Question 6

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
We used a lot of technology [click here for full list], most of which we had used previously, but we learnt about it in much more depth – including finding out a lot of the advantages and disadvantages first hand.
Hardware:

• Canon HD mini DV (Digital Video) camera – although we had the capability to change the camera settings to shoot in high definition (HD), we didn’t, as it’s expensive to shoot on HD tapes, and it also takes up a lot of power on the PC, so when editing everything would be much slower. As well as this, we would be unable to watch it in HD, as it would require a huge technology update which would be expensive, and would take time. However, it is something that in the future I feel it would be interesting to work with. The transition to HD is an example of how the medium of film is changing quickly, and perhaps indicates that this will change again soon.
• tripod for our camera to give us steady, focussed shots
• an on-board microphone so we could pick up the right audio much more clearly, which we could then listen to through the headphones. The sound kit was something we hadn’t used previously, but it didn’t take long to work out how to use it best.
• pag light -> very useful for short distances and CU shots, easily transportable (battery pack attached), good choice of how to use it, (barn doors that mean it’s possible to create shafts of light, and different filters too). However, it wasn’t very powerful, and worked better when combined with another light source.

We had to experiment quite a lot with lighting, and were not really used to using this technology, and it did bring up some problems: even though we were shooting indoors, the lighting wasn’t very good and so the shots were less clear, and the lack of light also made everything look really flat. To solve this, we got to use:

• the studio lights in a reshoot -> very powerful and very strong, very versatile, with the ability to create ambient lighting with the shutters and filters (but we didn’t use these). Had we chosen to, we could have used all three of them, giving us three-point-lighting and making it look more professional, but it would have taken a long time to set up and been difficult to arrange so that the lights would not be seen in shot. However, the studio lights were a lot less portable, being very heavy and in a bulky box, and we had to wait half an hour after the shoot for it to cool down properly, so no one burnt themselves putting it away, potentially also breaking the light.

The light we used really helped the shots look better, but we only had time to do the shots of the killer’s dialogue (we had to reshoot this anyway, due to bad framing and non-existent eyeline-matching). This presented us with another problem: the lighting in the same room was very, very different, as we had been unable to reshoot the housemate’s dialogue. We attempted to fix it on the editing software we used:

• Adobe Premiere Pro - we used Premiere to change the brightness and contrast on all of our shots, and added a special lighting effect on the housemate shots, which made the lighting difference less noticeable, but decreased the clarity of the image, which was an unfortunate downside. We learnt from this just how problematic and difficult to get right lighting can be, but I think it’s something that will help us in future projects – we will know what can go wrong and how to fix it before it happens.

We also had a few problems with getting the camera to focus on the right things, as it was on the automatic setting – I feel it would be quite nice to work with the technician to explore the manual settings on the camera, as it would give more us more scope to experiment with foregrounds and backgrounds – after watching Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) Gregg Toland’s innovation of deep focus, where everything in the shot is in sharp focus, really interested me.

Another problem that was hard to fix during editing was that the camera produced a whirring/buzzing sound, and this was present particularly on our new shots of one half of the conversation. We were able to lessen it by lowering the treble on Premiere, but this muffled the sound of the dialogue slightly, and we were unable to do anything about it.
We added five new timelines during the course of our non-linear editing, and had five tracks for video and four tracks for audio by the end. I’m much more comfortable with editing after this project, because we were forced to edit alone sometimes, which was really helpful. I learnt how to use different techniques (for a full list, click here), two of which included:

-Ghosting: layering shots over others but changing the opacity, so that the one on top is more transparent, causing the effect as demonstrated to the right, and with the ECU shots of Emma's eyes at the beginning of the montage

-Solarising: we used the 'solarise in' and 'solarise out' effect on a very very short section of a shot which we cut from the middle of a longer one, in order to create the flashing effect on the eyes that we found to be extremely effective from audience feedback - it was one of the favourite elements.

I also really appreciate the fact that we got to use non-linear editing and do it all digitally with the PCs in the edit suites after finding out all the hard work that goes into linear editing! I definitely feel more comfortable with the whole editing process and feel I've learnt a lot, from the simple processes such as capturing and naming clips, to the more tricky such as trying to adjust the sound to the right levels.

We also worked with the technician, using the Mac to create our credits on the software Adobe LiveType, with which we made our text move, and was very compatible and easy to transfer from the Mac to the PC and vice versa.