Main Task - Evaluation Q6

Q6 What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Editing is not as difficult as I initially perceived, it was fairly straight forward to upload our clips onto the Mac laptop. The only thing that I did not foresee, that as a group, although we were often agreeable, we did often take more time than needed to decide an aspect in editing. However, I expect this is part of filmmaking, where decisions can be difficult and will require time and patience in working together as a team.

There was a need to put the clips in order, as some were not filmed in chronological order, but we were aware that we could place these in the order preferred later when editing. Some were 10 to 30 second clips that had to be placed in order, in other cases we had sets of frames rather than actual clips to place in between other clips and frames. Particularly where Nadia is running through a gate entrance, we needed to show this from two angles, we had to film this in two separate shots. These shots had to be edited and placed side by side for the benefit of the audience, in order to create a match on match action.

We also as a group learnt about transactions, which are various editing devices for filming, for example creating a black and white visual effect, or a negative effect, or enhancing the colour for a richer visual perspective. As we were making a horror movie, we chose to use an x-ray effect to represent something took place in the past, although it would have been preferred to use black and white effect. However this did not work out, as the initial filming of the scenes were conducted during daylight, and therefore this was far too obvious for the audience. With more time, it would have been better to film closer to when the evening drew in, or twilight. But we did not have time to do this. Therefore we experimented with other types of transactions, the two main ones being negative and X-ray. In general editing the speed, style and chronology of clips and frames were fairly straightforward once we got used to using the software. Unfortunately this was not the case with editing sound into the 2 minute opening, although overall the opening passes as a tense horror. Using iMovie 11 software was not as enjoyable. Firstly the overall music playing over the opening credits, is a little lower than desired, and a few sound effects could not be found, like when Memz, who plays the male character hits Nadia, we required the sound effect for when the audience hear this taking place. I think in hindsight, it would have been better if we had taken the time to record this sound effect ourselves and upload this, and then edit it in place. However, again we ran out of time. Using Garage band was not as difficult, Safina was able to undertake the responsibility in making the eerie soundtrack, and it was evident that there was no need for any of us to actually know how to play an instrument in order to use this software. By which I mean reading music notes, or having to write notes down. The software allows us to match a rhythm by using pre-recorded loops, which can be taken from various instruments e.g. guitar sounds, piano, violins etc. We used basic steps to achieve our final product for the movie, first we named our piece, as you would a file, we set the tempo, which means we could go from slow to quite fast, however we decided to keep the track simple, and stick to using basic sample pre-recorded pieces, and only experiment with these to achieve the desired effect.