To figure out what we needed to do for our 5 minute film, we needed to build up some inspiration and research from different resources, most noticeably the internet. From the internet, we used the following in order to help us with the film and everything surrounding it:
RESEARCH:
- Blogger is probably the most important tool that we have used on this project. Blogger allows it's users to keep a blog on the internet with fully customisable features, written and edited by the owners of the blog. With it, we can research and plan our film out using preliminary tasks that we then place onto blogger as evidence of our hard work. Sometimes there are parts that alter the viewing experience on the blog website, as embedded videos and other multi-media properties occupy too much space on the blog boarders, which were then easily fixed using the flexible editing tools blogger provides.
- The BBFC have also played a role in helping us research existing films, how they achieved the age rating that they got, and then rating our own film accordingly to the BBFC guidelines. The BBFC also throw in a selection of latest films being rated, allowing us as students to find general ideas as to what would be considered a certain rating within a film. However, there is a lot of history that the BBFC holds, and it's presented in a way that is difficult to remember and use.
- SurveyMonkey is a free online survey generator that provides free, customizable surveys, as well as a suite of paid back-end programs that include data analysis, sample selection, bias elimination, and data representation tools. Here, we've used SurveyMonkey amongst our classmates and asked them some basic questions about themselves, what kind of products do they prefer to watch movies on, and what their thoughts were on our film idea before it was made. While the sample may be small, it's an excellent way to see what our audience is thinking and how we can plan our movie around this information. That being said, SurveyMonkey has no function to advertise the created Survey, and so our sample had to be seen by the people we asked to fill the survey out. SurveyMonkey also requires an account to use as well so it takes a while before we could use any of it's actual features. Lastly, because the film is built on the responses of these surveys, there is a loss of potential in original creative ideas that may have been better than what the audience expects.
- IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) is "the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content", Collecting data bases of films across the globe since the very beginning of film found in the 19th Century. The easy access to film backgrounds makes IMDb very useful for reference material, but it becomes difficult trying to get embedded links of film trailers, which I then tried to search for on YouTube. In addition, the synopsis of the film given only tells a small description of the film itself, similar to the back of a blurb. The only place where you can identify if a film is good or bad on IMDb is by the star ratings and the various comments given by fans and critics alike, which can make identifying a film's credibility really hard without seeing the film itself.
- Celtx is a media pre-production software, designed for creating and organizing media projects like screenplays, films, videos, stage plays, audio plays, documentaries, machinima, comics, games, and podcasts. Celtex is a bit hard to learn at first, with no tutorials on the actual software itself, but the software is considered one of the best professional script writing softwares for professional media production.
- YouTube is the biggest video-sharing platform in the world, and is a great platform to learn from no matter what topic is being taught. YouTube has helped us plan our film by searching up existing films, their trailers, and some people have even taken examples of film clips and used them to describe a topic of cinematography. YouTube is easy to navigate and doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge in order to get started searching, similar to any other search-base site like Google or Facebook. Not only is it a place of research, it's easy to upload videos by yourself, so that's where we've put all of our videos onto on the SpecShot Productions channel. That being said though, YouTube has it's flaws, with some videos not showing up when specifically asked by the search engine, and when placing an embedded video there's no easy way to try and alter the size of the video.
- We took some location photos prior to filming in order to easily organise our ideas of how the movie should flow. By taking these photos, we can visualise how characters may walk around and interact with the surroundings that they are shot in, adding more detail into the shot list afterwards. Below are a few examples of these photos
PRODUCTION:
- Premiere Pro is another software in Adobe's portfolio, with it's primary focus being the ability to manipulate films and moving images to the user's whim. Adobe Premiere Pro is a successor of Adobe Premiere. It is geared towards professional video editing, while its sibling, Adobe Premiere Elements, targets consumers market. We use Premiere Pro to build all our films from our film cameras, edit them by implementing other images, wipes, cuts, colour editing and blurs. The problems with Premiere Pro can be the same with Photoshop, that there is so much going on with Premiere Pro that there will be very few people that will know every single corner of the software to 100% potential. In addition, to make a truly great film, there are plenty of other software to use as well that gives a film a bit of flair that Premiere Pro cannot do itself.
