Adam Nixon-6332-AS Foundation Portfolio G321-Thriller Opening

Final Edit

The Tester (Evaluation Edit) from Adam Nixon on Vimeo.
Our absolute final edit of our film opening for 'The Tester'. Feedback from a screening with nine viewers has been taken into account such as adding more credits, sound effects and general fine tuning. The biggest change compared to our previous versions is the ommission of flashbacks, as these made the plot hard to understand.

Comparing My Preliminary and Coursework Productions

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7

Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
I was able to apply what I have learnt in lessons and the the feeback recieved from my preliminary production to my final coursework production.  We implemented techniques such as match on action shots and shot reverse shots, in addition to using a variety of shots of different lengthsand sizes inorder to reduce to the likelihood of boring the audience.

In my preliminary production, match on action shots were only used when doors were opened and when characters were travelling from one location to another.

 We used such shots during the opening of doors in our coursework production. However, we also used them when Max retrieves his gun from the bathroom cabinet-a use which wouldn't have immediately come to mind at the start of the school year.

We also observed the 180 degree rule in our production, in which we didn't cross over an imagined line into the second 180 degrees of our shots until the other character was speaking. Doing this during shot reverse shots created variety which helps reduce the chances of boring the audience. They were used both to show the speaker and the reaction of who their speech was directed towards.

The same was done in my preliminary task, as shown by these two screenshots. However, the same variety of shots was't used.

Diagram showing the 180 degree rule

One of the many things I did in my AS coursework which was lacking in my preliminary production was more shots and more variety. Close ups and extreme close ups, an establishing long shot, and a point of view shot are just some of the shots we used in our opening that improved the variety and made it more interesting to watch overall.

In addition, we paid attention to much finer details, the lighting and sound particularly, evident mostly in the ‘interrogation scene’ where we used chiaroscuro lighting to get across the dark mood in the scene. Appropriate music was also used to build tension, and to punctuate the feeling of the scene. Editing was also done much more in depth, with J and L cuts, and fade ins and outs on the soundtrack and scenes themselves. The pace of the editing changed throughout, whereas it was quite constant in my preliminary production.


Preliminary Task from Adam Nixon on Vimeo.

The Tester (Evaluation Edit) from Adam Nixon on Vimeo.

Evaluation of Technology Used

Hardware

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6

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

My Camera
It was good in that it has high definition capability up to 1080p, sadly however, we could not utilize this due to limited space on the SD card (we opted for 720p) and, more importantly, severely limited battery life (using 4 AA batteries) of less than 10 minutes; possibly due to a fault with the camera.

Other drawbacks in regards to recording were a slight static noise when recording, evident in the actual film. Luckily for us, it doesn’t affect the scene which we used the camera for, as the soundtrack music was foregrounded

The camera used an SD card for storage and this was a good substitute for the tape which the School camera used. The SD card allowed us to simply insert it into the computer’s SD card slot and drag and drop files into Pinnacle. The only disadvantage would be finding relevant files, as all of the names were very similar and hard to differentiate

 SD Card 

The camera used an SD card for storage and this was a good substitute for the tape which the School camera used. The SD card allowed us to simply insert it into the computer’s SD card slot and drag and drop files into Pinnacle. The only disadvantage would be finding relevant files, as all of the names were very similar and hard to differentiate. We also occasionally had problems with the computer recognising it.

From this we have learnt to test equipment beforehand so we do not commit to filming if the technology won’t work or doesn’t meet our requirements. It was a hard lesson to learn when opportunities to film were limited.

Schools Camera 

The second camera we used on the other hand was much more reliable and proficient. An incredibly generous battery life of more than 200 minutes (on rechargeable batteries) meant plenty of time for filming, and much less fumbling around with an almost unusable camera.

Consequently, we were able to film the bulk of the film in one day. The camera ended up producing much better quality images than the other camera, visually and audibly. The fact that we could recharge batteries even while filming (as we had spares), and also import our filming straight into Pinnacle Studio for editing made this camera the far superior choice in every way. We have learnt that many options for filming and editing etc have to be explored in order to make the film as good as it can be.

Unlike my camera, the School camera used tapes which capture the footage, which is better in some ways and worse in others. Using a tape meant the computer could record the footage off the camera onto its hard drive and hence all of the files we needed were right there for us in Pinnacle, allowing us to make a rough edit easily, as importing could be done in one process rather than individually importing each shot from an SD card.


We also used another camera for the interrogation scene, the Panasonic HDC allows for full 1080p recordings and is very user friendly. The camera shutter opens and closes automatically and uses a touch screen menu system which minimizes the need for physical buttons on the exterior. 

The battery life was even more generous at over 300 minutes, and it has a built in SD card slot - much more reliable than a tape which can deteriorate over time. The SD card additionally allowed more storage for files, which can be upgraded depending on how much storage you need. The SD card we used was 8GB which proved to be plenty; we simply deleted old files when it was getting full as we already had them saved on our computer.

One problem we found was that HD filming takes up a lot of space, especially when considering that we needed to transport the files to and from school. Not just this, but uploading them to a video sharing site such as Vimeo, where there is a 500MB per week limit for those with a free account. (Vimeo Pro allows you to have much less restriction regarding uploading)

To get around this problem, we had to convert the footage into an AVI format for editing, making the files much smaller and as an unfortunate consequence; it made the HD footage standard definition (480i) however the same audio fidelity was maintained.

