How did you use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning, and Evaluation Stages?
Research and Planning
technologies were used throughout the making of our products.
we used Adobe software such as:
– Photoshop
– Premiere pro
we used Photoshop to edit all our still images. Which included all the different outcomes of our posters. For our poster we hand sketched our main image so all our editing and usage of Photoshop consisted on improving the clarity of our image.
The different in clarity was a lot. The first image is the very initial image we had as a starting point. That image was scanned in with a HP scanner onto our PC. Through the use of photoshop we were able to darken and sharpen the image to the second image next to it, we were really successful at improving the quality of the image. We also added fonts to our poster which the software allowed us to do with a great variety of different fonts and choices. We chose the same font as we did on our short film title screen. We used ‘Leelawadee’ as our font on our film poster and also our short film.
This helped us achieve the sense of connection between the screen that takes place in the dining room with him in the background and the cups in the foreground and the image of the film poster with him in the front and the blue (his career) in the background. Both symbolizing his structure and how we captured in it.
– Premiere pro
We were all new to premiere pro and as the head of editing it was my job was to understand the software and how it is operated. We only used this editing program to glue our film together. With this software we were able to implement difficult editing skills/techniques into our short film such as the montage scene and the voice-over scene which were really effective.
The negative aspect of this editing tool was that it was very difficult to use and to get the hang of. The editing program itself had large quantity of tools that i could use. Some were hidden away from the tools we could view normally and some were activated with a single click onto the moving images (video clips). When clicking on the video clips on the timeline we were able to get a new window with the second video.This allowed us to edit that video clip separately.
We could edit the sound or the video which was very useful when actually editing this film, especially the sound tool as we could lower it during the windy scenes at the end where the protagonist is sitting down on the bench.
– Scanner
We also used a HP Scanjet 300
We used this scanner for importing a lot of our work into our PC in order to work with them. We scanned all our storyboards, brainstorming of ideas, and our design (hand sketched image) of our poster. Using a scanner made it really convenient to get all our images into the PC as it was wireless also, it was very handy in comparison to taking an image from a camera and then putting that file into the PC.
The difference in quality of the scanned image and the image taken by a normal compact digital camera (only used for this purpose). The scanned image was clearer, all the crease in the paper were fixed by the scanner and the image just looked better because of those two things. The scanner also made it possible to have a very good quality image to edit on Photoshop as opposed to the image taken by the camera.
– Camera
For the main filming aspect we used a Canon 550D EOS series.
This Digital SLR camera allowed us to achieve a lot of things that helped make our short film more technically intriguing. Such as the Shallow focus technique which we used on the revelation scene where the wife of the protagonist reveals that she wants to be a mother.
Using shallow focus allowed us to create a sense of pseudo reality from the Protagonists point of view, as the blur in the use of shallow focus creates a sense of barrier between him and his wife/situation, almost making it seems like he is trying to think that the revelation is not taking place.
– Microsoft Publisher
We used Microsoft Publisher to create the magazine article.
The software itself was easy to use and get used to which might have been due to the lack of complexity of the program. After using Editing software such as Premiere pro which is a much harder program to operate, using the publisher was really easy. There was not a lot of different tools. All the important/necessary tools were visible which made it even easier to use the software.
There were also issues with the program being a little too easy and simple, there wasn’t vast selection with things you could do. The selection with texts and the fonts were very limited which was a problem because other people/groups could also use the same font and because of the lack of fonts it made it seem like the originality of our article might get taken away.
Previous answer to QUESTION 4
– Internet
Watching YouTube videos gave us ideas about the construction of a short film.
Things such as :
– The pace
– The type of story
– The way it is edited
– Structure
We watched a lot of short films on YouTube and gathered ideas on how we can stitch our short film together.
We used WongfuProduction’s short film ‘shell’ as our guide. It was the short film that made a lot of our ideas come together. The main thing being the simple and very effective use of the title screen for our short film.
The whole aspect of simplicity yet effective and for this case we applied that idea to our title screen.
We also used google to look at film posters, not necessarily all short film short film posters but also mainstream Hollywood feature films to get general ideas that we can also make our own by breaking the conventional way of creating a film poster.
Frame - Short film 