Evaluation Question 6

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

The equipment we used is mentioned in the evaluation summary. With the studio lights, we used the blue gel to create the blue tinted effect for our sequence to make it cold-looking and make our villain character look much more menacing and there being little way of our victim escaping. The lights also made it possible to create large shadows behind our villain as you can see in the picture. This once again made him seem incredibly overpowering and threatening. During the entire production of the sequence, we learned a lot about how all the equipment works and how the software on the PC or Mac can make things easier. We used Adobe Premiere Pro (below) to edit together the sequence digitally. This gave us the ability to edit non-linearly which made things much easier when it came to constructing continuity techniques such as matches on action. It also gave us the potential for multiple timelines where we could layer the titles on the shots and made it possible to edit to the music such as when the music gets louder as the hand bangs on the door in the last part of the sequence (1:58). On the Mac, we experimented on Final Cut Pro when we were making our titles, looking mainly at the presets. Unfortunately, we didn’t find anything of use so we had to create our own title using Adobe After Effects. None of us had ever used this program before, but after a bit of instruction, we were able to create the title exactly how we wanted it. This was a lengthy process due to having to look for a font, make the letters on separate layers then add transitions to them. The font we used was ‘1942 Report’ as it mirrored the derelict, aged look of our location. In some of the feedback the audience said it looked ‘scary, seemed a bit disjointed and not all together’ which was beneficial as that is one of the ways we described our villain. In some initial feedback, the test screening audience said that the main title wasn’t obvious enough and that it didn’t linger for long enough. After this, we decided to change the effects used. We used Adobe After Effects to make the letters fade up slowly one by one in a random order, this made the audience focus much more on what the title actually said. We also added the ‘outer glow’ effect to make the title different from the rest of the titles. Another way we used After Effects was when we found that one of our shots had a bag in the background that ruined the entire look of the shot. In the end, we managed to blur this out so it looked less like a bag to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. It wasn’t the ideal situation as it would have been better to have not had it there in the first place though. So we learned to really check all the mise-en-scene in the shots to make sure it’s right before finishing shooting. In a lot of the shots of our villain talking, the sound wasn’t captured very well. This made it very difficult to use the music over the top of these clips. We ended up fading the music down, not completely silent but very quiet and turning the clip audio up. This then produced noise in the background sound of the clips. This was then edited out by turning down the treble on the shot which cut out the higher pitches where the noise was without really affecting the rest of the sound. We learned that in future, it would be best to have had a boom mic rather than one fixed to the top of the camera. This would have enabled us to have captured the sound much closer to our actor without having to turn it up and create noise. The last thing we learned was that, where there was blur in a few of our shots due to the auto-focus, although we weren’t able to cut it out, we edited around it. This however, could have been avoided if we had used the manual focus settings on the camera.