Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Evaluation 6

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

Our research that we conducted during this process and the learning from setbacks led us to have a much better understanding of film making and the technologies used in it.

Film making has had a massive impact from technologies throughout it's cycle as they are always connected together. Different genres rely more on it than others, like action, but you still need a story-line to make a good film. We found that however good or bad our equipment was, it was down to us to make a good film and the technology would only be able to make it look prettier. The most we learnt was about how to use the technologies to make the most out of our resources.

Below is our directors commentary where we discuss thing that we learnt, things that we would change in hindsight and general obstacles that we had to overcome.



Software:

We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our sequence together. We have used this previously in GCSE work and our prelim work. We cut our clips from the raw footage using the razor tool and the crop tool. We had to use the speed/duration for certain clips to get the right effect that we wanted to use like slow-motion or to speed a scene up.

We had to spend a long time with brightness, contrast and saturation due to our shot being shot over the duration of the day so our lighting changed quite dramatically. This meant we had to change every shots grading to get the look of an apocalyptic zombie film and to make them all look as if they are at the same time of day as only 2 minutes 30 seconds have passed.

Before we started our actual production we planned our shots out by using an animatic. This gave us an idea of timing and to see what was missing.



As our film was in the action genre we needed to have a lot of special effects. For these we used Adobe After Effects which had all the tools we needed. We needed to add muzzle flashes, explosions and blood splatters to keep with the conventions of the genre. For this we researched how to accurately do this on YouTube. We found that to achieve the most accurate muzzle flashes we needed to have moving clips from an effects cache and then use a mask over the character and gun to make sure it seemed as if the flare was in the correct place in the frame. We also found out to our surprise that we needed to make the flare react with the environment. For this we had to create a second mask and then add brightness to the areas of the environment that would be affected. It is a near identical process for explosions and blood splatters and the only difference is that you do need to have it lasting for many more frames, which means you have to move the mask for each frame rather than having one for one frame which makes the blood splatters and explosions much more time consuming.

No comments:

Post a Comment