QUESTION 6:

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

Titles: Adobe After Effects

At first the plan was to fix the titles onto various surfaces in our sequence like the Tv drama Heroes...

Unfortunately, we did not succeed but we came close. We used Adobe After Effects to try and achieve our desired titles but the process of tracking the motion path of the titles in three dimensions was frustrating and very time consuming due to the fact that it was very hard to find suitable tracking points.

We also realised that our idea would be much more achievable if we had still shots – but this may have taken away from our final sequence.

Advice to future groups: It is possible to fix the titles to surfaces, just make sure that you have 2 or 3 perfect areas of high contrast for the computer to track, otherwise it just won’t work.

Editing:

We used Adobe Premiere Pro to capture, edit and export our sequence...

All being confident users of this program from previous projects we tried to use this program to its full potential. Unfortunately, due to the nature of our film, no crazy or fancy effects were called for when we produced our film, but we did make the most of the blur effect and obviously the lighting and contrast adjustors. I also made use of the main audio mixer when, dubbing, and mixing our final sequence audio.

Tripod:

As most of our film was shot handheld, we not did not use the tripod to a great extent, but instead did make use of it as a sort of extension/crane for the camera operator. 

(Tom and I operating the tripod as an extension. This shot is when Matt runs out of the window room and stops as he hears the door being kicked down!)

We did use the tripod for some still shots in more difficult positions...

We used the tripod for the master shot of the car pulling up...

Advice to future groups: If you want to fix the titles onto surfaces quickly, make sure you have STILL shots – only obtainable with the use of the tripod!

Camera:

We experimented a lot with our camera before we started the real filming:

We particularly focused on working the manual exposure settings and the manual focus, both of which we used a lot in our sequence. We were able to work the manual focus and exposure settings well according to our environments lighting, but we did not attempt to use any focus pulls in our sequence as although possible, the focus wheel was tricky and inconsistently sensitive when operating it. 

I would advise all future groups doing this project to utilise the manual focus feature of the camera as it gives a much more professional look to the film and can be very rewarding when trying to apply greater meaning to a shot.