Digital Technology

When doing research for my opening two minute film, I had looked and analysed films within the same genre of film on youtube that I wanted to do which was horror and so I would be able to see the conventions of the that genre and how I could use elements of this in my project. Technologies that I used to create my opening two minute film was Adobe premiere elements 10 as I found that it would be more useful to me than movie maker because it allowed me to edit, cut down clips and add transitions for my film which would help me to achieve the final outcome that I had wanted. However, I found that when I had uploaded all my clips to adobe, they were all facing different ways and so it was harder for me to edit each section and try to make it fit together smoothly.  The equipment that I used in my two minute film opening was camera phones which were a Samsung galaxy S4 mini. This did not turn out as well as I thought it would as we had filmed on different phones such as an IPhone 4S too, we found that when it came to putting the final film together the quality if each clip was different and so made the whole film look unprofessional. Also, I found that using the phones was not such a good idea as when me and my group were filming, our phones may die and so we would have lost some of the footage that we had already recorded, resulting in us having to go back and re-record what we had already done. Another downside of using the camera phones when filming our phone is that not only did the quality of the footage was bad but also the sound that we had tried to film was coming back muffled. Also, when filming on a camera phone, we could not keep the camera steady all the time which resulted in some areas being slightly shaky. This resulted in me having to include an instrumental soundtrack over the top and so you could not here any of the diegetic sound that I had planned to include.  Problems that we had with our technology overall is that the quality of the film did not turn out well and at the time I had not had much experience with adobe premiere elements 10 and so when it came to putting the film together, I struggled with knowing how to do certain things such as adding transitions to my work to add effect. To record my ideas, I used a website called blogger which allowed me to record any thought processes that I had and any idea which I was able to come back to, change or add anything at any time.

This year in making my film trailer, I think I have improved in many of these areas. When filming this year, the camera that we had used was Sony CX 405 handy cam, which had much better quality and so our footage came out very clear. This was also helped by the fact that we had used a tripod when using the camera and so it was very still when we were recording. Although I had planned to use a Nikon Coolpix L830 16MP bridge camera, I found that the quality did not match up as well as the Sony camera. When it came to sound in our film trailer, last year I did not use my own sound as I ran out of time in making the opening two minutes, however this year we had included original music of the piano which we used as our non-diegetic sound. When doing our research for the music, we looked at websites such as incompetech which showed different themes of music and we were able to change the themes so fit a particular mood. We also included diegetic sound in the film trailer of the characters talking, giving the trailer a more professional outcome when it was completed. When editing the footage, we used premiere pro to edit our film. Although I was not familiar with this software, I picked it up really quickly and the tools on it allowed us to add much more transitions and effect to our work to get a more polished outcome. Another thing that I have improved this year is filming more clips than I need as last year I did not do this which resulted me in not having enough footage to cut down and add new things in. Whereas this year we found that we had recorded too much and so used them on our blog pages to show the process of making the film trailer and the final outcome.