We set out on completing our preliminary task with very little planning - a few pictures of where we were going to be filming, the camera angles we were hoping to take and also what we were going to say. Looking back on it I could see where this lack of planning effected the task itself. This therefore showed me the vital part which quality planning would take in our final task. So I and my partner made sure that when we went out to film our final piece, we were prepared with everything which would aid us in creating the final product that we had wished for. There were three main topics which I aimed to focus on while filming to overall give us a better final product; these were time management, the technology - camera angles, lighting, sound- and also how I managed our actors. The latter was something I could not attempt to plan for until the day of filming came around, however, the other two my partner and I trialled in our reccee.
The reccee, I saw as being a huge learning curve, as we were able to establish the mistakes and plus points which we had achieved while filming. Most of the technology was fairly new to me, so by giving it a trial run in the reccee, I was then able to film the main task without holding our actors up. We were able to work out the approximate time that it would take to film our main task, and therefore, when it came to the day of filming the main task we were able to determine what time we think we would have to start filming. Next, we had to try out our camera angles, lighting and sound which we had planned for in our shot list and storyboard which we brought with us for guidance. Everything seemingly went well, and we were happy with what we had achieved for our reccee, however, when watching our recordings back we realised that our microphone had been too close to a high electrical power source and therefore gave out a loud, high-pitched screech! Fortunately, with it only being a reccee we were able to correct this for our main piece. The lighting and camera angles we had used came out nicely, and again the importance of in-depth planning was proven to be vital.
When we had shot our main task and uploaded our footage onto a Mac, I felt as though I was learning something new to do with the Final Cut Pro video editing software every day that I used it. The inability to use it would have ended up with an uncut final piece, spanning over 20 minutes and therefore, learning to use the software, which I had no experience in before this year, was one of the most important skills learnt since making the preliminary task. To be specific with new skills I have learnt on the software; starting off I had an uncut preliminary task which had to be captured for it to be uploaded onto the software, then roughly cutting the footage so we had a feeling of continuity editing in my piece. However, since then, for our main task, I have acquired many more skills and uncovered countless effects on the software to try and make my final piece as good as possible. These included having to use a "Hum Remover" effect to, not surprisingly, remove a slight hum which we had with our sound recordings, learning how to apply graphic titles over the top of our footage and also layering these same graphics using "Boris titles". Unfotunately our first sound recordings came back with a strong hum which we decided was too much and therefore, did a re-recording of the sound using digital audio recorders, this was also a new technical aspect which I had learnt since my preliminary task. Finally, for our audio tracks at the beginning of our opening and the music box track, we had to download them off "freeplaymusic.com" and then overlay them over the footage; fading them in and out using special sound effects. This was a completely new are for me and something that I had no experience in just after the completion of my preliminary task.
JK
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