Question Six

1. Question Six
What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing
this product?

2. Pre-Production
Photoshop CS6 - Graphics editor to create the floor
plans, showing positioning and basic movements.
Word & Pages - Word processors to produce the
shotlist and the schedule. These offered a quick,
clean and simple way to produce easily readable
documents.
Google Chrome & Safari - The web browsers of
choice during the research phase of pre-production,
giving us access to information about the
conventions of genres and target audiences.
Celtx - Scriptwriting software, to put our idea to
paper.

3. Photography
Canon 7D - Used for the majority of principal photography, it provided a
high quality, high bitrate, large sensor platform on which to shoot our film.
Canon 600D - Due to a mechanical failure of the 7D, we had to revert to the
600D which provided much the same look as the 7D because of the shared
internal hardware.
Canon 17-85mm F4-5.6 EF-S IS USM lens - Used throughout the film.
Zoom H4n - Audio recording unit to take ADR and the sounds that build
up the soundscape.
Softboxes & Portable Lighting - We used a combination of fluorescent soft
boxes and portable LED lighting. The soft boxes gave us two light sources
to use on internal shots where there was power nearby. On location where
power was not readily available or in restrictive places, we used high-
powered rechargeable LED lights which had the added advantage of
saving time on shoot days.
Reflectors - To capitalise on natural light, we used reflectors to help fill in
the shadows on the faces of our talent.
Green screen - Allowed us to make our in-car shots appear to be moving
and use footage from the our setting.

4. Post-Production
Premiere Pro CS6 - The main visual post-production tool, it gave us the ability to
make the split screen happen, colour grade the rushes, add titles and pair the audio
with the video.
After Effects CS6 - Used to chroma key the green screen in for the in-car scenes.
Twixtor - A Premiere Pro/AE plugin that can slow down footage in a smooth
manner. We used this to help elongate some of the scenes so that it would match its
counterpart in the other half of the split screen, slowing by 2-3% was usually
enough to make up the difference without being noticeable.
Logic Pro X - Used to compose the soundtrack and build the soundscape. The non-
diegetic sounds were key to help fill in a few gaps in the story such as the news
report and the lift bell, these assisted the diegetic sounds which were also added in
Logic before the finished audio track was exported into Premiere Pro for final
rendering. The whole soundtrack was entirely engineered with a mix of audio that
we recorded ourselves and royalty-free sounds that we couldn’t or didn’t have time
to do ourselves. We decided against doing foley ourselves due to time constraints.
Videoblocks - Our source of stock footage to assist the believability.

5. Evaluation
Permissions and logistics proved to be far greater an obstacle than technical ability and
equipment availability. Despite a lengthy form being filled out for a request to film at
Bournemouth Airport, we were denied by the press office with a single line response: ‘I am afraid
we currently do not have the resource to permit this filming but wish you every success with this
project.’ which we considered to be rather inconsiderate. Unfortunately, due to the late reply to
our request, there wasn’t time to find an alternative location to be our airport; we had considered
Poole Dolphin Centre but for simplicity, we elected to shoot at our school, Magna Academy Poole.
Through some creative angles and being very cautious about what we shot, we think our school
could plausibly be an airport when seen in the video with the assistance of stock footage.
The only public location we were able to secure was Bournemouth Aviation Museum, as a
registered charity they were more than happy to help us providing we paid them. This gave us
the plane that we sorely needed for our opening to feel real.
Despite the limitations of equipment breakages and restrictions we placed on ourselves by setting
it in a foreign country, I think Terror Plane manages to be a plausible situation with a clear
narrative and is technically quite accomplished, especially when considering the ambition of our
premise.