The main piece of technology that we used was the video cameras. As I had
studied Media at GCSE, I had already had experience with filming and using
different shot techniques such as long shots, medium shots and close ups. I had
also previously shot pan and tracks using equipment such as shopping trollies.
This was very helpful for me to grasp quickly and help my group with my
previous experience. My group and I worked well with the video cameras and all
had equal chances to film and explore different shot types and styles. We did
however experience some minor difficulties when filming such as when pressing
the record button, the camera would sometimes shake therefore ruining some of
the shots. We overcame these problems when editing and it became less of a
problem and more of a learning step when editing.
Originally, we planned to have the 2000 pop/garage song 'I'll Bring You
Flowers' by duo Sweet Female Attitude as our soundtrack, we then found out that
due to copyright reservations, we were unable to use the track. We then searched
for copyright free music and found 'The Free Music Archive' a website allowing
us to download copyright music for free. This is where we found the track
'Someone For You' by Warm Soda. Once we found the track, we then opened it to
iTunes and dragged the file on to iMovie where we put our film together. The
song seemed to magically fit the opening perfectly with shots of Ella
Barraclough who plays Poppy dancing in time with the music.
YouTube was another website we used frequently to research existing romantic
comedy films. We are all familiar with the website so it was simple and helpful
to use. From using this site, we found many clear codes and conventions of
romantic comedy, this helped us to fit the prototype of what a romantic comedy
should involve (e.g. two protagonists, binary opposition and continued themes
of love and romance).
The scanner was useful for us to transfer our storyboards which we had hand
written on to the PC. At first we scanned them on and saved them as PDFs, but
this format of picture was not supported by the blogger website. We overcame
this issue by converting the images into JPEG images on Photoshop, allowing us
to upload them on to our blogs.
The program we use to compose and edit our film was iMovie. I had previous
experience using this software and was confident when using it. I did however
stumble over a few difficulties such as not being able to save the un-published
film to my user to allow me to edit from different PCs around the Mac room.
This meant to edit, my team and I had to stay at one PC every lesson to edit.
This did slow us down at times when other people were using the PC that we
needed to use, but having considerate and understanding classmates, this became
less of a problem.
Using the Macs was simple and familiar form me as I have been using them for
a while now. Although there were a few things I was not too sure of to begin
with as I hadn't been using them as frequently as I was throughout this
project, I quickly grasped and found out what and how to do certain things on
the PC. Problems I came across were putting titles on the film and positioning
them in places that wouldn't interfere with the film in the background, but of
course some time exploring the program in more depth around with we found how
to make the titles work to the standards of our anticipated vision.
Using Blogger has been especially useful, the site is an easy and quick
platform to display our research, planning and evaluating of our film opening.
We all have existing blogs so we found it simple and easy to use.
Overall, the technologies have worked to our advantage. Although challenging
us at times, it showed us that our will to succeed and produce a good piece of
film pushed us to overcome any problems if it meant spending more time trying
figure things out, or searching for an equal substitute.
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