- Photoshop is considered to be one of the most popular photo-editing software in the world, both in professional industries and home uses too. It can also be used as a illustration software, but mainly it's used to edit already existing photos by either touching up on colours, contrast, sharpness and brightness of a photo, and even adding completely new objects into the photo and deleting excess photo that isn't needed, manipulated around through layers. In Photoshop there are lots of options to use, and there is always something new to learn from it, meaning that most newcomers don't know anything about the software and often get nervous by what Photoshop can offer.
- Our camera, the Canon Legria FGT25, allowed us to record our movie at a comfortable 1080p at 25fps. The camera has some basic functions on it to get started with media and film recording, including a lens ring and a focus assist, which helped with long periods of recording and lots of characters moving at the same time. When it comes to actually making the film though, we had to rush a few of the shots, so we didn't use some features on the camera like the focus assist for example. It also easily blurs when moving around quickly with it, making our shots feel stiff within the film. Overall, the camera does it's job, but the technical limitations begin to show when filming lots of movement and other high-speed shots.
- As part of our project in A2 media, we used a Zoom Recorder to record our voices for a radio trailer. The zoom recorder focuses on muffling out unwanted sounds like wind as the recording begins, as well as being efficient, quick and easy with it's job, before being quickly translated into a MP3 file for us to use. That being said though, because of how it picks up certain sounds, it was obvious that the sound being picked up was digital, without that correct tone that the zoom recorder leaves out. The recorder also comes with a micro SD card, which makes it hard to be compatible with other computers without a USB cable.
- Wix is a cloud-based web development platform that allows users to create HTML5 web sites and mobile sites through the use of online drag and drop tools. Here we used Wix to create a fake viral marketing campaign featuring the cursed camera that we have on our film. Wix can also be updated with a mobile function so it can be accessed to more than just regular computers, and each website looks crisp and professional thanks to the HTML5 engine. Wix is a very healthy alternative instead of actually learning how to program your own websites, but because of this, Wix cannot cope with more complicated instructions that professional programmers could build into their own website.
- Prezi is a free presentation software that allows the screen to zoom in and out and around the presentation for it to become more interactive and entertaining. The editing of the presentation is pretty easy to begin, but there are some factors of it that don't become as clear such as using own backgrounds, so we instead use some of the templates Prezi already gives us. First time users will be subjected to doing a tutorial in Prezi, which can become a bit tedious to those who already knew how Prezi worked.
- Google Slides is another presentation software which rivals it's more popular counterpart, Microsoft PowerPoint. It's associated with Google Sheets and Docs as well, similar to Word and spreadsheet. Not only is Slides free, it comes with a huge variety of actions that the presentation software needs. Because it's saved in a google-owned media, the presentation can also be shared easily across other google-owned platforms, and it was able to be saved online so it didn't take up any computer space. That being said though, it isn't as flexible as power point, and it comes short when PowerPoint is far more powerful than slides.
- Microsoft PowerPoint comes as the best presentation software for all Window users, and with the majority of companies recognising how good the software is, it becomes one of the most versatile engines for presentation. Filled with so many different templates and functions that PowerPoint provides, It is possible to make a good presentation on almost any kind of topic. And because mostly everyone is familiar with PowerPoint in some way or another, it doesn't have anything bad about it as such. The downside is that it isn't used as much as it could, and instead people will go for Word instead for easier work. In addition, Power Point has been used for presentations so much, it's caused a phrase known as "death by Power Point", where the very mention of its use in public events causes boredom.
- Google Docs is a free, online based word processor hosted by the search engine which rivals and holds many similarities to Microsoft Word. The relationship between Docs and Word is identical to that of Slides and PowerPoint. Google Docs is free and automatically saves work into a cloud account. This saves any worries of black outs and other electrical, optional memory-loss situations. In addition, Google Docs, like Slides, Can easily transfer between other Google-owned apps. The only downside is that it's not as flexible as what Docs is trying to imitate: Word, and since more and more people are building new ways to send Word documents to each other, Slides eventually becomes a cheaper version of Word, and less powerful too.
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