Evaluation 6

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

Sound 
From making our opening sequence I have learnt a lot about sound and its importance within films. Before we even started to film or plan our opening sequence we analysed lots of different opening sequences. From this we  knew that sound could make or break a thriller as a lot of the tension and build up comes from the music and the sound effects. From this we learnt that we shouldn't rush the process of finding non-diegetic backing music but make sure that we have selected it carefully and appropriately. In terms of editing the sound I have learnt a lot about how to change, cut and edit sound on Adobe premiere pro and Adobe sound booth. Within the editing software I have learnt how to alter the volumes of different audios such as creating the perfect volume for the music, how to fade things in and out such as the sound effect of the shower and this played a crucial part in adding to our narrative enigma. The fading in and out of audios added to the verisimilitude of the scene as it didn't sound like the effects such as the sound of the shower didn't obviously sound like they had been added in as a sound effect rather than the natural sound. Experimenting with the sound also taught us to incorporate different audio techniques such as a sound bridge.

Camera
Before creating our thriller opening sequence I had no/little experience with camera handling and filming, I have therefore learnt a lot. When filming, we decided to use the Cannon 700D which was one of our media departments newly purchased cameras and so we knew it would offer a good quality of footage. This camera has a modern touchscreen feature which made it easier to focus and this therefore gave us professional looking footage. We only found out that we could use this to focus after trying to continually focus manually, learning this then helped us massively to speed up the process and give better looking footage. This easy-focus feature was particularly helpful when shooting close up shots as it captured the detail well and an example of this was when our female actor presses the doorbell.
 Along with the camera I learnt how to use all the equipment involved with using the camera such as the tripod and microphone. I also learnt that if you don't set the white balance correctly then it can effect the quality of the footage and distort the colour. We therefore set the white balance for every shot by placing a piece of white paper in front of the camera and making sure all the camera settings were correct.

Editing 

The editing software we used was Adobe premiere pro. Like with filming, before making this I had no previous experience with editing and so I have gained a complete new skill set. By doing the Prelim task I learnt how to do basic editing and this meant I could quickly edit together a draft edit and it didn't take too long to create the main structure of the opening sequence only using the razor tool to cut down the footage. After further practice I learnt about all the different features of Premiere pro and can now edit to a good standard, incorporating lots of different features such as the audio and visual effects and transitions. Examples of these effects and transitions is the 'black and white' effect which was put over all the footage and the 'dip to white' transition allowed us to signify to the audience when the flash backs were happening.