2. Introduction to the question
For this years media production, we took on the brief of doing a short film.
We thought that we would differentiate our product from last year as we
felt like it was more of a trailer for a film. The shot film allowed us to create
production that was visually appealing as well as having a narrative that
was gripping and realistic.
This presentation will run through what technologies we used in each
stage of the production.
3. Planning
Whilst planning our short film we would often use YouTube as a mainstream
software in which we could watch tutorials, interviews and other students short
films on. However this year we decided that to get an idea of what short film is
like on professional level, we would use a website called “Vimeo”
Vimeo is a video-sharing website in which users can upload, share and view
videos. It was launched in 2004 by a group of filmmakers. Since then, the
platform has grown to over 70 million creators as is a more professional site
for higher quality productions and other short films.
Throughout our production we researched multiple short films, some on
Vimeo and some on YouTube. “H Positive” was short film that I found on
Vimeo. It is professional standard short film in which we gained some
inspiration for ourselves.
If we compare this to the short films that we can find on YouTube such as
“Unbroken”; which we also analyzed, you can see a clear shift in quality. This
really helped us during the planning of our production.
4. Production
The production for our short film was incredibly long and drawn out due to
some members of the team having other outside of college priorities. However
in the end we managed to film and edit the final piece. We filmed the film on a
Canon 600D. Last year we filmed on the Canon 550D. The difference in quality
is much better as we could colour correct and light balance the final product
much better and therefore allowing the post production to be more straight
forward and less stressful.
During the post production process we used the same software in Final Cut
Pro. We decided to use this as it offers more than what we could manage form
the likes of iMovie. It allows us to be more precise and intricate with the
editing therefore ensuring that our final production flows nicely and in a
continuous fashion.
With the previous experience with the software, we felt like this was the best
choice we could have made as we are able to make the final product
efficiently.
5. Ancillary's
For my ancillary I produced a poster for the short film.
For this ancillary I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. It is an older form of software
however it gave me more to work with than software like Paint. Net or Fireworks.
I haven’t ever used Photoshop before so at the beginning I had no idea what I was
doing. However after watching hours upon hours of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, I
finally got the hang of it and made two of my Drafts which I eventually combined to
produce my final poster.
Photoshop proved to be more precise and effective during the process therefore
making my final product the best that I could. The poster may not be of the best quality
but I put a lot of time into it and made something that personally I am proud of.
For the other ancillary, Oliver also used Photoshop to produce a double page spread of
a film magazine. He also found that Photoshop was much easier to handle and allowed
him to make a magazine that we are all happy with as it links to all our other products.
6. Overview
Overall we used very similar technologies to last year however we made
slight alteration as to how we used each of them. For example we didn’t
use Emaze because it is too difficult to work with. We used websites such
as Prezi, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, GoConqur and many others.
At times we struggle to balance style over substance as some of the
software's we used we found ourselves spending too long on how it
looked rather than what it actually contained.
