

Before we came up with the idea for our film I did a lot of research on British short films, analysing them, and working out what short-film conventions they used in order to help me with my product. To do this I used the BBC film network (http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/) which allowed me to access hundreds of short films. New technology such as this and the BBC's iplayer have completely revolutionised how people watch TV and film, as people can just watch it at any time and don't even really need a television any more. 

Planning

• The main source of technology we used while planning our film was a stills camera. We used this to take pictures of our location in order to assist us with our storyboard and to give us a better idea of the lighting and space that we'd be dealing with. The stills we took can be found in the January section of this blog.
• We decided to do our storyboard as an animatic, using a camera to film the shots we'd drawn. We wanted to do it this way because not only would it be easier to load on to the blog, but it is also a better way to get an idea of how long each shot we filmed would be.
• The social-networking site Facebook was incredibly useful in getting ideas and feedback for our original idea. We created a group on Facebook and gave our audience a choice of two titles: "Three Words" or "Shit". Without this technology we would not have been able to interact with our audience in such a way, which would have also been disastrous for our feedback we received after finishing the film.

Filming

• Filming our product was the first time I have ever used a HD camera before. We decided to use this as we wanted our film to be as high quality as possible in order to end up with a more professional finish on our film. On first using the camera I had to re-teach myself all the things I could do on the XM2 cameras such as:
• Set the white balance
• learning how to record and what back the footage
• inserting and ejecting the tape
• setting the contrast, brightness and focus

          The latter of these turned out to be a very important feature as we changed the focus in certain scenes (the scene of Kate in her bedroom is a perfect example) in order to capture certain moods.

Editing

• To edit our film we used the apple program "Final Cut Pro".  I have used final cut many times before as it is an incredibly advanced tool which many major studios use to edit. The functions on it allow us to not only cut and paste scenes together, but also to create titles and credits, different types of cuts (fades, wipes etc) and even the image itself. I found final cut the most useful in the scene I directed where Kate is in her bedroom writing in her diary. I invisiged her sitting in her bedroom, fading out and then in again but sitting in a different position, a technique used by many directors when showing time passing. By using final cut I was able to do this, and ended up creating an effective scene which served it's purpose completly.
• To edit the music I used Garage Band, another apple product, and another program which I am experienced in using. The beauty of Garage Band is that not only can you create your music, but there are also many pre-set instrumental pieces, as well as a vast library of sound effects. We decided to record our own piece of music for this film, as we wanted to give our film an original sound that people hadn't heard before. We recorded Carl Williams playing acoustic guitar through the program; a piece we ended up using at the beginning and end of our film. We also used garage band for the voice-overs, recording and Keira and Carl speaking into a tape recorder then uploading their voices onto Garage band and editing them into the respective parts of the film. The clips you hear on the TV at the end were both recorded using a tape recorder which we then transferred onto an ipod, and then onto Garage Band. We took the clips (Gavin and Stacy and Scrubs) off of youtube and put them onto GarageBand to keep up the pretence that the protagonists are watching TV. 

  Review

• To create the template of the review we used Adobe InDesign, a program used mainly by designers and graphics production artists. With the use of this program we were able to successfully create an authentic looking template for our Little White Lies magazine review. Because it was the first time I had used InDesign it took me a while to work out all the functions for it, however once I did I was able to progress pretty quickly. Keira and myself each made a different once which would both suit the magazine and in the end we went for her template as it was more professional looking (see above). We also used InDesign to format our text into the four columns and the section at the bottom for ratings.
• As well as InDesign we used another Adobe program called Photoshop to edit the 'Alice in Wonderland" images. To do this we copy and pasted the images onto Photoshop then changed their colours and size to match the typical style that Little White Lies adhere to. The text boxes at the top of the review were also created and manipulated using Photoshop to get the correct colour scheme. 

Blog

Since I began this project I have updated the group blog to explain everything I have been doing. The blog we have been using is http://www.blogger.com, "a blog storage system that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries" (Wikipedia). Keeping a record of everything has been made much easier through the use of the blog, making it a perfect reference point if we need to find anything that we have done in the past.

I have gained a lot of useful skills during the making of this film, particularly with technology and in that particularly with the HD camera and the editing program InDesign.