My Tripod 

My Tripod allowed for easy access to the relevant controls when changing height and angles, it’s strurdy metal legs gave it increased durablity and rubber grips on the feet ensured no damage to the locations or equipment.

Schools Tripod

The school Tripod also met our requirements when it came to filming, like the other tripod it allowed us to film without any inherent problems. The only inherent problems with it would be that it is more fragile due to its plastic legs, and it was impossible to pan due to its  stiffness.

However, we still had probelms due to what were mainly cramped filming locations. In order to avoid an the capture of an unsteady image, the tripod wasn't used for one bathroom shot and the camera was instead placed on a shelf within the bathroom mirror. The shortage of space alaso meant that acouple of bathrrom shots had to be filmed from within the bath, as previously mentioned. This would have been a problem with whichever camera we used, as they were both larger than the bath when extended to the required height.

Battery Packs

We were able to take advantage of multiple battery packs at one time, allowing us to have backup charge for the school camera if we needed it. This showed us that rechargeable cameras are much more reliable than those which use disposable batteries. We even tried using some recharable batteries with my camera but had no success, still only managing to get 10 minutes battery life at best.

Websites 

Art of the title 

We used Art of the Title to look for inspiration in our title and credit ideas, we looked at films such as Se7en and analysed the way they used titles in font choice, size, placement and animation effects. http://www.artofthetitle.com/

 

Dropbox

Dropbox has, in a way, been a cornerstone of our media production; it allows easy transfer of files between our home computers, school and mobile devices. With 2 Gigabytes of storage we have had plenty of room to upload any word documents as well as our soundtrack, actual film and any other files we may have needed.it enabled us to contribute so the same documents, as a group as we would in a lesson, but without needing to be in the same room. It can be accessed over the internet, or more conveniently, documents can be dragged into a local folder on any PC it is installed on. https://www.dropbox.com/

Blogger 

Blogger has been used to document our progress and keep track of where we were up to and recieve feedback in the entirety of the project. We have found it to be generally easy to use in regards to editing text and adding links, with the odd hiccup when it came to adding pictures next to specific parts of text. Furthermore, drafts can be saved to avoid publishing unfinished work and it automatically saves backup drafts to avoid losing work, and we could all read each other’s blogs to check for new posts and research carried out. 


 


 Slideshare
 Slideshare allowed us to share and embed any PowerPoints produced and gave us a more unique and interesting way to share our ideas.

 

 

Vimeo
Just as Slideshare allowed us to embed Powerpoint presentations, Vimeo allowed us to embed our final production and any other videos we thought appropriate, such as film openings to demonstrate points made in written analyses and our storyboard. Another advantage was that videos uploaded to Vimeo could be viewed withing school, whereas video on Youtube could not, due to the content restrictions imposed by filtering software.

Software 

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Adobe Photoshop CS2 was used to edit our logo for our production company “Enigma Productions” we made use of the fonts in the program and the tools such as burn and clone to remove anything that we did not want to be in the final image. Burn on the other hand was used to darken our storyboard, therefore making them more visible in our animatic.

 Pinnacle Studio 15

Pinnacle Studio 15HD was used to edit our film opening and we found it to be a good editing program for beginner to intermediate editors such as ourselves. This is due to the easy to use layout and ease of navigation as well as tutorials that come with the program. There were however some problems with the program. When editing at school, we found it to be very unreliable as it tended to crash around every five minutes when any clip was edited frame by frame. Another problem early on was that the program would not save our project when prompted, which caused some frustration. These faults were caused by access problems due to the schools safety settings being incompatible with the software installation.

Fortunately, we already had a copy installed on Kieran’s computer, so we managed to edit from home, and this was a much better experience, with no crashes experienced whatsoever throughout editing the entire film. We found such editing processes as J cuts and L cuts a breeze with being able to isolate the audio and video on separate editing tracks, which also made it simple to add music and sound effects, and then fade them in and out of the soundtrack when appropriate.We also changed the speed of some clips to make them more believable, and reversed the scenes in which Adam was punched and hit by a car. Overlay titles were also added and fade in and fade out effects used on them.


When exporting the actual file we found some problems with syncing, this was due to lower quality exporting options and so this was fixed easily and quickly. The multitude of editing options is good if you have experience and know the advantages and disadvantages of each, but for beginners this could be daunting and time consuming due to the many different devices they may want to play it on, and subsequent technical issues.

Despite the problems we had with the software, it enabled us to create a production very close to our initial ideas thanks to the ability to create J and L cuts, change lighting, change the speed of shots and add titles etc.

The clock icon shows where we changed the speed of the clip for faster paced action such as that in the fight scenes.

The above clip shows an audio dub where we locked the video timeline and spliced dialogue from another scene onto it..

The colour correction tool added to the sense of continuity, as it minimised sudden chages in brightness of our shots.

The title editor made adding credits as overlays and changing their size and colour simple.

We probably learnt the most from the editing process overall, it is imperative that a backup of either software or a different editing program entirely is needed to edit a film to a deadline, and also feedback throughout the course of editing to identify any mistakes and then enough time is allowed for rectification of them.