Like any process you get better with practice; this media product helped us to learn to using I-movie in order to get the best possible look and feel from the footage we captured, whether editing the movie itself on I movie or the sound track on Audacity. We had learnt previously about the 180 degree rule, the golden mean; if it the scene is of importance and using camera angles effectively to portray expressions and emotions from our prelim task and new these things needed to be taken into account when filming our final thriller film. After set relocations, and poor weather conditions we eventually managed to get enough footage to create our product and I believe we captured some effective and enticing shots.
Left - (Audacity)
(I-Movie) - Right
To get the best quality footage on camera we had to learn about camera positioning, how to operate a tri-pod and lighting conditions. The best looking shot is stable and well lit so we aimed to ensure a these conditions were met. In the conservatory scenes we had dim lighting however this is what we wanted to portray the effect we wanted, we used the tripod to get steady, smooth shots of the actor and mis-en-scene. However on our filming day we were without a tripod and lighting conditions were beginning to fade so we had to make use of what we had… our bare hands. We did each shot multiple times being as steady as possible to make up for lack of equipment and were forced to work fast due to the fading sunlight.
To edit our product after collecting and importing our footage on to a Mac was fairly new to both of us; we were inexperienced and so were not fully aware of the capabilities of this editing software. We started of by altering different function on I-movie to see the different effect we could get for each shot, using knowledge we took from editing our prelim; however, after a while we discovered lots of little tricks like ‘Video smoothing’ to further stabilize our shots and nice effects like ‘Dream’ ‘Slow motion’ and ‘high saturation’ that we added to enhance the feel and emphasis the key points of our thriller movie. Unfortunately on the day of filming we had no tripod (stuck in boot of mate’s car) and were forced to film free hand making sure we held the camera as steady as possible… however its almost impossible to get a completely stable shot this way and so by using the ‘Video smoothing’ tool we improved shot stability which allowed us to take out screen shaking and improve the overall professionalism of the product.
We also added titles and credits to name our product and give credit were credit was due. Having titles slide in and out of shots was effective and easy and an ideal way to get information across. However, saying this I would have preferred an alternate method of incorporating titles to keep the audience focused and enticed in our thriller rather than computer generated effects, for example we could have written our titles and credits on leaves, trees, and walls or in blood which would have made for an effective alternative. When it came to sound we wanted to use minimal sound effects to keep the believability and realism of the film. We used ‘Thunder’ and ‘heavy rain’ in a few conservatory shots to give the scene more depth and add a sense or mystery and wonder, finding, adding and removing sound until we felt the scene was perfect.
For the soundtrack in our piece I wanted; from the start, to create the music from scratch using just a piano to create an eerie and atmospheric piece of music to accompany our dark, flashback styled thriller. We did not have the permission or knowledge to use the professional recording studio that was unavailable to us within the school facilities and I believe this to be a point of improvement when next creating a media product; learn to use the recording studio, if this was possible the music would have been a lot crisper and more effective in my opinion. We did however have a laptop with recording capabilities, which did a fairly good job of recording the piece. We took time out of lesson to record, we set up the recording functions on the laptop and I proceeded to play. During this process we found that because we were only recording using a laptop, background noise and vibrations also got picked up by the microphone. This meant that the sound was not crisp diluting the emotion of the peace. To try overcome this problem we recorded multiple times at different volume levels and keyboard settings, ‘Grand piano’ ‘Upright piano’ ‘Strings’ until we got the best quality sound.
For the budget we had. The piece was recorded multiple times to give us a range or sounds and tones for us to then select the most effective. Now that we had the music recorded it was time to edit and tweak any areas of the song that sounded flat or echoed and Laurence accomplished this by using the software Audacity.
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