AS Media Studies

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

Research

The first thing we did was research 3 different filming techniques; Shot Reverse Shot, 180 Degree Rule and Match on Action. Here is a SlideShare which was helpful in providing definitions and examples. With this knowledge we produced a Preliminary Task including those 3 different techniques.

Match on action, 180 rule, shot reverse shot from joe940

The Kuleshov Experiment allowed me to understand different perspectives of meaning when something is changed. This theory was created Kuleshov and also adapted by filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock who both provide videos on their example. As a group we also produced our own.

My research into genre and genre conventions led me to IMDB and Art of the Title where I researched into the Mystery Thriller genre following my audience surveys. The results from IMDB led to the popular films in both Mystery and Thriller which helped me understand what stands out in the genre.

The website ‘Art of the Title’ helped me with looking at examples of opening credits from the films of the genre such as ‘Seven’.

The page for ‘Seven’ shows the opening sequence , discusses the film in general and the impact of the opening sequence, images of people recreating the opening sequence, the design/planning for the opening credits/who created them, an audio commentary of the ‘notebook’ design/prop design, description of the typography and graphics and finally the ending credits.

For research into conventions of the Horror Mystery genre I went onto the Internet and looked at different SlideShares.

Horror genre conventions from marine18

Codes and conventions of the thriller genre from JasonsA2Media

Furthermore I looked into different narrative theories to help with the structure of the plot and storyboard making. Knowledge from lessons and the Internet helped me with this. Here is a good link;
https://brianair.wordpress.com/film-theory/narrative-theories/

To help with characterization of characters we watched the film ‘Drive’ and analysed the opening sequence to see how the main character was portrayed with the use of camera angles and lighting etc.

Planning

For the audience survey we recorded are responses on a video and kept the background as a green screen to give it a more ‘production’ feel. The use of recording the responses was very helpful especially when brainstorming ideas and my evaluation. Here is the survey we did;

For my editing plans such as what techniques I should/will use I watched various film clips and comment on the editing. Here is the link to my blog post about it;
http://asmediastudiesaisha.blogspot.com/2015/12/editing.html

Furthermore to present my storyboard I looked at other storyboards and created 2 of my own; one is visual and the other is animatic;

For the location we created a video of our inside location defining what objects we were going to use to our advantage and also took images of our outside location. Here are the videos and the images;

For the Music aspect I had to find copyright free music so I googled it and found a website - http://www.purple-planet.com/ where there was various songs of different themes all of the songs were linked to Soundcloud which meant downloading the songs was easy and legal. Here is the song we chose but the YouTube version;

Construction

For the filming aspects we used the school provided equipment such as the camera and a tripod. We did have problems with the fact that the battery life was short so we did need to take more than one camera. We also took a camera to take behind the scenes photos which we didn’t have any issues with.

For the editing we had to add different effects and transitions to the video to enhance it.

How to get rid of the green screen - Open the Video FX tab and select 'Chroma Keyer' and the 'Green Screen' option. Then place the image you want to replace it with on a layer underneath the video footage. This article provided me with the knowledge of how to change it http://content.videoblocks.com/tipstricks/tutorials/how-to-use-sony-vegas-to-do-green-screen-and-chroma-key-editing/

How to darken the image - Click on the video footage and then open the Video FX tab and click on 'Brightness and Colour' then drag the 'Darker' effect onto the clip. You can edit the amount of brightness to any scale.

To Fade in and out of the video I just had to drag the corner of the video clip and place it to where I wanted the video to fade in/out to.

For the sound aspect I had to minimize the volume, take away the sound from a clip and add in sound effects and music.

Controlling the volume from the volume slider on the left;

Muting a video's audio - Left click on the audio track, click on 'Audio Event FX', click on 'Volume' and then slide the volume to 0 to mute it.

Adding the music is very simple - just import the media and then drag it to the timeline and it will automatically add on to a new layer

For the credits i used Photoshop to add the text onto a plain background and I used Window's Live Movie Maker to add the sequence together;

Evaluation

For the evaluation I used different forms of media to display my questions etc Prezi, Canva and Picktochart and SlideShare. Within those media I used pie charts to display results and images from Google. Here are some examples;