Evaluation - Question 6

What have you learnt about Media Technologies from the process of constructing your Product?

During the process of constructing our Product, I learnt many things about Media Technologies, the majority of which I had never heard of before, and am now proficient in every one of them. To create our product to a high standard, it was important that we knew how to use every bit of hardware and software we were going to utilise, and how to do it properly.

The first thing we had to learn how to use was the camera. This was imperative. We used Sony PD 170 DVCAM Camcorder to capture our original footage. We were taught how to adjust all the settings on the camera, which was important as our type of product required very specific settings. We needed a high shutter speed, so we could get clear and unblurred footage of the zombie running at high speed. We also needed specific aperture settings, as we were shooting outside in natural light. These settings needed to be changed throughout the shoot, as we gradually started to lose light.

We used a rifle microphone for sound, as we needed to have the sound coming specifically from the zombies. Having a rifle microphone also allowed us more freedom of movement, so we could follow the zombies with the camera and the microphone, and capture audio and video at the same time.

After capturing our footage, we needed to edit it. The main program we used for putting all our footage together was Apple’s Final Cut Pro. All our raw footage was imported onto the computer and called our “Rushes”. We then watched carefully through our rushes and found the clips we needed to use. We cut these clips into smaller clips called “Logs” and placed them into a separate folder called the “Log Bin”. From here, we imported our Logs onto the timeline in Final Cut Pro, and proceeded to arrange them in our preferred order. Clips were cut into smaller pieces where required, so other clips could be placed between segments of another clip. When our sequence was finished being pieced together, we deleted all the sounds tracks as those were to be added later, and then moved onto adding effects.

We used Adobe After Effects to add visual effects to our sequence, which was important in creating the right feel for our product. To do this, we first had to export the clip we wanted to use from Final Cut Pro as a QuickTime movie file, and then we imported it into After Effects. We wanted to have credits appear on the screen, so we used motion tracking to fix an item of text to two points on the footage. The by changing the size and rotation of the text during the time of the clip, we created the illusion that the text was travelling towards the screen. We added a Gaussian blur effect to blur the text in and out of focus, to allow time for more than one credit to appear on each clip. We also added vinyetting (a border of black around the edges of the screen) to focus the audience’s attention in on our main characters and to ignore any other distractions on screen.

When After Effects was done, we exported the clips as After Effects files, and then imported them back into Final Cut Pro. As we had kept the time codes the same in After Effects as in Final Cut, we were able to just drop the clips back into place of their predecessors. We then checked everything through, the editing was done and the project was finished.

We have learnt a lot during the process of shooting and editing. I went from not understanding how to even work a digital video camera to being able to adjust complex settings on the camera to enable a specific visual style to be shot effectively.