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

Idents I

To start with Software wise, we used Motion to create the ident.I used a Graphics tablet to draw a Sloth in Pixlemator (the process of this is up on my blog). As I do photography, I have an understanding of Photoshop/Pixelmator, however, this required me to learn how to draw and blend colours. Kieran used Motion to physically make the ident for Dizzy Sloth. For this he made a Slothspin on the spot . This shows the use of multiple technologies/programmes to construct the first ident.

And now moving onto the second

Idents II The second ident was made by me. I drew a box in Pixelmator and created an optical triangle illusion by positioning 9 cubes and then altering their layers and on the final cube, erasing some away. In order to add the movement, I split up the image to be able to drop in

a cube and it look believable as it needs to be behind one box and in front of another. So, in Motion I made the cube drop in and I found a tittle from FontSpace (that is legal to use) and in Final Cut, I added royalty free music that gradually fades out. From this, I have learnt how to loosely use Motion, which is a completely new programme for me to use.

Final Cut Pro Firstly, Final Cut Pro was the program I used to add the sound to our Idents as it was an easier process. Last year during GCSE I used Final Cut Pro in order to make a music video, however, recently Final Cut had an update and so I had to re-learn how to use it and where to find the tools. I learnt how to use the colour filters and the new tool of the program automatically syncing the sound with the video. However, this was not helpful to us as the sound recording of the singing and video would not recognise one another as the tracks are so long. At other times, the singing acted as non-diegetic sound and so this would not link up.

The Camera Bags The standard bags that we are issued in Media containa Nikon SLR (and its charger), the Voice Recorder, an AUX lead, a Microphone, BoomPole, Tripod and a Clapper Board.We have used the camera bags before for the Preliminary Tasks, therefore I am use to the equipment.We learnt that you could cancel background noise in the voice recorder during our evaluation, which was a helpful tool.

The Camera

On the location of our new film, we used a Roof balcony which as it is outdoors, gave off natural light. As a cameras viewfinder does not replicate what we see out the Human eye, I had to play around with the settings to understand how to change the exposure of the camera. I am personally I am not used to using DLSRs so for this product, I have had to learn about song the manual focus and just basic functions- and now I am more comforta-ble using the cameras.

As I we are doing a musical, I require to record my song. We learned how to make a sound bridge by crossing over the diegetic and no-diegetic sound. This meant that to do this efficiently, I should record the music over the silent film. So what I did was made the film with rough audio and then in my own time, sang to the film. I listened to the audio as I watched the film and it was almost perfect and I knew i could alter the speeds in Final Cut. However, when the audio was uploaded to school, the Macs slightly altered the frames- meaning that the audio and film were no longer matching. This meant that Kieran and I had to chop up the entire song and have to calculate how much we had to speed things up and slow things down in the audio- a feature I never knew Final Cut had. And thankfully, final cut is clever enough to change the length of audio to fit a space.

Sound Recording

The DJI Osmo In our first take of our film, we used a standard Steadicam from school, which upon reviewing the footage (found on our Rough Cut I, the footage was not at all steady, but very shaky. It is clear that there was not full control of the camera- also the location was too small. So we decided to re-film and this meant we used the DJI Osmo. You install the application onto a Smartphone, which acts as the viewfinder for the camera. The camera itself is remote control, therefore we have full control with smooth movements. To me, this looked scary to use at first, but afterI learnt how to use it , i really enjoyed the experience and the picture looks incredibly smooth- exactly how we wanted it.

Photo from 4k.com